The First Year Without Sarah

Maybe twenty or thirty years will go by and suddenly Sarah will pop up one day to visit, like my friend Inga did. I’ll run into her downtown, or at some sort of event, and we’ll hug and I’ll say “You look fantastic, I love what you are doing now with your hair.” We’ll promise to get together, but of course we won’t, because we just won’t have that kind of bond anymore.

It’s so painful to think of her somewhere, anywhere, without me. But I really am doing better at creating space between us. I thought about the possibility of going through her clothes this morning when I saw on our neighborhood listserv that a charity needs clothes donations for school age kids. I even gave some thought lately to possibly doing something different with her room eventually, maybe making a den or guest room or whatever.

When Max and I were walking on the Boardwalk at the shore, I saw a woman with a full tattoo sleeve and it brought back a memory that made me smile. Sarah loved when she was a toddler for us to buy her a little toy from the gum and candy machines (since she didn’t chew gum) for fifty cents or so. You know, the ones at the entrance to the grocery store where you put a coin in the flat slot and turn the metal handle and the toy comes out the chute in a kind of plastic bubble. Once, the toy she got was a fake tattoo sleeve that was kid-sized, all brightly colored and made of nylon or some other synthetic fabric. She for some reason loved this and was obsessed with it. She wore it all day every day and slept with it on at night for a couple of months. When we first went to doctors’ appointments, I’d explain “That’s a fake tattoo sleeve, she likes wearing it for some reason.” But after a while I just stopped explaining. If they had an issue with a little kid wearing a tattoo sleeve, that was their problem.

I don’t remember what became of the tattoo sleeve. Maybe she lost interest, maybe it fell off one night and she had just gotten whatever kicks she was getting out of it and moved on. Kids have their little obsessions. Personally, I never wanted a tattoo. I guess I’m not of that generation, and there’s the whole Jewish thing with not marking your body. But perhaps Sarah, wherever she is, has gotten herself a tattoo, or even a full sleeve. The little rebel.

Things seem very busy all of a sudden. I think that’s good. My Dad will be moving down to Maryland in less than a month, and I have to do a walk-through of his new apartment to make sure it is all set up correctly. That will be this coming week. Once Dad moves down, in September, he has a couple of appointments I need to do with him. One is a medical thing, and there is also a social thing that he’d like me to attend as his “plus one.”

Max and I are meeting up today for dinner with an old college friend of mine, Inga, who is in the area with her family to attend a funeral. They want to go to the Parkway Deli in Silver Spring. I’ve known Inga since I was 19, when we stayed with different members of a big French family in Nantes for the summer. I lived with the parents and she and another student lived with the grown-up daughter. We used to see each other at Sunday dinner and for disco nights out and beach trips with the daughter. And for classes of course.

It seems funny to think that now Inga is one of my lifelong friends. She’s an assiduous letter writer and she’s also our college class alumni coordinator so she keeps in touch with everyone. So I hear from her regularly. After a couple of years of her letters sort of annoying me, I started to write her back. We’ve been corresponding for years now and I look forward to it.

I’m not sure what is striking to me about this. Just, I guess, the fact that our acquaintance in France seemed sort of forced, maybe even a little annoying at the time. I wanted to immerse myself in French family life and the French language. But now she seems like such a dear person. We grow used to people, form attachments. It’s so funny how that happens.

Max and I are also starting Weight Watchers tomorrow to try to lose a few pounds. It’s good that we’re doing it together. We’ll go grocery shopping today and tomorrow we’ll weigh in on our digital scale. So I’ll probably be doing more cooking. Finally, I signed up for volunteer hours at our local soup kitchen/homeless resource center. We’ll see how that goes. We haven’t heard anything back from Kennedy-Krieger about being foster parents. We discussed it on the trip and I was feeling a little negative but Max still wants to do it. Probably it would be good for us.

My attachment to Sarah feels a little less scary right now. Like I can untether the cord just a little bit, let her be her own person. Let me be my own person. Have a little sanity.

