Waves

My sweet kitten is THE most patient of cats. When I oversleep, as I did this morning by nearly TWO hours, does she take a gentle yet firm and persistent paw to my cheek as our man Rocco did? No. She does not. Coco climbs onto my hip and calmly, zentastically waits for me to rise and shine.

We’ve been spending a LOT of time together lately. Not just occupying similar patches of real estate either. No. She’s either on my lap or draped across my neck and chest. At farthest, she’s sitting at the foot of the bed while I read. I don’t know which of us is being more clingy.

Dunno what her reasons might be (though I think this adhesiveness is just her style). Mine? All the cleaning and organizing I’ve done over the past coupla weeks has stirred up a big wave or three of grief. Yeah, I’m missing The Amazing Bob. I suppose that’s a perennial state for me.

Here’s something – life went on after TAB peeled off. I thought, metaphorically of course, I wouldn’t be able to breathe without him. Yes, I actually can. I’m not a sobby mess 24/7. I haven’t become a big fat cow (using cookies to staunch the pain) or a lush (Jamo, Jamo will quell my heart’s misery) – yea me. AND I even found a kindred spirit and total hot babe (yes, I’m talkin’ ‘bout Ten).

So then, there is, in fact, life after TAB. Cool, no?

Still, grief comes in waves.

Know what I found when I googled Grief Wave? THIS beautiful piece:

When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.

I’m at grief high tide at the mo BUT the flood water will recede, leaving a collection of beautiful memories in its wake.