When did my 6 year old become smarter than me? Or is she reminding me of what I’ve taught her at a time I can’t look past what I feel. Which is too much.
It feels like everything that isn’t important right now also is the most important thing in the world right now. I just cry randomly. They taste less salty than they did each time. Am I lacking sodium? Is that what it is? Where is this fluid even coming from? I’m mildly dehydrated always. How can I have so many tears? And what is making them fall out? I blink and it makes them come harder. I squeeze my eyes and they pool out. They can’t be contained. I can’t be contained today? I’m way too leaky. I’m leaking my sodium? Do people have to go on saline drips to rehydrate from crying too much?
I’m flooded with tears then they are gone. Like a tide. That’s how grief works? It comes and goes? It ebbs and flows. A recurrent or rhythmical pattern of coming and going or decline and regrowth. I was fine 5 seconds ago and think I will be in a few more but the milliseconds in between Im flooding. Then I’m not.
I’m grieving. That’s what it is. We are always grieving? We have all suffered various degrees of loss. So we all grieve. It just comes and goes. Yesterday I was stuck in it. But yesterday making forts and tents for the turtle with my daughter and ordering pizza and taking 6 baths was what yesterday was. I can feel what I feel. I had to not give in to it, I just welcomed it. Every time I wanted to cry I did. It poses a lot of questions about the mechanics of the eyes and production of tears but nothing I can’t handle right now. They are tears because I am sad. And I want to be. And I don’t care right now why.
One day of not doing first grade math and remote learning isn’t going to keep my girl from becoming a brilliant engineer or even keep her from being not a brilliant engineer. She is a naturally wired thinker. She will be brilliant at anything she does but what’s important is she will see me through a grief process and be able to apply it to her own loss. She will be a brilliant grieving engineer. Not even 5 days of no math is going to harm her little spongy mind. In place of math she is absorbing a significant loss, her sponge is kind of absorbed right now. Mine is. Was? I’m not sure a grown woman still absorbs things like a little growing mind. Mine might actually be depleting.
I woke with a little more purpose today. I had it yesterday but it’s purpose was to just be. Today I have to do. I woke and have digested the thought I need to be a living donor. That I need to give. Be a giver. I googled. I broke a solid rule and googled first thing before my shower, before I was even fully awake and up. So dangerous. If I research before I’m upright it has too much time to sit properly and become a growing thought. I can’t linger in bed. The quicker I catapult into the world the less I have to digest through my shower. Which is where I seem to think in such fragmented thoughts. All broken and shaded from the sleep that I may have had. But I digest them right down the drain. Sometimes It takes me too long to shower so I can rid them all. I wash my hair too many times, can’t always remember if or which legs have been removed of hair. I’ve used skin lotion to wash. I’m a very distracted shower taker.
If I lay there and research then I hop in the shower and formulate a plan to donate part of an organ. Even if it’s not “encouraged”, even if you can’t just register. Even if I know no one who needs one,yet I know many who do. I know some people. That sounds like I’m thinking of a shady black market organ trade. I’m not. I know the people my dad knew. The people waiting for someone who wants to give life in a way that is now medically possible. Give the way someone once did for him.
I need to pay it forward. I know I could just pay for coffee in line but you can’t get coffee in lines right now. Lines are too long with the added math to be in one. Some are just closed. The math too complicated to handle the lines. Plus when I do that, I always end up being in front of the single person who happens to be the person sent to get the office coffee. I’ve paid it forward in the amounts of 50+ dollars before. It’s ridiculous to say you are, then when they say the amount,you back out. I am not complaining so much as I am noticing the amount of times it’s happened. I did it once and had the lady follow me to work and tell me I made her day. Since then I make sure I’m not followed to work anymore. I like the mystery behind it. I’ve been late for work worried someone will know where I work. This is also ridiculous. I want to pay it forward. Not with money. Just help people. Somehow. I’ve helped myself so much I’m almost bored with it.
