hi friends. Thank you for your kindness and understanding on my last dispatch. My big depression has given me a bit of reprieve and I have some hope that I can continue to shift and shape this thing, with the help of some added mental health support, acupuncture, and starting to move my body again. Simple things that are making a world of difference in how I’m able to manage my life.
Today’s dispatch has been sitting in draft but today felt appropriate as I watch a late January squall out the window.
winter without her
In Tove Jansson’s classic Moominland Midwinter, the central character Moomintroll wakes from hibernation early while his whole family sleeps. Unexpectedly present, he observes his home valley in new ways. The first thing he does is try to wake his mother, but she will not awaken and continues to hibernate, cozy on her pine needle bed. Moomintroll must encounter what is next without her familiar comfort and guidance. Winter then, is a good season for learning what we’re made of.
Every morning in my own home valley my small family pulls the curtains back from the living room’s biggest window to see what the night and the cold have brought. Everyday the landscape looks new. Here in the Northeast temperatures hover right around freezing and at our elevation some daily snowfall is not uncommon. We’re in a liminal time, in that we have passed the Winter Solstice, turned back towards the sun but the the change is not yet evident. Winter’s shadow is long, and we still have so much left to go.
Most days, my lungs feel grateful for the cold. I forget sometimes that I am of the North. The snow and cold meets the sun and sand somewhere on some chromosome and I contain all of it. This is my season too, my mother wove it into my blood.
Since she died, I have struggled to slow down and I have more generally just struggled. The fact is, there is just so much to DO when someone dies, and so many big emotions to avoid that doing is a welcome distraction. While there are still practical aspects to be done (let me tell you, the registration of a dead loved one with the government for tax purposes is truly a wild and dehumanizing experience!), most of that is behind me now. I frame pictures of her in my office and try to fumble through what to do next. But there is often nothing tangible to be done, it is the feeling and the remembering that is left. The hardest parts.
There are very few things that I know for sure. But one of them is that the only way I will get through anything big is by shuffling forward one step at a time. This was true for me in getting sober, in navigating moves and life changes, recreating a life after getting divorced. It does not matter if the step I take next is a leap or a stumble, only that it happens, no matter how shaky.
I am, like Moomintroll, learning to navigate a new landscape without that central person and her force in my life. I am finding new aspects my myself in her absence: finding anger that I don’t want to find, mourning not just the person and the relationship we had but also the relationship I wish we had, all of the things we never got to talk about because we could never make it past the wall of defensiveness. I don’t want to be angry or frustrated but I also don’t want to ignore what’s true.
I am wondering what the work of atonement is, between two people, when one of them is no longer here. How do we make amends with each other from where we are both sitting? How do I apologize for the ways that I failed her at the end? How do I hold her to account for the many times she lied to me? I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. But maybe I don’t need to know right now.
Winter is a good season for slowing down and for learning how to step slowly and carefully forward on icy path. I feel content to be here right now. It is where I am supposed to be, the exact right season for me and my unsteady feet.
Things bringing me joy lately. bBecause when I am depressed the bad things get really big until they block out the sun so I am trying to put effort into noticing the good things:
The moon through the trees. Hidden behind clouds, but still lighting up the night.
I recently unearthed a photo of me at around 5 years old, smiling with no front teeth, my hands full of emotional support rocks. I have always been this I guess, and there is something soothing about that.
Rewatching the campy glory that is True Blood.
Every Thursday I listen to Max’s radio show from our local cat cafe with a poorly-timed (but perfect) oat milk chai latte. I can’t believe how much I’ve missed the act of being in third spaces around other humans.
Getting back into the ritual of tending my plants again after months of iffy plant steward behavior.
Curling up under a handmade blanket Max made me for Christmas at the end of a long day.
When the dog nestles his little chin onto my body to find the perfect spot.
A really good running playlist.
in grief and solidarity,
lisa