Yesterday my card was the Queen of Cups, her cup runneth over with love in all its forms, refilled as if by magic - the more she pours out, the more that's in it to pour, as much through her as in her. Of all the Queens, I find her the most daunting. The Queen of Swords, I could do that shit all day without breaking a sweat. But to pour out feeling, you gotta have it, allow it. I leaned in. And now keep a candle lit (vigil).
Today, my job begins again. First meeting is re a class I am coteaching with a BIO faculty about whom all I know is she gets lip plumper injections, which she claims is life changing, and I've never had the gumption to ask how it impacts felatio. We will be working together for 3 months. There's no way I will be able not to ask for 3 whole months. Basically, today "work" begins again, but I am so wholly rearranged into grit in the shape of a woman (more or less), now serially overflowing with feeling, that I cannot and have no desire to imagine stepping back into my last known identity costume. And I have no clear idea of what that will look like going forward.
I am carving down to it, like sculptors do, chipping away what is not part of her, until the shape emerges. Having faith that the carving away does leave a shape of some kind (Alive) and not just rubble.
That is more comfortable to do alone. Painful, full of errors (oops, I think I stuck a chisel in my liver), my hair in a frazzled messy bunish mess, slap some liptint on it and turn up the 'appearance improver" setting on zoom. You can even pour bourbon into your coffee cup, who'd know?
Today, all that visibly ends. It has been closing as a window for a year+ where nobody could see, and now it SHUTS in plain sight of everyone I know. I have to walk onto campus, in the very few clothes that fit, all eyes on the ghost ft. workwidow of Patti, a much tinier person burning much hotter. By tomorrow afternoon, to cap it all off, I give the eulogy that officially "opens the semester" with a touchstone directive to guide the year. I have been writing/rewriting/doodling that eulogy for weeks. There is no one exemplary story that sums up a whole person, nor even what that person was to just you (not after 30 years), so telling a story isn't it.
She always believed that if you couldn't find ways you could be doing better, you weren't looking hard enough. But what are you looking for?, I would insist. Better compared to what? Seriously, you're going to insist on a searching moral inventory every day, and it ends with more organized desk drawers? And we would fight like that, like lovers might, like sisters do. It took us 3 decades to finally land on our respective essential stance: I shamelessly want to live, she wanted to live blamelessly. And for now, at least, I won our eternal argument.
What am I going to do with that? And by tomorrow, what am I going to say about it that will lead these people into the burning building of Living, rightfully afraid but doing it anyway? CPR breaks ribs, the sound is not one you can unhear, even practiced on a corpse with nothing left to lose, the birdbone fragile that we all are just under the skin, and it very often doesn't end in saving life, never undamaged if it does, and yet we do it, instinctively willing to break ourselves and each other for another chance. If I could, I would give them all just one firm compression to demonstrate how fiercely they do want to BREATHE. They just don't know it because they didn't die (quite) yet.
Patti did. And more than she was willing for anyone else, she walked with me through the thoughts of it until the very end when she emphatically wanted no hand to hold after choosing simply "thank you" as the last thing she wanted to say. I am not going to tell "positive remembrances" as requested. I am going to punch them in the chest with a sentence. I just have no idea what that sentence is yet, and I won't know until it comes out my mouth.
Like how my mother says that funerals
Have the timing down all wrong
You say so much to a person
Only after they are gone
So I never will stop grieving
Everything that's yet to die
I think I'll love after I'm dead
And I'll grieve while I'm alive
