Non-Stop
After losing my late husband in December of 2015, I received a copy of Sheryl Sandberg’s book Option B. Her husband passed away in May of 2015. I felt threatened by this book initially. Was she setting a stride for grief that I could not keep up with? Yes, yes she was, and as I stretched my very stiff left big toe this morning, I remembered the stride in which I wrote during the first couple of years.
After running lap after lap late into the bright stadium lights of another night, I stopped writing as suddenly as I started. “Friggin’ Sheryl Sandberg,” I said, kneeling over with a cramp, looking at an empty stadium. But the truth is, I was not competing against her. I set my stopwatch against that linear timeline called the five stages of grief, and I knew my time was running out.
It was almost year two, and my very scattered stages of grief changed by the hour. This was not a 400-meter sprint, a 5K, or even a marathon, and there were no preplanned routes with water stations along the way. At some point, people need to go back to their lives.
To this day, I have not found a finish line for grief, and while that may sound sad, there is a certain feeling of grief now that keeps me grounded. I am far from completing whatever I set out to write, but it’s good to feel the words coming again, my fingers keeping up with my thoughts, and my thoughts falling behind my fingers.
I am anxious to stop now because I want to introduce you to myself almost eight years ago when I was writing… NON-STOP. It was Thanksgiving 2016, my first Thanksgiving without Jay.
I was sitting next to my sister in orchestra row F, seat 15, at Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York City the day after Thanksgiving. My thirteen-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old son were sitting behind us. I spent way too much on the tickets, but I was desperate to rebuild my family of three after losing my husband right before the confetti of the New Year fell into 2016.
In the days following Jay's death, I woke up in the middle of the night to clean the kitchen. I was not sleeping well, and with friends and family at our house around the clock, it felt messy, and he was good at keeping a neat home. I loaded the dishwasher and cleaned the countertops, and through the fog, I found myself a couple of weeks later waking one morning and driving to buy new furniture because I needed to redecorate.
Slowly, over the months, the walls were painted, and our new couch arrived. I moved the Johnny Cash painting because Johnny’s gaze suddenly felt eerie, and just as I thought the kitchen was finally clean, alphabet confetti began to fall from the sky. It landed on our kitchen floor, and as I swept up the tiny letters, they became words that turned into sentences, which became paragraphs. I asked Jay if I could read him what I wrote, just like I had so many times before.
I wrote because it helped me understand the chapters of grief in my life and the layers upon layers of our marriage. In Health, our story was one of true love and a deep friendship; in Sickness, it was a dark and complicated novella. We were bonded strongly by both.
I enjoyed helping friends with a rehearsal dinner toast or writing a blog for my job, but I did not consider myself a writer. Then, for months and months following Jay's death, as my words grew bigger than the vocabulary from which I spoke, I felt I was only a writer. I woke up in the early morning and wrote. I wrote in the middle of the night. I sat writing on my screened-in porch, dripping with sweat, for hours in the Nashville summer heat. I doubted my words often, but the Jaybird that visited my backyard reassured me.
When the weather became chilly, I wrote inside. I wrote all day in pajamas and left my kitchen a mess. I hid from my kids and wrote. I wrote when I should have been cooking dinner, sleeping, or paying the bills. I wrote as my mail piled high around me. When I showed up late for therapy, my therapist knew what held me captive. I wrote in my car. When the phone rang, I hit "ignore" and kept writing. Even when I was not writing, I was writing. I was embarrassed by the fact that it was non-stop.
As I said, I was sitting next to my sister in orchestra row F, seat 15, at Hamilton at the Richard Rodgers Theatre in New York City the day after Thanksgiving. If you can believe it, I had to shush my kids for talking as the stage curtains went up. But thankfully, they were polite enough to continue talking only in my head as the music played.
“Mom, mom,” my son whispered too loudly, "Why do you write like you're running out of time?"And to that, my daughter looked me up and down with an eye roll, asking, "Why do you write like it's going out of style?"The lyrics of Hamilton's "Hurricane" answered as I sat in the Richard Rodgers Theater the day after Thanksgiving with my beautiful family of three.
I writing my way out. I was writing as far as my eyes could see.
OK, yes, I know I was not in the inner circle of the Founding Fathers with a quill pen laying out the foundations of our Constitution. But I am a Mother, and writing was how I became reacquainted with her. She was the foundation of me, and she is my Constitution.
She is Junebug Strong, a little girl fishing in the alley behind her house. After the night of her loud and sudden loss at age six, it was where she returned many times with her homemade fishing stick. Her big sister told her about an old toy store and magic dolphins that lived beneath the Storm Drain, and she was fishing for whatever would bite.
It was the hope she cast every day after losing her dad, which turned into the hope she cast over and over again in her marriage.
*Italicized sentences are from the songs “Non-Stop” & "Hurricane" in Hamilton.