It’s not just new paint to me
Finding out how grief colors everything
I’ve spent the last couple of days prepping to paint a new color in one of the bedrooms in my house — moving furniture, putting out drop cloths, taping off trim, and tinted primer cut in and rolled on to cover the bright turquoise that was my daughter’s last theme of choice in her young teen space. It’s been a quite a few years since I have done this kind of task, pre-Pandemic at least, and I can feel my age today more than the last time. My hands ache from gripping the brushes and roller for so many hours and my knees and thighs are feeling all the squats from cutting in those baseboards.
What I should expect by now, but didn’t remember when I started this project, was the emotional ache I would feel.
This is something you don’t understand is part of the package when you’ve never experienced an unexpected or untimely loss. The grief that rises up in your throat and sits there unbidden when you change something and then realize, “My person will never see this.”
In the two years since my son’s death, this has happened in countless different ways, and repetition doesn’t diminish the pain of that realization for every subsequent iteration.
Last summer we finally got rid of the broken, ripped and sagging hand-me-down couch we had in our sunroom and replaced it, as I had long intended, with a fresh, soft and comfortable option. I was excited until it arrived. Then it hit me that Mek and I had spent many hours on that stained old behemoth, balancing our dinners on our laps while we binge-watched “The Good Place” and me not caring if something got spilled because “I’m getting rid of this couch soon anyway.”
Now the couch and my son are gone. I don’t miss the couch, but it hurts my brain that my kid never will share a blanket with me, like we always did to start a new series, on this one. The new rules about not eating on this much nicer furniture will never apply to him. I’d let him eat a big mound of spaghetti on this thing if I could just have him here. But I can’t, and that’s a really detached from reality thought anyway, but when the reality you counted on gets suddenly ripped from you, so does rationality sometimes.
I’m constantly faced with big and small ways that life goes on without him. The globe still spinning, new things happening — both good and bad — and all of it having no connection to him, yet every connection to him.
At first, every change was a slap in the face. I hated when summer came. And then Fall. Seasons coming and going without him. I hated the flowers that emerged from the dirt that proved life hadn’t stopped when his did. The second Spring came, and I planted flowers again, remembering how he weeded alongside me without complaint, wearing those bulky, red Bose headphones he bought for himself with Amazon gift cards. He’d be singing along snippets of a song I couldn’t hear, in his own world right next to me. I relate to that feeling constantly since he left us. With every new season, experience or change, his absence is the soundtrack I hear that no one else knows is playing.
He now has missed two Christmases. While most can understand that holidays without a loved one is hard in a general sense, the myriad of ways that would present itself never really occurred to me until it was me.
Two years in a row now, I have purchased things that nobody else needed or would really appreciate because I would have gotten these items for my son, and I couldn’t walk away without buying it. What am I going to do with a big orange stuffed dragon holding a bottle of Frank’s Red Hot? It would have made him laugh, would’ve sat on his couch under his lofted bed in his room, maybe got tossed around by his friends and knocked over a lamp and I would’ve gotten mad. I’d be so happy to be mad at him. Regular, everyday mad at the careless buffoonery that teen boys serve up effortlessly. I see a stupid, garish toy in a store and my mind rockets through these thoughts of fantasy and grief, while nearby shoppers would never suspect that I am no longer normal like them — buying toys for a dead child instead of a living one. What would the cashier say if, after making a friendly comment about “what lucky kid is getting this funny dragon for Christmas” I told her it was for my son who really loved Frank’s Red Hot but will never dump it all over his mashed potatoes again because he died? I don’t, because that would be mean, and I’m not mean. But the unspoken words sit sour on my tongue while I swipe my card and I feel so different from her, and everyone, at that moment. Even though there might be someone one line over holding a sweater her mom would’ve loved and she thinks buying it might bring her closer somehow. I can’t know.
Now the dragon sits in a bag in my attic because I can’t give it to him but holding it in my hands in the store made me feel something and I couldn’t set it down and walk away.
This is the part of grieving that our society gets so wrong. They think there is going to be a point where you get to walk away, but that isn’t possible. What I am working on now is walking on, not away. Walking on is a path littered with memories and what ifs and he-touched-this-so-I-can’t-throw-it-aways. It’s finding a way to enjoy things I know he’ll never see, like the new rug I bought to compliment the couch he’ll never curl up on. Would he have liked what I picked? My world now is where I try the new Mexican restaurant in town and eat that burrito knowing what he is missing instead of just eating the damn burrito.
So, as I walk on, picture me a little like Steve Martin in the end of the film, “The Jerk.” I don’t need this stuff. I don’t need anything, except this ashtray. And this paddleball game. The ashtray and the paddleball game, that’s all I need…and this remote control.
Navin R. Johnson and me, walking on. I’ll be the one carrying the fiery dragon.
