Of Fun and Grief

Me, this is my version of fun: A dinner party, about 10 people. Four friends beside myself. The five of us having each brought a person no one else knows. The five outsiders turning out to know people in common with us, turning out to be so cool we all want to stay up all night talking. A huge dining room table in a candlelit room. Hand-painted dishes, filled with each person's favorite foods, their family recipes: salads with mysterious ingredients and tastes, bite-size appetizers that are salty and sweet, soft and spicy, dips, wines, burgers and basmati rice, treats for our mouths, flavored words. Everyone telling stories about their travels. Composing stories by each person writing a sentence and a half, folding the paper over so the last few words are showing, passing it along to the next person who continues the story. Reading them out loud. Merging our thoughts into wild scenarios. Everyone with a belly ache the next morning from flexing muscles they didn't know they had when they were laughing the night before, so much, so hard, so real. Everyone wondering when we can all get together again.
Being alone can also be fun for me. A friend of mine once told me that I was missing out by not liking to be alone. After years of not being able to be alone, of thinking it's weird and antisocial, I now long for it. I still want to be alone sometimes even though I have a spouse, but I enjoy it immensely and find that it helps my relationship with my husband, because it gives me time to think, grieve if I need to, and to miss him. This type of quiet fun, for me, is not a rush - it is a calm, peaceful afternoon propped up on tons of soft pillows and reading a great book or watching a totally engrossing movie, analyzing and observing life.

The past year has been a sad one for me. My brother, sister and I lost our mother to cancer. My father lost his spouse of 42 years. My niece lost her grandmother. My aunt lost her sister. My cousins lost their aunt. My mother's friends lost a friend. But, Carolyn, my mother, lost everything and every one, including her life.

So, combine loss plus laughing, guilt plus fun. This has often been a terribly confusing and overwhelming equation for me to stomach, let alone manage in life without going crazy. How do I cope when the closest person in the world to me died and sliced our MeWe in half with a gigantic knife of fate, turning our Us into a Me, our We into an I. When, initially, there was no one to replace or complete the MeWe I felt with my mother, I felt like a soldier with a missing limb. I had and still have "phantom limb," or "phantom Mom," reaching for her, thinking she is still next to me in the movies, next to me in an art gallery, on the opposite receiver during a phone call. But she is not there, she is not waiting to teach me about the next sculpture, she is not ever going to answer the phone again. No one will ever again tell me to sit up straight. No one will see me through the eyes in the back of their head. And because I do not yet have my own children, I feel as though I am floating, disconnected to the earth because the body that gave birth to me is now returned to the earth.

In the time that has passed, I realized that I have choices. I thought for months that I could be self-destructive, because those self-destroying acts were something I wouldn't want to tell her about, and if I didn't need to talk to her, then it didn't matter that she was gone. But when the grief does not overcome me, although sometimes it does, I can move on and enjoy my life and my interests without feeling guilty. We were voodoo dolls, my mother and I, feeling for each other in pain and happiness. She always made me feel like I was getting her life right the second time, by doing what she did not have enough courage to accomplish. I just have to find someone else talk to now - my dear father, my dear friends, and my caring husband. And maybe I can teach them, by channeling to them what mother taught me, about learning, about art, about life. My solutions.

I read quite a bit. My mother taught me how to read, encouraged it my whole life and was herself reading even a few hours before her death. I need to believe that Amazon.com fills orders in Heaven so I can discuss all these books with her when I see her again. And I exercise as much as I can. Walking on the beach or vigorously on a treadmill is empowering. I write! I take classes. I cook. I visit with my family, trying to memorize our history, most details of which died with my mother. I breathe. I cry. I dream. And I hope that she was proud of me.

When my mother found out just how ill she was, she was sad more than scared or angry. She merely said to me, "I'm going to miss out on all the fun." What better reason to have more fun now. Have it for the both of us.