I woke up on a Sunday, late, turned the Christmas tree lights on, made poached eggs on toast with a Christmas napkin, chatted with my kids who were curled up by the fire, for real, and all the while I was singing boy band harmonies in my head from the concert I had attended the night before with my eldest son.  I’m pretty sure there was a cup of tea, a kiss from my hubbie and a cuddle from my dog too.  A whole lot of happy.  Simple happy but certainly happy.  Almost glorious ‘morning-coffee-commercial’ happy.  Just 24 hours before, my cousin had passed away.  My mother informed me that her husband and two grown children were an emotional mess and unable to think about funeral plans just yet.  But I was happy and I planned to be happy all day.

Am I a monster?

I won’t always be happy.  My day will come.  Bad things don’t just sometimes happen to good people.  Bad things just happen to people.  It is important to BE happy because it will, inevitably, unceremoniously end.  Be ended.  I feel emotional for my cousin and family but somehow, at the same time, I have the capacity to enjoy my life. Monstrous maybe.  This is the gift, or for some the curse, of emotional compartmentalization. It is our subconscious defense mechanism and a damned powerful coping strategy.

Psychology’s take is that it can be a negative and a positive. It can be useful in that it can protect us from harsh realities and allow us to have some normalcy despite trauma or heartbreak; like sharing a laugh at a funeral.  While stricken with grief, we are still able to feel a contradictory emotion in a separate but consecutive moment.  Awkward, but possible. Compartmentalizing can be harmful in that it can also aid us in avoiding the conflicted ways in which we live our lives.  Some think it’s ok to watch porn and still be possible to be an exemplary big brother to a little sister.  Yes, I was assuming this mentality on a male but I’m certain there are women out there who have enjoyed a night out at a strip club and come home to make a tuna sandwich for their son for school the next day. This compartmentalizing relieves us of any moral responsibility as we disconnect the life of a stripper from the life of our own child or sibling.

Writers have explored and frightened us with this human ability repeatedly.  Edgar Allen Poe and many others have chillingly told tales of people committing atrocities and then going on to do very normal things like make dinner or even go to work.  In the Tell-tale Heart, the narrator and murderer calmly shows the investigating police around his apartment while the body of the old man is rotting beneath the floorboards.  “I was singularly at ease.” he says.   And let’s not forget Walter White in ‘Breaking Bad’: loving husband and teacher as well as eventual ruthless drug lord.  Self-preservation and compartmentalization for the sake of cash and some cancer treatment? That could be any one of us.

But funny enough I don’t see my being happy while my cousins family is devastated as coping or as simple compartmentalizing.  I consider it a Carpe Diem mentality.  A different survival strategy. If I don’t allow myself to soak in these little moments, to ‘feel the feels’ as the kids say, how will I know to save myself from the dark times?  If I can’t cling to the happy, see it as a destination, call upon the memories still warm, I may not bother to come back from despair.

Lying on my back in the sun looking up at the clouds as a kid, family movie night with my own children, sneaking booze into the movies with my husband, getting on a plane to start an adventure,  a girls weekend that is a bit like a ‘bad moms’ trailer and a whole other blog post on ‘shame’, tea with my parents on a random afternoon, playing rough with my dog, reading in bed, playing loud music and singing to my children’s embarrassment until they inevitably join in; all these moments have happened while a friend has been suffering, a parent has been ill, a car accident has ruined someone’s day or someone has been told they have cancer. I simultaneously felt overwhelmed for those suffering while normal moments still crept into my day.  I needed to compartmentalize my life or it would have halted and maybe have been lost.  I hope it was never disrespectful.  I hope I never had the traffic-reporter-smile-on-my-face-while-reporting-a-highway-fatality lack of sensitivity. That is never my intention.  

My intention is to be prepared.

I try to take these happy moments, keep them, and arrange them in my memory like plates on a dinner table, where I can see them all.  A dinner table set on a festive and silly Christmas tablecloth, with candles, some flowers and beautiful glasses.  The plates are large and there are side plates to match and always, always nice napkins.   That’s how I see my amazing moments in life.  Each plate holds a different feeling and moment to be cherished.  The plates are kept warm by these events. They are there for me to sample when I need.  They are there for me to impress my friends with on social media.  They are there because I need them around me. I need to sit at this table as often as I can.  I’ve got to stop eating over the sink.  I can’t take a breath and remember the good things if all the crumbs are falling down the drain.

While I admire my table set with comfort and joy, make no mistake I know where this table is situated.  My table with memories and sparkle and hope is set on a beautiful grassy patch with a few glimmering granite rocks around it. There are wild flowers, sky and the buzz of harmless insects.  Two steps from the head of the table, my seat is perched at the edge of an unforgiving and sharp cliff.  The edge of a nasty drop-off.  At any minute a wind could pick up and send my happy table over the edge.  I could lose my footing, and drop off into the abyss.  The fall will be slow, like disease, or quick and hard like violence, or burn like a betrayal.  But when it’s my turn to fall, to be unhappy, to experience hardship and sadness, I will grab that tablecloth and pull.  I will not fall with nothing. No way that tablecloth will pull clean out from underneath all those precious memories like a magic trick.  It will be messy.  I will yank the tablecloth as I fall so that my happy memories follow me down into the cavernous hurt.  The plates will fall, the cups will fall, the flowers and salt shaker will tumble in with me.  I will fall into some dark sadness with my table setting, my memories and I will be reminded to climb back out.  To get back up.  To be happy again.  To get back to the table.  To re-set the dishes.

Because I will eat again. The table might look more rustic this next time, with cracked dishes and scratched up candles. But it will have character, a story, depth and texture and it will look great on Instagram.  I love my family in these hard times. When others are sad, I must still be ok being happy.  Because I might need to be.  The winds are picking up and my chair is in a precarious spot.  I plan to be happy not just all day, but all the while I am still seated.

C. Sloan

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