A Peep-Hole of Clarity

I think I’m going to bring my 24x36 collage of pictures of Chris to my next therapy session. Now that I drive there every week, instead of taking the train, I can load my framed collection of favorite photos of him and some of the two of us into my car and go.

To date, I have never hung this shrine of my husband on my wall. Instead, my Chris-museum has remained propped up against my wall directly below some empty space I would like to deem his. Clay and I have talked about the possible reasons for my hesitation. So far, all we have come up with is the thought that hanging up the photos, in some way, would be an admission on my part that he has become a part of my past and no longer resides in my present. Despite my understanding of this theory, I am still unable to unfreeze the powers within myself to bang a nail in the wall and call it “done.”

I have to admit that the hundreds of times I have arrived home after a day of work or an evening of fun and collapsed to the floor before my collage, screaming inside and out for some justice, have been much easier to do with the pictures on the floor. Once I hang them up, I will need to stand on my own two feet again. Falling to the floor in a heap of despair (at least in front of my pictures) will be yet another part of my past. At the present moment I need those pictures to remain in place, right where they are.

Grief holds many mysteries. My trip thus far has been interesting, to say the least. I know my own mind better than ever and still my psyche is dense with mystery. I never know what I am going to think next, which aspect of grief is going to take hold of and whip my emotions into a frenzy, or how many days each week I will feel periodic happiness, content in my knowledge that Chris is no longer suffering and that the intensity of my nightmare is ending, ever-so-slowly, but diminishing, no-less.

I am waking up to a new day, ever-present the threat of ambush powerful enough to whack me into last Tuesday, last March, last year or 1999, the year Chris invited me out for that powerful and pivotal cup of coffee. The cup of coffee which began with the sweetness of cream and sugar and ended with the raw bitterness of vinegar and acid.

Pain washes over me when I realize that the Chris and Robin chapter of my life has come to a close, replaced with a chapter called Cope. I wonder what the next chapter will be and how I will find the courage to read on. I suppose that one good thing about a book is that the chapters are always there. I can open to the pages and read the chapters I loved as often as I like.