Home, but Changed

Socrates is on my windowsill. He looks quite lost here, rather forlorn. I hope he'll adapt to his new home.

Yesterday was the first when I really felt the loss, simple and unadulterated by gratitude or relief. It happened as I was tipping and topping green beans for dinner - a task I often did in preparation for making a Middle Eastern bean and meat stew, a dish my father-in-law especially liked and I had often made for him. The thought process took only a few seconds, but contained an entire journey: the recognition of a subconscious "I'll have to take some to M.", followed by the conscious mind's substitution of fact, and then the finality of "never again," the sharp sting of grief, the welling of tears.

I've been here enough times in my life now to be confident in the dulling effect of time on the knife-edge of grief. The moments of forgetting the person is gone actually do subside, as does the pain they bring in their wake. I know that in this case the sharpness of grief really is less than with most other deaths of people dear to me; it was time, and I accepted that a long while ago. I've also learned that time gradually substitutes a different kind of recognition in the same thought process: the reminders  become linked to a person's memory in a way that slowly raises the floor of the abyss one first feels between the dead and the living. You become grateful for the reminders, and realize they are a way of walking, as it were, between the realms of the dead and the living on a bridge of shared experience and love.

Last night I got up for a while, and as I was boiling water for a cup of chamomile tea in the kitchen, I wrapped my shoulders in a pink mohair shawl my mother knitted for me after she became ill. When she first gave it to me, I put it carefully over the arm of the sofa but absolutely could not wear it; it made me too sad to think of what she was thinking as she knitted it. I couldn't wear it for a whole year after she died; I wanted it near me but every time I touched it it made me cry. But now everything about it is a comfort  -- the beautiful color, the innumerable stitches, the warmth -- and brings her love as close to me as an embrace, as she intended. Maybe even its texture reminds me of that softening effect of time.

On Saturday we had a memorial service at my father-in-law's retirement home. All of the immediate family members spoke about his life, and thanked that community for the caring and friendship they had given him in his last years. The service was nice: intimate, and appropriate. I played the piano - old hymns - as people came in and then played the hymns during the service, which made me happy, and I laughed to myself when I suddenly remembered the first time I played for my father-in-law. He had said "I like your playing - it's not professional." That's what we all call "a family compliment" because that side of the family has such an adept backhand. I remember being totally taken aback and rather hurt at the time. But  now I understand better that what he meant was that there was an unstudied, unaffected quality to the playing that he appreciated: I was an amateur in the French sense of the word, a lover of what I was doing. He always liked children for that same reason, and many people have remarked on how childlike he remained himself, always mischievous, spontaneously creative, liking to surprise people - especially the New England establishment - by appearing in a bizarre costume or pulling out props as well as unexpected words during a sermon or class.

Socrates would have approved.

(This is the latest in a many-year-long series of posts about my father-in-law, collected under the title "The Fig and the Orchid"; please click on that name under Pages, in the sidebar at left, for the whole series.)

Comments

[marja-leena]

This is so touching, a warm and very human expression of what grief feels like when it's fresh and when it fades. I kept nodding in agreement as I recall past deaths of family. Be well.

[Kaycie]

I remember so distinctly my husband picking up the phone to call his father, dialing the number, and then remembering that he was dead. The look on his face broke my heart.

That shawl is priceless. There are boxes of tools in our garage that belonged to my father-in-law. We have moved them twice, still in their boxes. My husband doesn't use them, but they are with us, and I think it comforts him.

I have never experienced this kind of loss myself, but I have great empathy for you after watching my husband's grief. I'll be thinking of you and your husband.

[Pat]

Thanks for continuing to share. Bless you all.

[Bill]

What a sincere compliment! He must have really liked you.

[Joyce]

My recent trip to England remided me of the loss of my own father.Dad was an English orphan who came to Canada as a boy to work on a farm in the Eastern Townships. Though he lived to be 87 he never lost his English accent. There were moments during my time in Canterbury when I heard his voice or saw a flash of his Wedgewood blue eyes in the face of another - strangely sad and comforting at the same time.

I lit a candle for Mounir in Canterbury Cathedral on Friday evening. Standing in that very special place my prayers went out for you and J. and for your father-in-law. I prayed for peace, I prayed for rest.

[Bill]

I would have been terrorized.

[language hat]

It's sad to have this much familiarity with the stages of grief, but it's an inevitable part of growing older. I've pretty much stopped having the impulse to call my father about baseball games and the other things we enjoyed talking about, but they still make me think of him. It comforts me to wear the brand new socks I took from his drawer after his death and brought home with me.

And I miss your father-in-law too, in an odd, reflected way. You've made him a part of all our lives, for which I thank you once again.

[Leonardo Ricardo, San Juan, Puerto Rico]

Lovely, you describe people and things and I see them...thank you

[Leonardo Ricardo, San Juan, Puerto Rico]

Lovely, you describe people and things and I see them...thank you

[dale]

Yes. It softens, over time.

(o)

[Scott]

Mostly just to let you know that I am still here, reading. But also to thank you for reminding me that the quilt squares my mother made when she was a young girl still rest in an old broken cardboard box waiting to be sewn together into that thing I will then have to start dealing with, again. I can't find a quiltmaker willing to do it. Either it's too sacred or they think I can't afford it. I'll try again now. Thank you.

[Rana]

Green beans and a hand-made shawl - those are wonderful memorials, I have to say.

(o)

[rr]

Ah the knitting, the knitting. The fabric of life. I love the vertiginous height from which you have chosen to view Socrates.

[Anna]

My mother bought me some shawls over the years and now she's gone they are a true comfort and precious. Thanks for reminding me Beth that they embrace me as she used to...
I love this mention of shawls by Alice Walker:

Be nobody’s darling,
Be an outcast.
Take the contradictions
Of your life
And wrap around
You like a shawl,
To parry stones
To keep you warm.
Alice Walker