This week used to be one of the happiest of my life.
The children would be at summer camp, and Greg and I would, to use Grandma Williams’s term, gallivant.
It was all her husband’s fault.
Grandpa Williams, who was a translator and reporter in World War II, didn’t talk much about his life or the things that had happened to him. He did, however, make pronouncements. We grandchildren knew what he valued and what he believed to be true. Grandpa thought you should turn out the light when you left the room. He dismissed watching TV reruns as utter foolishness (“You’ve already seen it once.”). He believed if key lime pie was on the menu, you should always order it.
His primary tenet–aside from his unshakable faith in Christ–was that two things were always worth spending money on: education and travel.
Grandpa said no one could ever take them away–no matter where you were, you would always have the memories of what you learned and what you saw.
And so, every summer, when the girls were at camp, Greg and I traveled. We couldn’t really afford it, but with his long illness, what else was there to do–”sit home and look at [medical] receipts?”
So we would find the least expensive hotel rooms (often a family timeshare), activities we could do for free, nature parks and wilderness areas. While the girls were at camp, we would try to approximate our pre-cancer selves.
My Facebook and Google Photo memories for the past two weeks have been as full as these weeks were. Greg and I on birding trails in Orlando. In Las Vegas at Cirque du Soleil. At Cedar Point. At the Grand Canyon. In Sky Valley.
We went places. We did things.
We had some laughs.
(My mom and dad always placed great value on “having some laughs.” After a dinner date–or after an hour-long phone chat post-divorce–one of them would always say with (sometimes wistful) satisfied happiness: “We had some laughs.”)
A soul-draining, marriage-challenging long illness gnarls your thoughts. You, your spouse, your children–everyone can forget that you had some laughs.
A few weeks ago, I asked Abby if she remembered her Barbie with the color-changing hair. She didn’t. I told her how Greg was always in charge of the bathtime routine. How carefully he would pick out the toys, check the water temp, and get the hooded towels. Greg would sometimes get the toddler stacking cups, readying them before the bath–a cup of hot water, a cup of cold, cold water, a cup of hot water, a cup of tepid water. Then he would grab the Barbie whose hair changed colors depending upon the water temperature. And my husband and our daughters would dump water on the Barbie’s hair, changing it from pink to blue to green, and they would laugh. The girls with delight, their father, at their happiness.
The girls have no memory of this. Of all that laughter, that sunshine in our house.
Greg has been gone for six months today.
It is an impossible sadness.
The peculiar, brutal horror of his hospitalization and death has stolen our sleep, and the void he leaves shatters us daily.
And the fifteen months–the in-between of separation and reconciliation–the time that we practiced living without him, tripping along in broken shoes–that time, that container of pain, is unrelenting acid on ulcers.
There is no sleep, no comfort.
But then the Greg of twelve years ago appears in my Facebook memories, holding a pink balloon poodle.
I marvel and remember: there was a time when my husband and I wandered in mountains and canyons, suppered on shrimp, crab legs, and key lime pie, and watched clowns shape balloon animals amid the happy clamor of the boardwalk, as we ignored the quickly setting sun.
In my carport and my sitting room, there are Rubbermaid containers filled with memorabilia–forty-year-old amusement park photos, elementary school report cards, “World’s Greatest Dad” trophies, letters from summer camp, tiny plastic Cracker Jack toys, greeting cards that all say, over and over and over again, “We love you. We appreciate you. You are wonderful.” And I look at that–all that written attestation, all that Crayola-ed love, and I think, “It wasn’t enough.”
Six weeks ago, I joked with a friend that I wanted to write a blog on 25 ways to survive a bad day. We agreed that it was “too morbid” for South Georgia–small towns being what they are, no one should ever admit that, sometimes, simply enduring is difficult. Now, of course, with my father’s death by suicide, people can think what they will.
It is crazy that I would even think about blogging again, that I would return to my laptop and try to make sense of this latest tragedy, attempt to put it to good use. But, if you read this blog regularly, that’s what it is about, in a sense: putting sorrow to use. Putting pain to work, for good. Because, to me, good must come from hurt.
There are so many losses–even beyond those awful and known. Children, babies, promised adoptions, health, finances, a normal marriage, a home, friendships–all have been stripped away, food for locusts.
This blog was originally a Facebook note on September 19, 2009. (Today I found myself writing part two, so I thought I would post this, part one, tonight.)
the teetotaler and the gal who enjoyed the glass of good merlot, the mother whose kids were bedraggled and barefoot and the mom whose kids wore matching Crocs with their every outfit. I exasperated her with my total cluelessness about the feminine world of makeup and hair: “You send that child over HERE before that dance recital. Don’t you TOUCH her hair.” Steph was my girls’ biggest fan, and the stars in their eyes were certainly those that I expected. 
Today, I spent silent hours in the car with Greg–we were going, again, to the doctor. We don’t even pretend anymore; this morning, we didn’t want to be in the car, didn’t want to be spending our day in waiting rooms. We did not buy Chick-fil-a biscuits on the way out of town, didn’t discuss going to the arboretum after the appointments–there was no attempt to make this into a fun trip.
When I was younger, there wasn’t anything I hated more than blow-drying my hair, and in the hot summers of South Georgia, I saw no reason to do so before bed. This distressed my grandmother with whom I lived, who was a true saint. Each night, she would beg me to dry my hair. And when Greg and I were dating, she would still continue her bath-drawing lecture.
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