Shiva

*Sharing an essay from the archives on a tender anniversary.

Today I need to go to the grocery store because the carrots I added to my cart fourteen days ago as I wandered the aisles of Target with my husband, who was on the phone with a detective, who was trying to gain access to his mother’s house to see if she was still alive, have gone bad.

I need carrots to make a salad because ten-plus days of tiny towns filled with churches and trailer homes, Dollar Generals and Subways, junkyards and faded dreams still hurts on my insides, and even though I picked out the velvety, buttery lettuce leaves that were still good, the cucumber was mushy and the olives were shriveled in the can. And I want an avocado this time, a good one, perfectly ripe and sprinkled with pepper, because I know that with a delicious, creamy bite of green my cells will start to perk up like the trailing leaves of my Senecio radicans which went too long without water as I sat in a motel for days and sobbed with the drizzly sky.

Outside my room-with-a-view, a Taco Bell sign insisted on glowing purple and white through the rain, through the ice, through the sleet and snow, through the whipping wild winds, through the curtains I kept pulling tight around my window as we slept, because our bodies make us sometimes; they shut us down when we’d rather just keep trudging our labyrinths of grief.

Bodies are an intriguing thing. The fifteen new grey strands of hair above my husband’s right ear were not there fourteen days ago. Our eyes have seen the purple, grey, black bruise of death and how can our clear blues hold it? So we tuck all we have seen into plum-colored pockets beneath our lower lashes, that spot made hollow just for this. And the heart trudges on, collapsing and filling just like lungs do when all of the sudden it’s too much and you can’t breathe and the body makes you gulp air because you are still alive and of course you must do this. You must, if only for all the ones who cannot.

There is nothing deeper than the intimacy of grief. There is nothing more intimate than seeing the body crack beneath the weight of penance. Guilt shows up in how the body tangles itself into knots tucked into the curve of the neck or hidden like a golf-ball beneath the shoulder-blade. In the way the body stoops and sags and falls, yet still carries on in rhythm and shock, going through motions required of you when the voice on the other end of the line says the word autopsy and it just might break the spell. Almost, because really? Each day’s helping of mundane and surreal, endlessly unfolding like a packet of tissues that are all wrapped around each other...how do you escape the spell of that?

Here, just hold the bag, I’ll empty the fridge.

Mundane. Surreal.

Replacing a burned-out lightbulb above the garage door.

Mundane. Surreal.

Selecting an urn from Amazon Prime to ensure next-day-delivery to the middle of nowhere.

Mundane. Surreal.

Calling to re-connect the electricity which had been disconnected for non-payment because, well, how can you pay your bills when you’re dead?

Mundane. Surreal.

Calling to have the guy who shut off the water (because the woman who lay dead on the floor in her house at the top of the hill couldn’t make a payment on time) come turn it back on so we could clean up the house at the top of the hill...

Mundane. Surreal.

And then, the wake of rage—mine—towards someone who would leave life with us like this, the remains of it, tucked into bags and boxes and closets stuffed with papers and knick-knacks that reek of Sonomas and air-fresheners that cling to my hair, my body, the inside of my car and my man; towards this woman, who devoted a whole room in her house to Elvis Presley, who once told me she hadn’t drank water in seventeen years, who gave birth to my love and left him with piles of clutter, the hardest decisions to make, and growing grey-headed loss.

Ten days ago, he gathered up the pink towel the detective or coroner or someone grabbed off the door of her bathroom shower and placed down to blot the carpet where she lay for almost three months, in another state alone, like no mother should ever have to do.

And he stuffed it into a big black garbage bag like no son should ever have to do.

Today he writes the obituary for his mother and sends it to me—any ideas on this? Today I write a list. Candles. Pictures. Body-wash. I will get him the lavender plant he wanted from Trader Joe’s and will walk the aisles in a labyrinth of rage, and tenderness, and grief, like after we watched the funeral director slip her death-bruised body into a healing womb of fire and sat beside her for a little while, outside the room, as she burned.

And then we walked the aisles of Lowe’s in Northern Arkansas as men in red vests asked, “Finding everything okay?” in helpful tones, with smiles, while we waited for her ashes to cool and looked for a mantle to hold her.

Mundane. Surreal.

Bodies are an intriguing thing, the way they live and cope and die. Soon, Jesus will come for us and we will never die. Every day until then, I will look for tender mercies. Today I will make a salad filled with every color—rich velvet kale green, carrots the shade of a warm evening sun, sweet butter lettuce, avocados the color of spring, crisp purple slices of cabbage, and walnuts the color of earth. On the side I will add some sweet, juicy raspberries, because they are my favorite, and blueberries for him. I will taste life. I will feed my husband life.

(*Originally published in 2015.)