How to find your feet

The first weeks of reentering life after all the time in the hospital were like my own rehab. Even though I had ideas as to who we were as a family we were really just like Wile E Coyote running through the air before he realized there was no longer a road beneath him. We thought we were still us but we actually have no idea who we are.

I was having to relearn and rebuild everything. All accounts must be closed and reopened. Grocery shopping, laundry, the empty house we come home to.

Be inspired by the grace and speed of a three-legged dog running full tilt at dog park. They get knocked over more easily in the dog pile but when they run you’d never know they’d been hit by a truck.

People had given me advice like Be outside and Don’t turn down any invitations in the first year.

I accept the offer of two tickets to the symphony and invite a work friend. Other facets of of her life, and the life of the person who had the tickets, who I learn always has an extra ticket to invite a random friend, and this week I was that person, are revealed in the kaleidoscopic turnings of how our lives intersect and overlap. From the top of the parking deck, the lights of our tiny city glitter around us as she tells me things she is dealing with that have not been on the agenda of the weekly team meetings we have attended together for the past 8 years.

Like all of us, I tell people what I am going through and sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I just say, fine or okay. Sometimes I might even say good. Don’t question me about that. Let me say it. It’s what normal people say regardless of what kind of a day they’re having because to say anything on either side of that invites conversation and oversharing. But sometimes I tell someone, anyone, exactly how I am feeling — like it’s taken me a while to be able to read things in print again, or that my dead husband was in my dream last night, acting like he didn’t know he was dead and I had to tell him that not only is he dead, he has been cremated. In the dream he was just regular him in his normal body, in some normal clothes — and while I am sorry to lay that on you, I’m just going to keep running like a three-legged dog.

So if I say good, just go with that. It is true and a lie at the same time.

It’s like you lose your sense of gravity.

I am relearning how to experience gravity in my pilates classes. And in the way of the tiny city the instructor turns out to be the ex-sister-in-law of a tennis friend who also turns out to be the work colleague of my next door neighbor and the very good friend of one of my very good friends who has moved to a much larger city but is back visiting and so the three of us had spent New Year’s Eve together the week before.

In pilates as in therapy it’s all about being aware of what you are feeling. It’s not What am I supposed to be feeling?, but What am I feeling?

The studio is on the third floor of an office building downtown, where 10-stories is a skyscraper. At night, the lights of an elevated section of road remind me of the BQE and if I squint I could be in Brooklyn Heights. As I drive home, I think I could sell the house we live in and buy an apartment downtown in some 4th floor penthouse. Because what’s holding me anywhere? (The dogs, to some extent.)

What I feel is that I am undergoing some kind of osmosis where I am letting other people and other parts of myself through that semi-permeable membrane of identity to find some kind of new balance where the heavier molecules integrate with the lighter ones.

I am strapped onto an inversion table and by lifting my arm I start to float backwards and upside-down. How did that feel?

The blackberries we used to get every week at Costco are not very good. They taste of bleach, and I haven’t made granola in several months so I stop buying them. Instead I buy strawberries somewhere else and have them on yogurt with hot chili pepper jelly, which seems to be the only condiment of that kind that we have and is actually a really good combination, so it becomes my new breakfast.

I have no regular day to shop.

On Christmas morning I cook our grits in the oven as per suggestion in comment on food website, a risk he never would have taken. What food do we even like?

The other night one of his cardiologists, one of the very few people he was happy to see in the hospital, who he knew well enough from before to trust, comes to an event I’m at for work. This is how it is in a tiny city or any human community, like church or school, where you see each other before, during, and after major life events; so the doctor you see in the hospital in scrubs, at your absolute darkest hour, you will see at the pool in the summer, always a little surprise, like kids realizing their teacher doesn’t live at school. How can we go on, pretending it just goes on, laughing or making small talk? We stay in each other’s orbit, becoming brighter or darker, exerting more or less pull, as we collide, then move apart again. We hug. He says some of the nurses had asked about me. And later I wonder which ones. I think about them sometimes, too.

And he will know that when I say good, if indeed that’s what I said, it doesn’t mean I don’t have moments of looking up at the stars and asking why or what now or do I have to? I’m here. I can feel my feet. I am aware that gravity exerts a push and a pull, that a lie can carry you through as much as it can trip you up.

“We’ve already had you cremated,” I tell him.

“You did?”

“Oh,” I can feel my face contorting, “wasn’t that what you wanted?”

And maybe this is his Wile E. Coyote moment, when he realizes he has come back to ask me when I’m going to unload the dishwasher or if I’m going to talk to the doctor and find out when we’re going home and I’m already scattering his ashes. Or maybe he has moved past that, like a point of logic he thought had been corroborated.

“Oh,” he says, “yes, of course,” and seeing my consternation, assures me repeatedly that it was. “No, really, I’m good.”