Stories - A Life in Pieces

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Escape to the cottage - Steve, Isaac, Dexter and Kirby

Friday morning, the sun was shining, and I mean shining - like a heat lamp on an unhatched duck egg.  And I was the egg, soaking it all in.  It warmed my outsides and sparked my insides.  I felt like I had arrived at the gates of heaven after a long drive through hell.  Months of ‘grey skies, cold temperatures and a global pandemic’ drive through hell. I darted over to the garden centre first thing and lined up in the steamy parking lot, vibrating at the thought of flowers and summer.  After a good sized purchase, I raced back home and packed the groceries, kids, dog, husband and flowers in the car and we headed north for a cottage weekend.  It was the kind of cottage weekend that didn’t involve building fires for warmth, but rather for s’mores.  At a fairly unladylike pace, I inhaled the s’mores as if I were on death row, minutes away from someone flipping the switch.  That Friday was my deadline for releasing a blog post.  I’m not even going to tell you which Friday it was - but it was that Friday, some time ago. It’s not that I don’t have my head in the game because I do.  My head is so far up...pardon me, so in the game, I can hear the referee’s heartbeat like a whisper. I have devoted myself to fiction writing lately, mostly because the idea of sharing a personal story right now has felt forced. I still feel quite empty and not totally in control of my thoughts. Of course I know that at times like this a story can unite us, calm us, inform us and even keep us from going insane.  In my bones, I feel the ache to share stories, but my bones have fallen asleep, the ache miraculously dulled.  I struggle with the feeling that I have nothing to say at the moment.  Buying flowers and driving away was a welcomed excuse to shirk my duties.  A few days after that Friday escape, I visited an old work friend who is at the beginning of a long journey through the fog of memory decay and finally, once again, I felt a small ache rise up in my joints - the importance of story and sharing quickly overshadowed my pity party.

As with everyone, my visit with her was spent at an awkward distance, physical and otherwise. I knew immediately that reconnection would be tricky. Her stories and life, that were once a deck of cards, carefully ordered by suit and number, now lay in a heap on her brain’s floor, out of order, with more than a few cards face down.  Many of them have gone missing and I daresay, some of the cards have been scribbled over, with bold marker and secret code.  When I stood on her front stoop, she looked back at me the way I looked at the cashier at the garden centre; pleased to see a cheerful face but quite certain we’d never met before. We talked in circles; I shared memories of our time together and she walked beside me, decades away.  I was ecstatic when I was able to spark a connection or glimmer of recognition in real time - my lighter occasionally hitting the sweet spot in the gas, and lighting up the BBQ of her mind so we could actually be together.  Her husband just passed and the feelings of loneliness, depression and the longing to be back at her cabin in the north with her soulmate has hijacked her ability to process grief.  I could feel her longing for better times the way you can feel a day-old mosquito bite; ignore it and it will torture you with a low-grade but persistent itch, touch it and you risk scratching until you bleed. She’s been scratching. Many of us struggle with a longing for better times right now, but safe in the comfort that it will end.  She is not so lucky.

She and I worked together many years ago at a large school for students aged 14-21 yrs with special needs.  Our paths crossed again seven years ago when I moved to a school in the south where she had become the medical coordinator. She is older than I am and I daresay, I am lucky to have benefited from her experience, kindness and community-oriented perspective in regards to the care and education of students with multiple diagnoses.  She retired a while back and we lost touch. My life still swirling in the child rearing and working stage is the excuse I use for my distance.  I assumed I might have another chance with her.  But you know what they say about making assumptions.  And sure as dirt, I feel like an ass.

We walked her dog and enjoyed the nice weather. The best I could do was listen to her relive moments that may or may not have happened and reassure her that her husband was loved and so was she. She knew her grand kids' names but confused pictures of them with her own children. She showed me her husband's guitars and I told her about all the times he had agreed to bring his truckload of antique instruments into the school and play for restless kids, unaware of the gift they were receiving.  She smiled and talked about their cabin in the north again.  She walked me to my car twice and left the muffins I brought her on the front step.  More than once she asked me who had sent me and was I there to take her away. Living in a world where every day it seems the pictures on the wall have been rearranged and the doors turned to windows, with no way out, paranoia is a cruel roommate I wished I could evict for her. Knowing she was cared for, I left her my number and attempted to say goodbye again. She waved and smiled and I watched her walk back toward her house as I pulled away.