Vincent Van Gogh said “I don’t know if I’m extremely sensitive or if life is unbearable.” Sometimes I feel the same way. We met with the Parks Department yesterday and chose a spot for Sarah’s Memorial Bench in our local park. It was a good experience. We settled on an area near the infant swings, which Sarah loved when she was a baby, but also with a nice view that looks out over the whole park, and is also within sight of the paved path that curves around the park where Sarah practiced driving her power chair. It was tricky finding a spot without tree roots from big established trees, but that still had a feeling of “setting.” Someplace you can sit and people-watch or just sit look out at the park. Someplace with a bit of shade, but also some sunshine. There’s a young tree nearby that reminded me of a teenager. We mentioned to the Parks Department people that Sarah used a wheelchair, and they offered to pour a concrete or cement slab beneath the bench so a wheelchair user can wheel up directly next to the bench. This makes it ADA compliant. We said of course that would be great. The whole thing will be ready by the end of August and then we can start benchsitting and bench-tending. It felt like a good morning, something real accomplished. So why do I always manage to spin gold into straw?  Maybe it’s my way of keeping my anxiety down, or is it my way of ramping my anxiety up? I’m not sure. Since yesterday morning, I keep having intrusive fantasies that people from our neighborhood listserv will complain once the bench is installed with its slab.  Complain about what?  The bench? The slab?  Who knows, people on the Listserv complain about anything and everything.  It’s really quite comic.  Max and I have long felt that there should be a screenplay or miniseries called “Listserv.” Maybe I’m just nervous about putting my loss, my grief, my failure out there in public.  Sarah’s name and her year of birth and death will be on the plaque. I just feel afraid of the thoughts people will have.  It reminds me of the statement that gets made at the beginning of every Compassionate Friends meeting, that we don’t judge any parent by the way their child died.  This is meant to make parents whose children died by suicide, drug overdose, eating disorders, etc. know they are just as welcome and their children are just as important. But I find it comforting too. Lately I’ve been changing the picture of Sarah I keep as the wallpaper on my phone.  For many months I kept the last picture I took of her, before I left for my fateful trip to New York State.  But I’ve been changing up the picture lately.  I can’t believe how beautiful she was.  I had such a beautiful child.

This weekend I felt okay, not too bad for the most part. I would say fair to partly cloudy on my grief scale. I tried to push myself to do some things I used to enjoy doing. For instance, I used to really enjoy reading the Sunday newspapers, The Washington Post and The New York Times. I read the articles and the newsy bits and I did the crossword puzzles, and if there was an acrostic I did that. My Dad always did the NY Times Crossword Puzzle when I was growing up, and I remember trying it when I was a kid, and it didn’t make any sense to me, and I tried it again and again, and finally I got the hang of it. I felt so proud of myself.

Some Sundays my Dad and I will call each other and say “Finish the Times Crossword yet?” and if the other person says “No” then the one who is finished says “Well, it’s probably too tough for you” in a very condescending way. It’s our little tradition. Anyway, I don’t remember exactly when, maybe it was around February, the crossword started to seem like work, and I just stopped doing it. It didn’t seem fun, like so many other things didn’t seem fun anymore. Just reading the Sunday papers felt meaningless. Who cares about all that crap anyway?

To try to get to the point here, yesterday I decided to try the puzzle again. To get into it, regenerate those neural pathways and spark that “aha” feeling of satisfaction from filling in those squares. (Yes, I know everyone is playing Wordle now, but I somehow missed that boat.) I did about half of it, which I thought was pretty good.

I can’t say it really stimulated my sense of relaxation and contentment. I felt more like I was trying very hard to enjoy something I should. I wonder if I’m going to have to replace all the things I used to enjoy, one by one. That’s a really scary prospect, because I have no idea what the new things are yet.

I remember feeling so content three years ago in 2020, when the world was shut down and nobody could go anywhere, and it was just the three of us at home together all time. I felt cozy and happy. I don’t remember feeling like I had no interests or searching for things I liked to do. The day was full. I guess the difference was Sarah and her needs.