Comfort, and almost joy

In the past few weeks, I have watched the first two seasons of The West Wing, and almost all of Slow Horses, and it’s not a bad way to be sad. I’ve stayed a little isolated, and that’s not bad either. I go to work (which I love). I walk my dog. I watch The West Wing. I moved things to my new condo. I unpack a little. I eat foods from at least two food groups every day, and one of those food groups is Cheez-Its. In three more days, my mom will have died two months ago. When I was driving to work yesterday, I wanted to call her and tell her about how my office building (a converted cottage-style house on the edge of campus) had the pipes freeze AND the downstairs heat break overnight. Wanting to call and tell her something, or text her a photo of something, is a daily occurrence. But what I realized when I was driving was that this is by far the longest I’ve ever gone without speaking to my mom in my entire life.

I’m aware that Christmas is coming, but I’ve avoided it pretty well. I have bought presents. I have plundered her wrapping paper supplies (I cannot even tell you how enormous her wrapping paper supply is. It’s absolutely ridiculous. I have even found gifts she hadn’t gotten around to giving people), but I haven’t wrapped anything. Christmas isn’t here yet, it’s somewhere in the future, and thus not immediately touching me.

And yet, when I went to Lowe’s to buy a closet rod and some tape and some wood glue, I saw a Santa standing outside, handing out hot chocolate, and I burst into tears and ran in the other direction. Much to the bemusement of the Santa, who no doubt was not expecting that reaction from a 48 year old woman. And when I left the store, I did so furtively, peeping around the corner to see if the Santa was still there, as if I could creep past him and avoid Christmas itself. (He was not there, so I was safe to walk to my car like a normal person.)

It’s not so much that I’m not ready for Santa, or Christmas, or New Year’s, or Valentine’s Day, or her birthday. It’s that I’m not ready for time to continue without her. I’m not ready for time to just GO ON, as if the entire universe isn’t completely altered. As if I didn’t have to start my Christmas list this year (I write down a list of everyone I give gifts to, and then I haphazardly save it in whatever notebook I happen to be using, which ensures that I will probably never see it again, because I’m paranoid enough to fear that I will give the same gift to the same person twice and so I must keep track of this information, but not paranoid enough to save the lists all in one place where I can access the information. I live in a liminal duality most of the time, and I chalk this up to being a Gemini) without her name at the very top.

When my father died, I neglected my sourdough starter and it, too, gave up the ghost. And, in that weird thought distortion that grief sometimes makes, I felt like I hadn’t taken good enough care of my father when he was alive. (This is most assuredly not true, as I even spent a period of time as his legal guardian which probably saved his life). My father was a difficult, complicated person, who was also wildly charismatic and witty. But he had a mean streak, and one year for Christmas he gave me one of my stepsister’s old dresses. She’s 15 years younger than me, and the dress was at least four sizes too small. He laughed and laughed, and I still have no idea what the joke was supposed to be.

My mom wasn’t like that. And this grief is not a complicated grief. I just want to buy her one more present. I want to have one more Christmas morning where she inexplicably bought eight Ukrop’s Christmas Tree Coffee Cakes and froze most of them so that we would have enough (for three people. Seriously. It’s like the wrapping paper thing), but she forgot to take the one for Christmas morning out of the freezer early enough and so we had to wait until the afternoon to eat it and the middle was still a little frozen, which made her annoyed, but not as much as the fact that she still hadn’t managed to get around to cleaning off the dining room table.

Like any decent person, I think of holidays in terms of food. And if I had a fully functioning kitchen right now, I would be baking. I would make her Chex mix (Sidebar: After my parents divorced, and after my father was in a nursing home, he still asked if she would make him some Chex mix). Date balls. Thimble cookies. Japanese fruit pie. I would go through her cook books (which are currently in boxes) and make the recipes in her handwriting. In my grandmother’s handwriting. The recipes she relentlessly clipped from magazines. I would make all of these things, and I’m not even sure that I would be able to eat them, because I’m still not back to eating on a consistent basis. But I would have them if I wanted them, and that’s something.

I don’t really know what I’m doing for Christmas yet. I’m traveling to Atlanta, where I’ll drop off my dog with his dad for a few weeks (yes, we are sharing custody of our dog, because we are awesome. And we’re super excited about hanging out and playing video games all week, and honestly, nothing is cooler than that). But I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I won’t be spending time with his family, who clearly don’t get how we are staying friends, and who don’t seem interested in maintaining relationships. Fair enough. I’ll definitely be spending time with friends (booooook cluuuubbbbb!!), and I’m overjoyed at the prospect. But I think mostly I’ll be quiet, navigating the days, probably watching The West Wing and catching up on my reading.

Two months isn’t a long time. But it’s long enough to feel the new shape of things. Or rather, the shapelessness of things. Everything is amorphous and strange, and all the traditions and routines that I knew are waiting to be remade. And I have ideas.

But it’s the season of comfort now. Of watching The West Wing. Of waiting. Of remembering. Of missing her. Of missing everyone.

It’s the season of gathering myself together, and pulling everything I know close, and finding all the things that I know and need and want.

And then getting ready to rebuild.