Loss…an excerpt

This is the beginning of a longer piece on loss and grief.

It rips you apart in a ferocious explosion like a bomb decimating bricks and mortar. Debris scatters in a fiery burst showering the pieces down, down, down. When the dust settles and the smoke clears, you see the gaping hole, edges clearly defined. You can’t fill it in by picking up the broken shards and fixing them back together with that bottle of Gorilla glue you keep in a plastic bin on the pantry shelf. That’s only for reattaching the tiny flowers and delicate grape vines to the rim of the porcelain ewer, which despite being wrapped in copious layers of plastic bubbles and buried deep beneath crumpled newspaper in a packing box marked fragile, still got jostled by the moving van. The priceless pitcher is sitting on a tatted cloth doily on Mom’s antique pull-out table in the 200 square foot space you call a living room and you can only notice the repair if you look up close.

What can keep out the wind and rain for now but a giant blue plastic tarp? You duct tape it in place. It doesn’t hold. With each new storm, another gray strip loosens and soon an entire corner is flapping and you can see in. Maybe you could sew on a patch like you used to do on ripped jeans, before it was a fashion trend to wear them with threads exposed. Or a graft on a wound, but still you’d see the scars.

You could board it up, paint over it, but it will never be the same. Maybe you should just knock the damn thing down with a wrecking ball, only leaving the chimney standing like the builder did to our old house. Or smooth over the particles and level the ground. Dust to dust. Don’t even rebuild.

A year and eight months after Mom’s death, and not quite as long since I left New Jersey and moved to California, already the tarp is coming off. It was only a flimsy stop-gap. Underneath, the hole is the same. It hasn’t gotten smaller or healed in any way. From one angle, everything looks intact. You see me smiling in photos with my new running friends. I’ve got a sweaty-faced, toothy grin after crossing a finish line. I’m chit-chatting at a gathering of animal rescuers. I’m verbally nodding as someone tells me about a school project. But if you shift your view 90 degrees, you’ll see what’s under the tarp. Like one of those fright makeup tutorials on YouTube where a beautiful woman paints her face to look like it’s been eaten away. She turns her head and she’s a zombie. Do not misinterpret my smile as happiness.

Exactly a year ago, on December 27, when the embers on the ground were still smoldering and all the tears I shed could not put them out, I went for a run on a chilly, windy morning. I remember the date because it was just after Christmas and there were storms on the East Coast and high winds on the West, and this year the weather was identical in San Jose, so I looked back at my journal entry to check and I was right. Even something as simple as a run could set off an aftershock. That day, for someone in Brooklyn, lightning struck in the form of a winning Powerball ticket. The person was lucky it wasn’t really lightning. Later, a transformer blew up in Queens and lit up the Manhattan skyline in an eerie blue light that scared people into speculating it might be aliens taking over our already other-worldly world. It wasn’t, of course. Just multiple explosions that shut the power down in parts of the city and outer boroughs.

So the lottery winner had good luck, the blacked out Manhattanites not so much. And me, I’ve got a dark rain cloud perpetually hovering over my head. I have only bad luck.

It was clear and sunny, but very windy. I was on my way back from the park across the street where the Los Alamitos Creek trailhead begins and where I had gone for a short recovery run, since my knee was still achy after that weekend’s mountain climbing expedition. I was finishing up the run, on the sidewalk in front of my apartment complex, when the wind picked up and suddenly – lightening struck. I thought so. I didn’t really know what hit me. All I knew was something came out of the sky and hit the bridge of my nose -- just between my eyes. It wasn’t lightning; just a huge branch from a tree that broke off in the wind and scraped my nose on the way down. Stunned and reeling, I touched my face to find blood on my hand. A car pulled over and a lady who witnessed the tree branch strike got out to ask if I was okay. I wasn’t. I looked at my reflection in her passenger side car window and saw blood on my nose. She handed me some tissues and I held them over the gash. But I reassured her that I lived a few minutes away inside the complex and that I’d be fine.

I wasn’t so sure. Little cuts can bleed a lot. Remember the time I stepped on a rock while playing in the sprinkler at day camp when I was a little girl? The panicked counselor swooped me up and ran to the infirmary without wrapping the cut first. Blood dripped onto both feet, turning an eight-year-old girl into some vision of Christ plucked from the cross and casting my screaming petrified playmates as unwitting extras in a horror film. This could have been that bad, but I needed to get near a mirror to see the damage to my face. When I did, I saw that the skin was scraped raw, but the cut wasn’t too big and I did my own first aid. I cleaned the wound off and dabbed on some Neosporin ointment, along with a Band-Aid. Then I went to CVS as I’d been planning and got a brace for my knee. There was no one I could call. No one checked in on me. The only human contact I had was with a stranger in a car who saw a tree branch torpedo towards my face.

I spent the next few weeks with that stupid Band-Aid on my nose, a visible symbol of my constant bad luck. A faithful, religious believer in God would probably rationalize and tell me I was lucky. God was watching over you to make sure that branch didn’t pierce your heart or your skull or your eyes. Sure, it didn’t kill me, but I still had a gash on my face. However, in my world view, where God lets terrible things happen, I can only think God is not good or benevolent or loving. How else to explain it? The Brooklyn guy with the winning ticket went to sleep millions richer and I went to bed wearing a brace on my knee and a Band-Aid on my nose. Whose life is luckier?

A year later, the wound has healed with new skin, filling in from the perimeter until the mark of the tree branch is undetectable. I have a faint scar as a reminder. In the summer it was more pronounced when it got too much sun. Now in the winter, you can hardly see it. It healed completely. The skin repairs itself. It regenerates.

But there are scars you can’t see. Grief is an emptiness, a void that can’t be filled in. That gaping hole is still there. Still raw.