Cold

It’s been nearly three weeks now and it is still terribly cold. Snow has blanketed the frigid fields and lakes of Minnesota, and snow has blanketed my soul. The world seems covered in an awful sameness. Like the landscape, there is no color to it. The water blends into the land, which blends into the road, which blends into me. My life feels like a Xerox copy of its former self; a precise reproduction of all the nit-picky details in shades of gray. It’s a perfect reproduction of the world minus the color that once warmed it and gave it life. I want to escape this frigid wasteland, but there is nowhere for me to go.

The endorphin buzz of shock that accompanied me on my early journey has given way to a stark, pitiless reality. I’m left with nothing to delude myself. Even my beloved scrapbook, where Hyacinth still lives and breathes and lays her head against my chest, is nothing but a fantasy world. When I work on its pages I feel free and happy. But I know that it is nothing but an escape from reality. It is a drug. And like a drug I am needing ever more and more of it to ease the pain. It is becoming a problem. I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to write. I don’t want to eat. I don’t want to talk or think about anything else. I want to live amongst the photographs. I want her to “err” at me, demanding to be picked up. I want to feel her warmth in my arms. I want to hold her close to my face, kiss her and smell her. When I work on the scrapbook it feels as if I will be allowed these simple pleasures again. When I close the cover and set it aside I know that I will not.

Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun, is right. She says that when things fall apart, when the rug is pulled out from under your feet, you are tender. The tenderness of pain allows growth and openness and a connection with other beings. I really felt that during the first couple of weeks that followed Hyacinth’s death. My rug was pulled out. I flew through the air with no reference point. I was swept up in a crazy current. I let myself fly. I didn’t try to grab onto something or land on the ground; I didn’t fight it. There was a strange “rightness” to the whole thing. Grief and love went together and I felt both at the same time. I had no idea where the journey would take me, and that was okay. Acceptance was somehow easier when my feet were not under me. Over the past few days I have landed on the ground with a hideous thud. My feet are firmly back under me and my life has become a terrifying solid reality without Hyacinth. I am back in control. It feels hard and cold and lonely. The loneliness is relentless. Like a Chinese water torture it drips, drips, drips and slowly wears away the skin, slowly travels to the bone where it knaws and knaws and wears me done.

The other night I dreamt of Hyacinth and Molly. We were in the water. The current was swift. Molly was in my arms. The water soaked her Bichon locks of curly hair and pulled her down like lead sinkers. Her hair seemed to become longer and heavier with each passing moment. She was struggling against the undertow and was losing. I had her in my arms but could feel the water pulling her straight down. If I let go, even for a moment, she would surely drown. Off in the distance I could see Hyacinth. She was not sinking. Her head was bobbing along on top of the water like a little cork. Hyacinth was not drowning, but she was moving fast in the current. If I didn’t do something quickly to prevent it she would be swept away downriver. She wouldn’t die, but she would be gone. The thought of losing Hyacinth was horrible, but I couldn’t swim to her without letting go of Molly, and Molly would surely die. The children would suffer loss. I called out for Wendy, for someone, for anyone to help. But nobody dove in. I was alone in the water with a terrible choice. I awoke with a start before making a decision.

What did the dream mean? I wonder. Perhaps it meant absolutely nothing. I don’t know. What I do know is what choice I would make today if the dream were to come true. I’d let go of Molly in a second – I’d let her sink like a stone to the bottom of the ocean. Hell, I’d throw the children in after her if I thought that it would help me to hold onto my Hyacinth. I don’t want Molly, or the children, or anyone else. Instead of filling the hole in my heart as they once did, the presence of others that I love has begun to disturb and irritate me. They produce unpleasant noise and movement in my colorless, Xerox-copy world. Like dripping water from a faucet that will not shut up, the living beings around me are relentless. They rip and tear at my heart. They make the hole larger. I don’t want the living. I prefer the silence of my memories and my color photographs, even though they are frozen in time. I want the dead.

I couldn’t cling to the weightlessness of acceptance any more than I could hold onto my beloved. Both were swept away from me in the current. Both are gone. Though I was initially swept away with them, now I have landed alone. I have been set down in the middle of the snow and the ice. I’m no longer swimming in the compassionate, loving limbo of new pain described by the Buddhist nun. The pain feels very old now – very old and very familiar, solidly planted in this icy new reality. The river has frozen over and there are no more choices to be made, only cold, hard loss to be endured and lived with. The tenderness is under the ice, out of reach for the moment and perhaps forever. I can see it there, but I have no will to even begin the task of cracking the crust. It’s cold outside. It’s cold inside. I’m cold – freezing cold, inside and out. I have no will today to live amongst the living.

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