Lessons In Joy

Floating on the Seine

In July 2007, Kirsten and I were in Europe visiting relatives in Sweden and sightseeing in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Paris. I have always been a planner. I filled our itinerary as full as  possible with historic sights and important landmarks. I had everything planned right down to the hour on a calendar that I printed and carried with me and we followed it to the tee. In our two days in Paris we saw the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre museum (which with careful research and planning I managed to get us in and out of in a half hour and at half price), the Arc de Triomphe and many other important sights.

On our first day in Paris, Kirsten noticed a tanning salon on the block where we stayed and asked if we could go tanning. Tanning was, of course, not on the itinerary. Why would we do something in Paris that we could do anytime in the U.S.? By the second day, she had bugged me so many times that I gave in and agreed to take the time out of our schedule to go tanning. We entered the tanning salon and I somehow arranged for us each to tan, in the appropriate bed and for the appropriate length of time, despite the fact that the nice young woman there spoke no English and my French was seriously lacking in tanning vocabulary. 

The tanning equipment was like none we had ever seen in the states. It was modern and colorful. There were futuristic conventional type beds and some that reclined. We marveled over the fact that the fans in the beds emitted a puff of fragrance every couple of minutes. We left feeling a sense of accomplishment at pulling this feat off on our own and a sense of connection with a local Parisian. It was an experience completely unlike the ones I had planned. It felt real. When I thought about it later, I realized it was one of the best memories of the trip. And it wouldn’t have happened if Kirsten hadn’t insisted on doing something she just felt like doing, enjoyed, instead of something that was on the list of “must sees.”

Maybe this is the secret to the elusive thing called joy. Enjoy…enjoy…live in joy. Since Kirsten’s passing, these types of memories have made me wonder if I have been missing out on some of the joy in my life while I was busy getting everything done and I resolve to enjoy more. To be in the moment more. To be present. Planning is important, but so is living.

“Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things.”

                                                      ~Robert Brault

Kirsten at the wheel of a 747

Pink Slipped

One of the hardest parts about losing Kirsten has been the loss of my job as her mother. Like a pink slip after years of faithful work with no performance review, no explanation or retirement benefits… just the end.

After years of braiding damp hair so it would be wavy in the morning, painting cute little toenails bright colors and rushing forgotten items to school, I’m not needed for anything anymore.

I’m not needed to wake her up because she has somehow slept through her ridiculously loud alarm clock, not needed for writing excuse notes when she’s missed first period, not needed for calling doctor’s offices or hair salons to make her appointments for her.

She doesn’t need to borrow my favorite dress or necklace, she doesn’t need me to make her coffee with cream and sugar every morning and she doesn’t need me to take her on expensive shopping trips to the mall where we would share a dressing room at Victoria’s Secret or Hollister.

No glass of water (without ice) to get at bedtime, no writing projects to help with, no need to stand watch outside a bathroom stall door because she wanted to be alerted if someone came in.

Instead, I make up things to do for her.

 

 I write to her in pretty journals every night (she always loved everything to be pretty), I light scented candles (she always loved scent and always smelled so good), I plant flowers and trees (pink, the color I associate with her), I frame pictures of her (they are everywhere), I document and save everything about her life (lest I forget a single thing), I think of her (constantly), I write this blog.

These things are the closest substitute I can find for the job I used to have. They make me feel like I’m doing something. The way I used to be needed to do things. And it is the labor of them that is the reward.

They are outlets for a love that has nowhere to go.

        

“Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night.”

                                                      ~Edna St. Vincent Millay

                                            

Signs

A couple of nights ago, when I was feeling particularly down, I asked for a sign.  Something about the way the candlelight flickered on her urn, her beautifully fitting urn with its bright, colorful poppies…beautiful, just like her, made me feel almost other-worldly and I wondered if I asked out loud if maybe, just maybe, I could get some kind of sign…the kind other people always talk about but I never see and I wished.  I kissed her urn and went to bed hoping she would come to me in my dreams.

 I didn’t dream of her and nothing special happened until the next evening when I came home from dinner with my husband, Kenny. As I passed my dresser on the way to the closet I stopped suddenly in my tracks when I saw my mother’s pearls in their blue velvet box on top of the dresser. The pearls my grandmother had given to my mother and I’ve had ever since my mother’s passing. I’ve kept them in the back of a drawer in my dresser where I keep seldom used things as I am not really a pearl wearer and haven’t worn them or even thought of wearing them for years. I know for a fact, without a doubt, that I did not take them from that drawer. The only other person living at our home is my husband. After interrogating him for about an hour, to the point of making him angry, I had to begin to believe he was telling the truth. What purpose would he have for opening that drawer? If he did, why would he take and leave out the pearls and not disturb anything else in the drawer? It was a mystery.

Pearls…symbols of female generative power, the oyster the womb of the pearl. Pearls… symbols of purity, beautiful and rare. Pearls… found on the gates of heaven.

Was this my sign? What did it mean? How did it relate to Kirsten? A memory sprung to mind of Kirsten asking for pearls as a gift perhaps a year ago. I told her I wasn’t going to buy them for her, I didn’t see her as a “pearl girl” either and told her that she could borrow mine if she wanted to. I don’t think she ever did. Was that the connection?  Or were they chosen simply so that I would know it was a sign just for me?

Me and Mom

Maybe Kirsten is together with my mother (and possibly grandmother) in heaven…four generations of the maternal bloodline, like part of a chain… or a string of pearls.

 The next morning, as I leaned over the table full of candles on the altar at church, the candlelight from the one in front and center, which I lit in Kirsten’s memory flickered briefly on the strand of pearls hanging from my neck.

That Makes My Butt Go Numb

There are certain things about each person that make them who they are and are the things that are missed the most when they are gone. One of the things I miss the most about Kirsten is the funny way she had with words.

Some of the expressions she used didn’t seem to fit the situation at all and were just silly, like “architecturally diverse,” but others were really quite clever. And it was the fact that the expressions weren’t quite right which made them so endearing and so Kirsten. Anyone can say them right…it takes a different kind of mind to come up with new ones.

Once when she wanted me to get something from her room, she told me it was on the "passenger side" of her bed. I understood immediately that she meant the side of her queen size bed that she didn’t sleep on. A different way of putting it, yes, but it did make sense. If she had a headache, she said it "felt like she had a bowling ball in her head."

And if something was really painful looking, like the Joe Theisman leg injury, the one that broke his leg visibly between the knee and the ankle and gave most people the “heebie jeebies” or the “willies”, she was the only person I know who would say it made her “butt go numb.”  I feel ya, Kirsten.

Another time she felt nauseous, and she asked me if I knew what she meant when she said that “the inside of her mouth had started sweating.” Well, yes… actually, I did. I had just never heard anyone put it that way before and probably never will again. She had a unique way of looking at things which was hers, and hers alone.

                “The pain that is felt at the death of every friendly soul arises from the feeling that there is in every individual something which is inexpressible, peculiar to him alone, and is, therefore, absolutely and irretrievably lost.”

                                                                           ~Arthur Schopenhauer

                                                                                                     Kirsten 2010
                                                                                                    We miss you <3