Fragment: Tatouage

I can't stop thinking about tattoos. I can still smell the ink, even though my newest one is a few months old. My industrial-size jar of Aquaphor sits in the bathroom and leers at me. My favorite artists' business cards live on my fridge, and wink every time I go out the door. Any kind of buzzing noise evokes a tattoo shop for me. (There are electric saws and lawnmowers outside my window as I write that both pull out the feeling. The quickening pulse, the impending sensation, the scent of ink.)

Healing Sources

From my horoscope email: "What are the sources that heal and nourish you? Where do you go to renew yourself? Who are the people and animals that treat you the best and are most likely to boost your energy? I suggest that in the coming week you give special attention to these founts of love and beauty. Treat them with the respect and reverence they deserve. Express your gratitude and bestow blessings on them." 

 I am nourished by strenuous movement, most of the time, but also, sometimes, by being still. Touch heals me, and laughter. Really good words put in a wonderful order. Really good notes and sounds and voices. 

What are your healing sources?

Scarlett O'Hara, Grief Counselor

I wrote this before going to my mom's to tackle the house. Now that we're in the during/after phase, I've got more thoughts, but I wanted to share this.

*

Now that I am staring down the packing up of my dead mother's things and the selling of her house, a task that's petrified me since the beginning of her illness, The house tasks glom together into what feels like an insurmountable mass, and that mass sometimes shines, mirage-like and as falsely, as worse than her death.

It's not.

Nothing in my life has been worse than her death, except the fact of the wall it put her behind, and the fact that I can't break it down.

But it's a hard task. It'll be like cleaning out her office times who knows what. I don't really want to think about it. So I'm not. Like the formerly unseen grief counselor Scarlett O'Hara, I'll think about it tomorrow. Another day.

Dwelling on it won't really help me handle it better, I don't think. I'm sure I dwelled the last time we went there, and that time, I utterly fell apart. I fell apart in a way I didn't in the days after her death. It felt like the house itself was suffocating me. Being there without her was worse than being haunted - it was utterly empty, except when it wasn't, and those two feelings alternated with me between them like a buffeted sapling.

There's no sense in being buffered more than you already are if you can avoid it.

Not thinking about things was a tactic I used when she was sick, too, though sometimes I'm not sure I realized it. Looking back at it now, I didn't spend a ton of time worrying about what would happen (or at least not putting the fear into thoughts or words). I focused on hoping, and when I wasn't focused on hoping, I was focused on doing. Taking buses to be with her. Living in yoga pants in her room in the ICU. Being forced by well-meaning nurses and family and sometimes Mom herself to go outside.

I thought about everything else another day. Today, and tomorrow.