It’s October 26, nearly the end of the month and the sky this morning, at 7:00 am was still dark, dark, dark. It lightened slowly by degrees until at 7:30 it was light enough to tell that the sky was overcast. Good, it somehow feels better that way. Today is Mary’s birthday, my friend from Catholic grade school who got kicked out of seventh grade with me. Even though it was acknowledged that I was the ringleader of the underground newspaper, because she had helped, (and was my best friend), she too was suspended. It was both of my sisters’ birthdays on October 11 (not twins, one was born on the other one’s birthday); and I have cards for all three of them around here somewhere.
In September, I’d come down with some hellish cold or something, and was not feeling very well for weeks, along with my daughter. So, things weren’t really being very well kept up. At the end of September, I closed my private practice office in St. Louis Park, in preparation to be full-time with the group practice at Catalyst that I’d been part-time with. I was very excited for this move, but it meant that I had to get rid of my living room furniture to make room for the office furniture that was now going to go in my living room, and so in preparation for this we painted my living room and dining room. I had a lot going on.
On October 5, our new Catalyst offices opened in Bloomington and I was excited for this new part of my career, no longer on my own, but fully part of a supportive group practice. On Wednesday, October 7, as I was happily driving to Bloomington, trying to figure out how to configure my new office space, I got a phone call from my oldest daughter, Kathleen. “Mom, are you driving? Will you please pull over?” Fortunately there was a grocery store just there and I pulled into the parking lot. It was then that my daughter told me that her two sons’ dad, Jay, had been found dead in Iowa. The saddest news I think I’ve ever heard. Jay and Kathleen weren’t together, but they were friends, and continued to parent together. They had known each other since Junior High.
I continued to my office, while my middle daughter Erin made her way to Kathleen’s. I cancelled all my clients and then drove to Kathleen’s to wait while she and Erin went to pick up Max, 13, at his school, to tell him that his dad had died. I then drove Max and Kathleen to Medford, to Jay’s parent’s home, outside of Owatonna, where Kathleen’s oldest son, Elliot, 18, had been living. We mourned and wondered what had happened. The days before the service were a blur. That next Saturday was the funeral, closed casket, so not much closure, especially for the boys. So sad to bury a young man, so many mourning a young dad, a son, a brother, a friend, an uncle, a bereaved girlfriend.
Somehow, weeks before, in the midst of the painting and the moving, I had convinced my family to plan for a weekend in Wisconsin, and I’d reserved a cabin in the woods in Bayfield, Wisconsin. And so, a week after burying Jay, we drove the 4-5 hours to Bayfield and were able to just spend time together. It was a beautiful weekend, only slightly marred by Kathleen and I fighting briefly on the way home. We were both tired and hungry and grieving, figuring out how to be there for each other in the midst of pain and loss. Kathleen was at times overcome by the weariness of it.
And now, now it is the end of October, plans are being made for dinner out for Thanksgiving. I am grateful for this. I want to settle back into the day to day, the gratitude for little things, the taking for granted of everyone in my life, knowing that really-- we can take nothing, nothing, for granted, and each breath we breathe is precious. I want to move past dreams of my dad, who died nearly 14 years ago, the sam year Max was born. Dreams that he is still alive, but just in the other room. Dreams of my parents still together in the same house I grew up in, even though my mom is in an assisted care apartment, way up North, where my sister lives. I want to dream of Bayfield, of hot tea with Kathleen and Elliot, after a long walk on a trail with Andy and Audrey, overlooking Lake Superior. Kathleen, Erin and Megan all doing yoga on the screen porch surrounded by trees. The colors of leaves reminding me of the upbeat Boy George song, Karma Chameleon, because the beautiful autumn leaves are red, gold and green.
Karma Karma Karma Karma Karma Chameleon
You come and go
You come and go
Loving would be easy if your colors were like my dream
Red, gold and green
Red, gold and green
