The trouble is, even with all this new insight into life and what mattered to me - I was simultaneously feeling like nothing really mattered. It’s true. I felt like nothing mattered. Why had I survived my suicide attempt only to be given a cancer diagnosis?
He was right. There was a lot to look at, up there. Out the big window, pale blue light dissolved itself up through the pale drifts of snow. Infinitesimal points of crystalline snow hummed past the glass. The great trees shimmered upward. I nearly lost my balance, watching the Universe breathe like that.
The night of my D&C, I handed the anesthesiologist my wedding band, which he put into a plastic baggie, and I imagined the headline that would publish if I died. New Mom Dies Six Days After Childbirth. Husband Left to Raise Newborn Alone.
I felt drawn to these hapless women in a way I can’t usually relate to models, never once having seen my hipbones since my pelvis presumably began jutting out in puberty nor having any space between my thighs when I stand with my legs together.
Somewhere in the muck of friendship ending and stranger-ship beginning, in the 10-week process of detachment, anger, and sorrow, I found myself on a grassy hill facing the sun.
I lit a candle for my dad, but by the time we got to the last row where my mom’s wheelchair fits, it had blown out. Being full of magical thinking and even more full of guilt, I spent a good while staring it down, willing it to spontaneously light up again. Certain the dud wick meant that my dad was still pissed at me from The Big Upstairs. Maybe I’m still a little pissed at him, too.
The ball seems to have a life of its own. We find it in different rooms of the apartment, not quite sure how it traveled from here to there. The dog is petrified of it, my husband irked by it.
I was haunted by the old rotunda at my high school, a place imbued with the inheritance of old Southern values, with a belief in a certain kind of womanhood.
Promise yourself, on a regular basis, that today will be the first day of many when you find perfection in silence. No stupid questions. No wrong answers.
If I could rewrite the ending, I would have made her scream and hit and cry. But she sat still in that ugly chair, and I sat on her blue sofa, both in our tense silence, terrified of what sat between us, unspoken, the enormity of the loss.