It was hard not to contemplate my previous notion that I had nothing to say or share at the moment - slightly uninspired during the pandemic.  Our entire morning together was spent lost in fragments of stories and sadness.  A few times we laughed at things I was able to recall about a student or her husband.  There were whole stories and pieces of stories. By the time I drove away I was nearly dizzy with ‘story’.  The gift of comedy, drama, mystery and memory suddenly washed over me like a cold shower. I have a terrible memory, that’s the truth, but there is still so much I can recall - even if in pieces.  There are the moments I am creating now, the moments from way back, and the standout tales that live just beyond the lights, ready to hit centre stage whenever I have an audience, or a glass or two of something interesting.  There is shelf upon shelf, full of moments in my life that make up my mental library.  Turning the lights on and booting up the directory is not as easy as I’d like, but I can wander and still know where the door is to my present. 

“Story, as it turns out, was crucial to our evolution - more so than opposable thumbs.  Opposable thumbs let us hang on; story told us what to hang on to.” - Lisa Cron (story coach and author), Wired For Story.

Early on in the pandemic, I remember getting out of bed one morning at the same time as my husband, a rarity in our normal lives.  We looked across the bed at each other as we pulled the duvet up and, slightly tortured at the monotony, I said to him, half smiling, half dying on the inside, “Here we go again.”  In our extreme togetherness now, I notice every slurp, chew, stained t-shirt, repeat joke and added pound of flesh and wonder what I was thinking 21 years ago. I sweep, vacuum, bake and ask everyone if they have brushed their teeth and logged in to school.  I feel like I have been injected with some radioactive toxin that gives me super sight and bionic hearing. My mind is on the brink of meltdown with sensory overload; the sound of sloppy footsteps in slippers, nose blowing and random laughing at computer screens connected by hidden earbuds on a loop.  I half expect a concerned Netflix exec to call us any day now and suggest we get a life. I can only imagine what my family thinks of me during all this.  Does my husband look at me every day and wonder if I have 100 pairs of black yoga pants or has he just given up on me and accepted that his beloved may actually be wearing the same pants, day in and day out?

That’s the easy narrative to tell and one that I now know is void of reflection.  While I still long for a few moments in a sensory deprivation tank, I am also aware of the story behind each slurp and dirty dish.  When Steve takes that first sip of hot coffee every morning, forgetting to blow on it and sucking it hurriedly down his gullet, he’s really just letting me know he’s still here - with me, after all these years. The audible swig is a signal for me to remember that first time he reached back to hold my hand as we walked through a crowd after leaving the Royal Alex Theatre on our third date and to never forget that he’s still holding on. When my kids drag their feet in their slippers and smash plates into each other as they load the dishwasher after wolfing down a slice of cake that took me two hours to make, they’re letting me know they are lost - lost without the opportunity to be out in the world laughing with friends, talking about the future and making mistakes. When they smile at me or brush past me in their rumpled clothes, they are really just pressing play on a memory for me. I am reminded of the time Kirby took a cup of water, one after the other, from the kids pool to the adult pool, for hours, in the scorching heat on a trip to Spain, loving the sun, the colours, and stopping to smile every time we wanted to take a picture of the curly haired kid who needed nothing more than a measuring cup for a good time.  I remember Isaac walking the dog on his leash around the kitchen island in a saggy diaper dozens of times in a row, constantly looking over his shoulder to see if the dog had somehow given up and wormed out of his collar, giddy each time he realized the dog was still with him, playing the game.  I can easily replay in my mind the memory of Dexter as a toddler, sitting on his father’s lap, barely able to breathe or blink with excitement as he attended his first ever concert, hypnotized at the sight of his singing purple pal, Barney, in the ‘flesh’.  After a couple of songs, he broke his silence and turned to Steve, his chubby cheeks glowing pink with happiness, and said “Thank you dad.” as if he had just been given the power to fly instead of a seat in a crowded arena.

21 years ago this August - good ole Steve and Carol

Right now, these stories and memories live and breathe in front of me, no matter what is happening in the world, like trees in a forest.  I can look past them and ignore their life and shade, or climb them and sit in their branches for a different view.  I am so sad to see someone whose company I enjoyed be lost in her forest. I hope in time, the stories that visit her and inhabit the air around her are happy ones, with less grief and more joy.  As the sounds around me trigger the impulse to get in the car and keep driving, or bury my head in a pillow, I also know they are the sirens alerting me to the stories of my life that are stacked beneath me, holding me up, brick by brick, so I can see over the wall and into a future.  Every day that I have the privilege to shirk my duties, inhale s’mores like a hog in a slop bucket, or contemplate life in pieces with an old friend, is a day worth remembering and maybe sharing. I can hold on to monotony or reach for richness.  Once in a while I may need to escape to the garden centre and be selfish, but mostly, I hope I’m able to stop and smell the roses. 

By Carol Sloan

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