the unbearable beige-ness of being

#64

Monday. . .

It has been nearly a week since my friend died. We had the sukhavati for her on Friday at the Shambhala Centre. It was a deeply sweet, powerful and celebratory time. The shrine room was packed to the rafters, as Cindy swung in many jungles. There were many co-workers from her workplace, the Buddhist magazine The Lion’s Roar, where she worked for eighteen years, up until her illness. She had been a member of the school board until it was (stupidly) dissolved. She’d received a MFA at King’s in their creative non-fiction writing course and was a stalwart volunteer at Afterwords Literary Festival in Halifax. And she was an engine of connection – if someone needed a place to rent, or a job, or some knowledge on where to locate the best thrifting in town – she was your gal. Her four children all talked at the ceremony as well as one of the ‘Canadian babes’ - those of us who’d been tight friends for thirty-five years. Her kids, like their mother, are all story tellers and even though they were heart-broken they told true lovely stories about their mum. There was plenty of food and wine, and people talked and shared even more stories. When they took the body out they played by her request Burl Ives singing Streets of Laredo. It was perfect.

And now here I sit, the sun going down, free of the centralizing force of my life for the last chunk of my life – the dying of two of the best friends a person could have – dying three months apart. I can go to bed at night without having my cell on and in my room. I don’t have to have my overnight bag at the ready. We can make plans for small or larger trips, say yes to invitations issued for weeks hence, get back to my edits and quilts and painting.

But not easily.

Right now I can manage to meditate once a day, work on this dispatch, and do some stitching – but my sorrow seems made of two physical yearnings – to sleep and to eat. The sleeping I sort of get, but my hunger seems vast and unable to be satisfied. I will let my mind and my body do what it will for awhile. If I want to watch old BBC shows like Jam and Jerusalem or Love It or List It, well so be it. I’m reading Mansfield Park by Jane Austen, which I haven’t read for a long time (did I read it?) but even there I’m reading it slowly, researching things I’ve always wondered about. I’m eating three meals and weird snacks of chocolate chips, walnuts and raisins, or making popcorn. I sleep after I meditate for awhile, I have a little sleep in the afternoon and I go to bed early. My dreams are very busy but foolish. Early this morning I dreamt that I was walking Bella and came upon someone with a dog sled team of bulldogs. I had to laugh. I also was going somewhere to a conference and wanted to find my nice pair of pants (dream pants that I do not own) but I know that is from getting ready for the funeral and realizing that I absolutely don’t own anything that looks very proper anymore. No work and a pandemic will do that for you.

Now it is dark and I will go have a nice soak in the tub, reading my Austin. And then to bed. Again. How lucky am I that I can grieve how I like, with others who are doing what they can do too.

Tuesday . . .

Did I say I was sleeping a lot? Last night I couldn’t sleep at all. Probably because I keep dozing off all day long. I took a pill a little after midnight and slept the rest of the night. Today I tried to not doze off although I woke myself while meditating because I snored so loud. Good grief.

Today I dove back into the first edits on my manuscript. I had to push myself. I only have about 35 pages of edits left in this first run through by my editor, but, just in case you’ve never written a book, or you’ve forgotten, or you aren’t like me, the last chapters are generally a rat’s nest. For one thing they haven’t been rewritten a gazillion times like the first chapters, and, even more importantly, it is the end of the book where one generally makes sure all the questions are properly answered, each windy road comes to a destination, and so on. I’m completely happy with the general structure and plot of the book including the ending which is vastly different than how I felt about The Crooked Knife pre-editing. However! So I have to take my time and carefully follow the threads back to the centre of the labyrinth where, you know, the minotaur lives.

In Greek myth, the Minotaur was a monster with the head of a bull and the body of a man who was imprisoned in a dark underground labyrinth at Knossos on the Aegean island of Crete. The Labyrinth was an ingenious maze commissioned by King Minos and designed by the architect Daedalus.

Or that’s how it feels to me. So in this metaphor the plot is the Minotaur and the manuscript is the labyrinth. Once I go in and have a chat with the Minotaur, the labyrinth will be a safe place for readers to, uh, read.

