» In a funk. Reflections on a tragedy.
Documenting what triggers the spring-time fun.
Four years ago I had a great evening playing cards and laughing the night away with friends. I came home, played with the cat, and went to bed. In the morning I looked over to where the cat was sleeping; she never woke up. My soul was connected to hers and she was gone. The roommate I had when she was a kitten was in a rehabilitation center after being in a car accident six months earlier. I didn’t have the heart to tell her our cat was gone. When I went to visit her that weekend she told me she didn’t want me to come back; if I had time to visit it had to be with her son. While I talked to her every day, I didn’t see her again for 15 months. And I didn’t spend as much time playing with her son as I wanted to – I was working full-time and in school full-time.
When I got home from that visit I collapsed. The six months of stress from work, school, and my best friend breaking her neck in a car accident took its toll. I didn’t have a mental breakdown, but I was seriously depressed. However, I pulled out of it fairly quickly, as I do each year.
The second year I was sick. I had bronchitis. I remember curling up next to the answering machine absolutely broken, crying as I listened to her message; she wanted to see me. She was in a hospital fighting pneumonia. But I knew I couldn’t see her because I would make her sicker. I finally got to see her in May, when she invited me to talk over decisions she had made. She wouldn’t fight the recurring pneumonia any more. Her body was shutting down. We both thought there would be more time – perhaps a couple years – but the next month the pneumonia was back.
Of all the anniversaries of negative things it isn’t the date of the accident or the holidays that hits me hardest. It’s March. I’m distracted on the anniversary of the accident as well as the holidays. What I have in March is a change of seasons that makes me all too aware of the memory. The change of smells in and the feel of the air makes my skin raw. I have no more energy to hold off the crash — I spent it all looking after other people. The one thing that pulls it around is there’s plenty of work that keeps me going.
It seems the timeline of these events correspond with the change in seasons. The change from fall to winter is when she was in the accident. The change from winter to spring is when I fell down. The change from spring to summer is when she died. The change from summer to fall is when her son starts school without his parents.
It’s been manageable, and I know this whole slow turn of events is something I have to accept as a permanent part of my life. It’s March. There’s nothing anyone can do. It won’t last long. But if anyone needs an explanation, there it is.