I need a challenge. Like a good homeless person to tend to. That’s my mom in me. She is a giver. She would have given part of her liver to my dad if she could have. I would have. I also couldn’t. His specific requirements we couldn’t meet because some of us shared them. Our bond so close because of genetics. It was genetically not possible. My mom cares for others. It’s what she does. It’s how her and dad worked. She took care of others which is how she showed love to him, he required so little he demanded she care for others or herself first. He loved her by reminding her to love herself. It was an interesting delicate balance. When he couldn’t she was there. I often struggle being a little bit of both of them. My mom would stop and take in every homeless person and care for them; my dad would stop and lecture them how to care for themselves. I tend to just pretend there are no homeless people because I wouldn’t actually be that helpful. I drive by and hope that it all works out without my interference. I tend to be more like my dad. I don’t want to change everyone’s tires I want everyone to know how to themselves. If I put the thought of donating an organ out there it will swirl around in the univers and be spit out if the opportunity presents itself. I will not actively seek someone to give life to. It will find me if I stay on the path to allow it.
Someone told me to do everything with purpose. Right now it’s more important than anytime in our lives. Make plans to be places few aren’t, make lists, today isn’t a day to linger the store and read labels. Today is a day to chose things that maybe don’t need labels. And get out. It’s not a social call to go to the store. Pinterest your recipes the night before. Not while standing in the produce section. Awaiting a sneeze. Awaiting the virus to attach itself to you while cruising through dangerous places like the produce section. It’s a dangerous world right now. It’s out of control. It’s out of our control.
Remove myself from the equation. My dad reads books. Read books. He is past tense now. I have to change the way I form sentences. I wasn’t good at it anyway. He read algebra and calculus and physics books for fun. Yes for fun. He gave me dictionary’s to look at as a child when in trouble. I didn’t do anything with them but look at them like I was looking at pictures or a book of paintings maybe. I love a good equation. Or math problem. Just the looks of it. It’s so complicated. I don’t have an interest in an answer, in fact if it produces one I would question it one step further. Why? Why does it equal that? I’m a mathematicians nightmare. Or maybe their challenge?
So I’m taking myself out of the equation. Each day will have purpose. Some days it will be not to leave. This will undo. If we follow the rules. If I can’t hike and explore nature right now it’s a small price to pay to help keep a few alive. I won’t stop it single handed but I can help slow it. Maybe. I will never know. But I can do other things. Right now the tide is rushing in on this virus. It’s about to behave like the eye of the hurricane. I can feel it. I think dad left at a good time. If there is even a good time. I would not have been able to get to him if he did get sick from this. Then mom would have. I could have lost them both. Dad saved us. He is saying ride this out girls. Then life will get back to normal. He is saying it’s going to be bad and you need to stay in and stay safe. He is still talking to us. So is the universe. I’ve become a universe listener. Which is really me. I’m my universe. We are one and the same. It’s saying to stay in. I’m not afraid to be out. I’m going to be cautious. I am still afraid just being more cautious. Live with intent and purpose even if it’s just playing dolls for days.
Why a second cup of coffee tastes so different from the first I will never know. They are made from the same things. The first is the taste of waking up, the second tastes like coffee. I rarely even have two, specifically because I don’t know that I like the taste of coffee. It’s the cream and raw sugar. I really prefer a good cup of steamed sweet milk. But that first cup of coffee tastes nothing like coffee.
So I can’t just donate part of an organ in the middle of a pandemic. That’s not purposeful. It’s actually dangerous and I’m guessing the process has slowed during this time. I’m going to garden the shit out of today. My dad has a yard. Oh my god, had, but he still has it. It’s also my moms so the ownership is still theirs even if he is gone. My dad has a garden and it needs tended in his absence. I don’t have a garden to tend. I tend others.
He is being donated. Or we are trying to. Anatomical donation is increasingly difficult during a pandemic as well. This is making the dead hard to move on to their places. They can’t be properly rested right now. Too many lingering souls soon. Dad needs to go. He can’t linger. I also don’t know what I’m even talking about. He is gone. But people believe people aren’t “gone”. I believe he is gone. But I believe he is part of me, because he made me so he isn’t gone because of the life he made. I’m a part of his universe and he was mine so it’s an infinity to me. He is gone but real close all at the same time. I have to get off this train right now.
Every day I will grieve. Everyday will be a grief day. It’s an unbearable loss. But he has shown me how to get through this. It was his purpose. Like mine is to my kids. When the water subsides that’s when we tiptoe into the water again. When it is calm. You don’t play in the dangerous waves right now. The signs say so.
Aspenleaf 