The Colony of Grief
“I’m doing a Norwalk day tomorrow,” Liko said, as he and Dane cleared up after dinner.
“Anything fun?” Dane asked.
Liko made a face. “Absolutely nothing. Physical with Dr. Jellyfinger, then—”
“Wait, that’s fun,” Dane insisted.
“Oh yeah. It’ll be the most action I’ve gotten in years.”
“Will you roll on your side or just put elbows on the table?”
Liko fired a dish towel at him. “One snog and a sleepover doesn’t entitle you to doctor-patient privilege.”
“I’ll put you down for elbows.”
“Fuck you.”
“I would, but whatever comes after Jellyfinger is bound to disappoint.” He dodged Liko’s swat, laughing. “What else is on the agenda?”
“Eye doctor. Oil change at the dealership. Break for lunch with Gavin and Cynthia to discuss a really insufferable client and how we can let him go without breach of contract. Then Janelle and I have a meeting with financial advisors because we’re doing a scholarship for Kyle’s graduating class. Then I see my therapist.”
Dane hated that he stopped listening after Janelle and I. Hated the frisson of suspicion in his chest, because you still sleep with your ex-wife.
Did one snog entitle him to make some casual rules about exclusivity? Did a sleepover on Klonopin qualify as dating?
What are we doing here anyway?
You’re the one setting the slow pace, Diane reminded him.
Shut up, Dane thought, which he didn’t often do with his other half.
“…So traffic willing, I should be home around three,” Liko was saying. “At which time I will curl into fetal position with my emotional support duck, and you can hook me up to an intravenous G & T.”
Dane uncapped the dry erase marker and wrote Buy gin on the whiteboard.
Liko closed the dishwasher with his foot, and rubbed at the moody wrinkle between his eyebrows. “I swear, man, a finger up the ass is going to be the best part of tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” Dane said. “You don’t have to do it perfect, you just have to do it.”
“If I say fuck you again, it means I understand and appreciate the thought, but I hate hearing it. Fuck you. Whoa, is that ice cream?”
Dane turned from the freezer with a pint in each hand. “Let’s see, we got… The Colony of Grief and the Prism of Abandonment. What’s your jam?”
“The what of what? Gimme that.” Liko took the coffee chocolate chip, which Dane knew he would.
“You know how you have The Precious Little and The Meaningless Scrapheap? First year on my own, my two modes were The Colony of Grief or The Prism of Abandonment.”
Liko ripped off the inside plastic seal with relish. “Both resonate. Find us some spoons and tell me more…”
2016
“How you doing?” Huff says.
“I’m just awful,” Dane says, because he can give honest answers to Huff.
Everyone is being incredibly kind, still Dane doesn’t feel like any one understands.
Or rather, he’s bewildered how they’re being compassionate, yet going along with their lives.
Everything continues to go along, as if Nomi’s death and Ethan’s absence don’t make any difference in the machinery of the Universe.
Dane wants to rent a billboard and broadcast his pain.
Or stand by the side of the Palisades Parkway with a sign:
MY WIFE DIED. MY HUSBAND LEFT ME.
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU ALL DOING?
DON’T YOU CARE?
DOESN’T ANYONE ELSE FEEL THIS?
Of course they don’t. They ask “How you doing?” and hope Dane won’t give an answer that makes them feel things they’d rather avoid. They listen with empathetic expressions but behind their eyes Dane can see the there-but-for-the-grace narrative.
“How you doing?” they ask him.
“I’m okay,” he says. “Bad days and worse days.”
Even that makes some people wince. But sometimes blithe, black-humored quips are the only thing getting him through, so he learns to whom it is best to give the generic answer, and to whom he can give the quip.
“Okay,” he says to the former. “Hanging in there. One day at a time.”
To those he trusts he replies, “Not too bad, considering I’m driving around life with the check engine light on.”
“I feel like I’ve gone deaf in one ear and blind in the opposite eye, but hey, I have on matching socks.”
