Triggers

The annoying thing about grief, at least this kind of grief, is its persistence.  It just doesn't go away.  Or, more accurately, it goes away from time to time, but it doesn't go away for long - and that's actually worse than never going away.

You wake up and start thinking about what you've got to do today and then boom, it hits you like a sucker-punch, right in the gut.  And then you know that mostly what you're going to be doing today is dealing with this feeling again and again and again, like a boxer on the ropes waiting for a bell that's never going to ring.  You make breakfast, you're thinking about breakfast, you're pouring the syrup, and then boom, sucker-punch.  You get in the car and drive to work, you're caught up in negotiating your way through traffic, your mind's on the traffic, and then boom, sucker-punch.  You're teaching a class, you're completely wrapped up in the causes of the Cold War or the religious policies of the Mughal Empire, you're thinking about the best way to explain these things to your students, you're coming up with lively examples and analogies, and then you turn around to write something on the board, the sea of faces disappears, and boom.  You hope you can catch your breath before you turn around to face them again, and usually you do.

This goes on all day, every day, and it's exhausting.

The grief can be triggered by anything or nothing at all.  For me, there are probably hundreds of little triggers each day.  Sometimes they are explicit and direct.  There's a photograph of Joey on the wall near the hanging baskets in which we keep our garlic, onions, bananas, etc.  It's from our trip to the Upper Midwest, and it shows him staring at two enormous pie shakes at a pie shop outside Minneapolis.  He's wearing a blue t-shirt, which I gave him, on which a cartoon cookie is holding hands with a cartoon carton of milk and saying to the milk, "I love you!"    I'll be cooking away, chopping the carrots and measuring out the olive oil, and then, when I spin around to grab some garlic, there it is.

Gifts that he gave me are everywhere in our apartment: the pie cookbook from which I make most of my pies; the photograph of Ernest Tubb on our bathroom door; the ceramic moose pitcher that normally sits atop my bureau (until recently, when we had to kitten-proof our bedroom and hide all the breakables); the copy of A Summons to Memphis by Peter Taylor, which he'd lent me and which sits on the to-be-read stack on my desk; indeed, books of all sorts, from travel books to novels, including some, such as William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways, that have seeped so deeply into my subconscious that they've become integral to how I see the world; the Bonnie Prince Billy bottle stopper, currently serving as a Christmas tree ornament, which was the last gift he bought for me (but didn't have time to give me).

I could almost tell the entire story of our relationship through the items in our apartment.  There's the Charlie Daniels Christmas bobble-head doll on our mantel that I bought with Joey when we first visited Nashville together (he had a matching one); the photographs hanging on the walls from trips we made to Berlin and Copenhagen; the Christmas gifts from family members who had a habit of giving both of us identical items - pajama pants, shirts, a deck of Oklahoma playing cards - and of which he had a corresponding version; the plush Snoopy doll that was given to me as a gift and that I, knowing he had a special affinity for Snoopy, had lent him several years ago to keep him company on a long post-Christmas drive back to Virginia (Kate and I now take that Snoopy with us on our own road trips); the DVD of  "The Gods Must Be Crazy" sitting on our shelf, a movie about which a very young Joey pitched an almighty fit when our parents took us to see it in the theater.

There are indirect triggers everywhere.  I can't drive anywhere without passing hundreds of thousands of silver Honda CRVs of the sort he drove.  I frequently drive past the hotel where we stayed when we first came to Nashville, as well as the restaurants and other places we visited when he was in town.  Music is a big trigger - we shared lots and lots of music with one another (I'll probably write more about this soon), and at least half of the albums on my iTunes have some sort of Joey association: either I got the album from him, or I gave it to him, or we'd listened to it on a road trip, or he/we had seen the band in concert, or something.

The triggers are so ubiquitous that it'd be impossible to escape them, even if I wanted to.  I can only imagine how much more inescapable they are for my parents or Tina, his girlfriend, who live where he once lived and whose everyday environment contains thousands of such memories.  Maybe, though, it's their very unavoidability that will ultimately make it possible to overcome them - or, if not to overcome them, then at least to absorb them.  If you're forced to deal with that sucker-punch feeling all the time, gradually it becomes less shocking, less disorienting, almost normal.  If you can't escape it, in other words, you have to deal with it.

The truth, of course, is that it often doesn't take an external trigger to set off the grief.  All it takes is to cease being wholly absorbed in whatever it is you're doing.  You stop paddling just for a second, and the waves wash over you.