Making Some Room on the Bench for Sadness

 Well if you got past the title, Bless Your Socks! Yep, this is a little story about sadness and I shan’t apologize for it. Oh man, I love that word - shan’t. I hardly ever get to use it, so I shan’t pass up this opportunity.

I did promise myself that when I write these posts, I’d write what I was feeling and so here I am with a kind of quivering, aching space. I’m sad because I miss my brother John. And my mom. But for the past couples of days, mostly John. Yesterday was worse; I woke up with an awful case of the blue meanies.  Was it Holly Golightly who named them that? I don’t remember now. Shall I tell you the story?

We’re coming up on September, which means it’s been almost a year since I came back to Texas. As I’ve mentioned before, John flew up to New York so that he could take the road trip back with me. I’ve been thinking about that trip because I want to write a story about it. Because it was wonderfully full of talking and laughing, a misdirected GrubHub delivery, uncooperative playlists, scary bridges, gorgeous scenery, sketchy convenience stores and one (accidentally) stoned cat. And in the way of stories, I discovered another story now, lying beneath all that.

I needed John on this trip for several reasons, but I think mostly I needed him for moral support and company. Also, I have no sense of direction. A lot of people say that, but it’s a real thing for me. I get more lost than anyone I’ve ever met, and I’m here to tell you that GPS is the greatest thing since somebody decided to make pancakes and syrup a thing. So I asked John to be my navigator. Unlike me, both of my brothers have navigation hard-wired in their brains and no one knows why it was left out of mine, but there you go. John had made a lot of road trips by himself, mostly in the west. The lonelier a stretch of road was, the more he loved it. Me, I like plenty of landmarks (hi Starbucks! hi Target! hi Courtyard By Marriott!) and Google maps constantly telling me what to do next. Hell yes, John said, I’ll be your navigator. The very next day he had our route planned out. On a map. Like, a paper map. A road atlas. Which, frankly, I didn’t even know existed anymore. But that’s how John liked to roll, he liked to see it spread out on a piece of paper with all the wonderful possibilities of course changes and side roads that might take you Someplace Wonderful that you’d otherwise never see if you were relying on a voice over Bluetooth just telling you how to get from Point A to Point B. And since John had managed to drive himself all over Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Arizona and God knows where else without falling off a mountain or disappearing forever into the desert, I said OK that sounds good!

A few days ago I decided that, in preparation for writing the road trip story, I would try to get some notes on our route because I honestly don’t remember, even though I did most of the driving. And not just because it’s been a year; I’m sure I forgot that route as soon as I got out of the car at the end of it in Houston. I started poking through my own journals, hoping I’d find some hints.  Nothing. And then I tried to do something I’ve not been able to do since John died. I tried to go through his papers. 

We’ve gone through a lot of John’s things - his book collection, his amazing paintings and sketches and photographs.  My brother Brad has most of John’s road atlases, dog-earred and marked up with his western travels. I took John’s notebooks and journals, not because I want to read his private journal entries but because he had a habit (as do I) of jotting verses and poems, story threads and lines and ideas in amongst his private thoughts, and I want to save any stories or poems that might be hiding in there. My plan was to rifle through the pages and hope that those nuggets would just jump off the page and present themselves without me disturbing anything more private. But I had not been able to do it yet. So when my own search for trip notes turned up nothing, I thought I’d make an attempt, just looking for those few relevant dates. Simple. Doable. A brief foray. But oh my God, it was flying too close to the sun! As soon as I looked at his handwriting, slanted so sideways it is practically indecipherable, yet perfectly and evenly spaced, that dear hand I know so well...my courage melted and I crashed to earth. It was a hard hit, and the pain of losing John came back so suddenly, so fresh, that it took my breath away. Grief happens that way.  You can have a long string of days or weeks that are peaceful and happy, you can laugh and work and plan and enjoy life. And then there are the days when that grief will hit you like a tsunami and knock you flat on your ass. And it just is. You cannot hide from it, or outrun it or make it go away. You can only sit where you got knocked down, and try to get your breath back. And I had the cold, sudden clarity that for the rest of my life, I will have to live without the physical presence of John, my brother. My best friend. It sounds simplistic, but it really just finally dawned on me in that moment.

In her beautiful book Radical Acceptance, Tara Brach writes of how to sit down with the things we don’t want to see or feel: loss, pain, fear, loneliness, regret. I mean, like it or not, life is not made up solely of rainbows and sunshine and unicorn sprinkles and great road trips. Even if it were, who would really want that, trust that? Remember when Starbucks made that pastel “unicorn” frappe? Most people said “Umm, no. That’s freaking weird.”Although I think there were a few 12-year-olds who liked it for a minute. Point is, life has Stuff that Sucks, and Stuff that’s Awesome. That’s just how it is. What else could give us depth of feeling, contrast in such stark relief. You know that amazing shade of green that trees and grass become just before a storm? You’d never see that particular, beautiful color if it weren’t for the blackening, roiling sky in the backdrop. 

We have to make room for all of it. We have to scooch over on that bench we all have inside our hearts, and say OK, I see you. Just come in then, stop lurking and jumping out when I least expect it and scaring the shit out of me. Come in, already. Sit down next to me, Sadness. Grief, loss, anger, fear, pain. Sit down.  We’re all here together. Over there are hope and courage, right on my other side (never very far away) is my anxiety. They’re all lined up here...laughter, doubt, jealousy, brilliance, talent. Everyone at the table. And if that sounds like the story line for Pixar’s Inside Out, well they probably stole it from Tara. I’m a pretty visual thinker, and this exercise in accepting all these pieces was life-transforming for me. A relief, a huge relief. This will not kill me. It’s not my favorite damn thing, but it isn’t going to kill me. Some days, sadness is going to drive the bus. But not every day.

This is a picture John took on one of his trips. We used it for the program from his memorial service. Here is the thing that I really love about this photograph: if you look at the right edge, you’ll see the outside of his sandal. He might have done it on purpose for scale, but I kind of doubt it. I think it was accidental that his sandal is just in the frame, but it tells me that he was climbing for this shot. He might have just seen a little flash of green there in between the rocks, and went to investigate. And there in those grey and sober rocks was a lovely green fern in a mossy little bed, just going about the business of living, even in the shadow of something larger and darker than itself. It spells hope, and life. And I know John saw that too.

A life worth living has a heart that makes room for everything.

❤️ Bonnie