For better or worse, the streak has continued. I’m reluctant to make a big deal of it, because bad minutes and hours and days are bound to be on the horizon. Nonetheless, I’ll note that I haven’t had a truly bad day for twelve days now, which is nearly unthinkable to me at this point in my life. I’ll take it, but I’ll probably stop emphasizing it quite so much. I really don’t want a big sign in the corner of my living room that says “XX days since a major meltdown”.
My weekend was really nice, if quiet. When I woke up on Saturday, I felt the sads creeping in. I was determined to outsmart them, and so spent some time doing things outside my house in an effort to keep my brain busy. It worked, thankfully. I spent some time at the lake, and some time at an apple orchard. I took a wonderful nap with the pups and then had a quiet afternoon.
Sunday, I had my Quaker meeting, went to a local food festival, and took another nap. In fact, I’ve been napping every day for the past four or five days. I don’t know if it’s a new trend or not, but having enough time in my day to carve out for one of those has made the rest of the afternoon and evening much more manageable. This damn lack of energy is really a pain, and I need to do everything I can at this point to buy myself more of it. Naps are helping with that.
Today was a day off from my day job due to the holiday, but I saw some counseling clients in the morning and then had the afternoon off. It was an especially quiet day for me today, with very few folks texting or otherwise saying hello. I’m assuming that’s due to their own holiday plans with their families, and trying to think ahead to how I’ll handle that when Thanksgiving and Christmas arrive. It was abnormally free of social contact, and while that’s nice for a day, I’m hoping to talk to a lot more people tomorrow.
I’ve been missing Kellie a lot over the last three days. The missing feels different this time, though. It’s feeling like nostalgia, like memories, and although I’m feeling her absence very acutely, it’s not sending me into the panic attacks that the moments of deep missing were causing even just a month ago.
If you characterize her absence in my life as that space when you’re missing a tooth, it feels unusual. You know it’s not there, and you try your best to work around it but its absence keeps popping back into your mind. You might even be drawn to poke your tongue into the missing space (until it hurts, and so you consciously draw back from that). But when you don’t think about that tooth for long enough, your tongue seeks out the spot without you intentionally meaning to do it and you get shocked and hurt all over again.
For the last four and a half months, I have tried to think about her absence and what it signifies in controlled doses. And when I do face fully into the lack of her directly, it sometimes literally takes my breath away and leaves me gasping and in panic attack mode. Not as much for the past week or two, though, and that transition feels like both growth and progress on my part.
I had a bit of a surreal (and positive) experience yesterday that I wanted to think some more about. I know I’ve discussed here some of the unusual aspects of living in a small community where many folks know one another. I have a good friend who lives and practices in a much bigger city, and who had reached out to me with an ethical dilemma surrounding a new referral that, it turned out, had attended the same church in their childhood as my friend’s partner. That wasn’t an alarming scenario for me at all, due to the many ways in which ethics play out differently in rural areas, and we talked it through. I’m very likely to encounter clients in social settings, or in a grocery store, or even the children of clients when I’m out in public many years after having that therapeutic relationship. But my friend’s situation is very different, and they’re very unlikely to ever bump into a client outside of work due to just how many people live in their vicinity.
This point was hammered home to me in three different interactions yesterday. First, in the midst of that local food festival, I stopped at a food truck and ordered a hot dog. It was served to me by the coroner’s investigator who came to my house after Kellie died and stayed with me while the paramedics did their work. Even though she was very kind (in both of those settings), I was struck by just how weird it was to bump into her like that.
As I continued down the street, someone stopped me and wanted to express their condolences for my loss and tell me how sorry they were that Kellie had died. I was already in a bit of a surreal place due to the hot dog thing, so I thanked them and kept walking. I didn’t know what to say besides “thank you”, but it was really nice to be cared about in the midst of a very busy street festival.
Down the block, I stopped to pick up my actual planned lunch from a second food truck. The owners of the truck took the time to ask how I was doing, to thank me for supporting their small business since they started it, and to tell me how much they appreciated me. When I got back home with my food, I saw that they had literally given me twice the amount of items I had paid for, just out of kindness.
Three encounters with three people (or sets of people) who all knew my situation and who all expressed care and concern and love for me in their own way, within about ten minutes. I know that I wasn’t there to be seen by anybody, and I strongly doubt that 99% of the people on that street yesterday had any idea who I was. I also wasn’t ready to talk to anyone about my loss and about how hard it’s been yesterday. But those three very different interactions all made me feel seen. And if I lived in a community that isn’t Ashtabula County, I don’t think I would have bumped into anyone like that at a similar event.
People can say all kinds of negative things about this community, but I’m always going to push back. Folks here often display more care for each other than you would expect, and that’s a nice surprise to get. Especially on a lonely day.
I hope your Labor Day was full of love and joy and a profound lack of work.
Talk to you soon,
Matt