I will do it because that’s what we writers do. We fix up our shitty manuscripts so people can read them and not scratch their heads and say hunh?

So that’s me basically today.

The fella and I are having a fire because it’s cold and rainy out and my seedlings died anyway so we don’t have to worry about the basement getting cold. So that’s a silver lining isn’t it?

On the scrolling and screaming front I read about the jello men of the south deciding that women needed to have lessons in menstruating cycles so they would produce more children for the labour camps I guess, and I started moaning and grinding my teeth at the same time, which is quite tricky, and Ron asked me what was the matter, and oh my but he is sorry he did. I’m sort of surprised I have any rage left in me whatsoever, but apparently like love it is in endless supply.

We’re going to watch Wolf Hall. I’ve been a big nerd for Anne Boylen since I was a teenager. This is not a nice depiction of her, but I will still be sad and horrified (and oddly surprised) when she is beheaded all the same. Her father was somewhat useless and her uncle treated all the women in his family as bargaining chips, so truly I think she did as best she could. When I went to London with my English pal Linder we went to the Tower the very first day we were there and I started crying and moaning and Linder asked me why and I touched the staircase stone wall and said “Anne touched these”. I’m a maniac. An anti-royalist who loves queens.

Wednesday . . .

Not an inspiring day. Although I feel like I slept well last night I feel extremely tired this morning. It doesn’t help that I can’t have any coffee as I’m getting blood work done this afternoon. I’m used to not eating until late but no coffee! Bad planning on my part but there really wasn’t any morning slots so...

A friend of mine who was a close friend of Cindy’s is coming for a visit this morning so that will be good. She lives nearby and although we’ve always liked each other (I think??) we haven’t spent that much time chumming around. She was actually a couple of grades ahead of my kids in school so we’ve had lots of intersecting circles.

Thursday . . .

It is warm and sunny out. I could get out to the garden perhaps. But I don’t feel like it. I don’t feel like editing my ms, or working on my quilt, or much of anything.

What do I feel like doing? Companionate grieving. Getting together with people who had a connection to Cindy or Kerol (or both) and talk about them and what they meant to us. One of my friends just emailed us all saying she was sorry for something she said in her last group email – that it sounded sort of ‘meh’. She doesn’t know why she feels ‘meh’. I do. Meh turns out to be the perfect description of how I feel too.

Meh – I looked it up. Of course I did.

From OED - Probably Yiddish -me-be it as it may, so-so (1928 or earlier), probably imitative.

Synonyms – boring, excruciating, tedious, blah, dry, grey, dreary, draggy, colourless etc.

I think I would say that I feel stuck in a beige room, with windows looking out on a beige aspect, with no scents at all. Or signs of any of the senses working. No warmth, no cold, no light, no dark, not dry, not moist, not fuzzy or smooth or rumpled or silky. Bland beige-ness, beigeology. As folks from the Caribbean might say ‘yam soup’. After the colour and taste and texture has been cooked out of it. I cannot find this description in the writings on various hell realms and the bardo, but I think if I looked harder I would.

But – here is what I do know. It will warm up. It’ll turn peachy and golden with shots of indigo running through it. I’ll start smelling the earth as it warms up, the neighbours pot plants ponging like slightly annoyed skunks, hear the ocean roaring about, hear the birds twittering away about how their trip down south went. I will feel my bare feet on the deck as I place the offerings from the shrine on the railing (squirrels love walnuts but leave the chocolate chips) and notice that the garlic is almost six inches high already. I’ll see the slight furrow in my fella’s brow, showing concern without being overbearing. I’ll go back to listening to the weird lyrics of songs I’ve heard a zillion times – always with joy. I’ll ask Ron ‘how come you never caress my waiting fingertips?’ and we’ll laugh.

I just need to be patient with my self. To hang around with others who are patient. To tell my editor I’ll get to it but maybe not just yet. To call those I know are also grieving and say ‘just checking in’. To be okay with getting up in the dark hours and make myself a peanut butter sandwich to take back to bed. To start something and leave it unfinished for now.