“I did not consider swan diving into a wood chipper today. Can I get an amen?”
“Honestly, I wake up wondering when I can go back to bed again. What time is it?”
“Yesterday was decent. Today, I hate everything and everyone. You included. Get out of my face. I’m kidding. No, come back. Hug me. I love you. Thanks for asking…”
Time passes. Somehow. In eternal minutes and disappearing days, it slides in and out of meaning as Dane negotiates grief, Saskia, and the farm.
He feels Nomi’s loss like both a wasting disease and an empty space in his brain.
He wonders if the way your spouse dies determines how you grieve them.
If their death is sudden and violent, do you feel the loss like a constant surprise: an axe to the face, over and over and over again?
If they die peacefully in their sleep at a satisfyingly old age, are the sharp edges of their absence padded, because their death is sad but it makes sense?
Nomi’s death from a stroke breaks important blood vessels in Dane’s head. He’s slow and sluggish. He can’t think. One side of his body feels paralyzed. Ethan leaving is a cancer, spreading into his bones and organs, making him ache all over.
No longer belonging to a trio means Dane no longer belongs to himself. He is being colonized by grief. He writes it down on a Post-it: The Colony of Grief. Then he stares a long time at the words, not knowing what he means. It’s a joke with no punchline. Or an unfinished proverb.
In the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king.
In the Colony of Grief, the…
He has support, but at the end of the long and lonely day, it’s his pain and his burden alone.
His heart might get over Ethan one day, but he’ll never get over Nomi being gone.
Death comes into your house and takes a giant cosmic dump in your soul.
No crack team of postmortem cleaners can remove a turd of this magnitude.
You have to endure it stinking up your house until it petrifies.
Then maybe you can box it up in some attractive container and take it along for the rest of the miserable ride. But it’ll always be with you.
“That’s accurate,” says Sharice, his grief counselor. “But can we rewrite the petrified part?”
“To what?”
“Biodegraded? Composted? You could grow something new in it.”
Dane grunts. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to sulk with my petrified turd metaphor for a while.”
“You’re entitled.”
“I’m thinking about Huff,” he blurts. “A lot. Fantasizing.”
Sharice tilts her head. “Why do you think that is?”
“Because I’ve always been attracted to him.”
“I meant why are you thinking about him more now?”
“Because the pilot of desire has taken off the fasten seatbelt sign and my attraction to him is free to move about the cabin.”
“That’s a better metaphor than the petrified turd.”
“Thanks. I worked a long time on it.”
“Besides the obvious, how does fantasizing about Huff make you feel?”
“Frustrated. Pissy. Angry. Resentful.”
“All the colors of the abandonment rainbow.”
“Pardon?”
“In the deep, primitive, binary parts of your brain, the loss of a loved one is abandonment. They left you. The circumstances are irrelevant because the switch only has two settings: they here and they not here. You don’t get half-settings of nuance to explain. It’s on or off.”
“Interesting.”
“You know the five stages of grief, with stage one being anger. I often frame that as stage one: primitive. You’re angry because you’re abandoned.”
“Huh. How does this circle back to Huff?”
“He left you, too.”
“Well, not ex—”
Sharice holds up a finger. “The circumstances are irrelevant, remember? One switch. No explanation.”
“Right.”
“The switch is pointing to they here but you’re not getting the result you want. Hence you are angry and frustrated and…”
“Abandoned.”
“Mm. And for the first months, maybe first year of grief, bereaved people tend to view everything through the prism of abandonment.”
Dane’s mind goes to the cover of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, with its iconic triangle refracting a single beam of white into the rainbow spectrum.
In his imagination, he picks up a glass prism and lays it on his grief, refracting the white-hot beam of his daily pain.
Out shoots the red of anger, the orange of resentment, the yellow of fear, the green of envy, the blue of desolation and the purple of frustration.
“I’m going to take some time with this,” Dane says to Sharice. “It’s an excellent theory. I mean that sincerely. But at the end of the day, I just want my fucking people back.”
“Of course.”