3/20/25

And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.

Just a few minutes ago, I was eating lunch (late) and reading a book, when I came across this sentence:

Everyone dies, and yet it’s unendurable.

• Catherine Newman, We All Want Impossible Things

And just like that, my head was hanging and I was crying onto my ham and cheese sandwich.

My life has been like that lately. Plugging along just fine, feeling, well, reasonable, and then something happens to make me cry, or the alternative, make me laugh. I’ve always been a rollercoaster, but lately, I am the rollercoaster from hell.

I watched a video sent by a student earlier this week. It was of a Ted Talk on grief, and the speaker, Nora McInerny, said, “Grief isn’t fatal, but it can often feel like it is.”

I didn’t have a ham sandwich at that moment. So I cried over my keyboard. Here is the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khkJkR-ipfw

Two weeks ago, I wrote this blog and told how I’d been staring at the blank screen for ten minutes, trying to come up with something that counted as one of my Moments. Then, last week, the day after writing my Moment, I had such an avalanche of small good things that all I wanted to do was come home and write a second This Week’s Moment for the same week, to talk about the miracle of small surprises. There were no rainbows, no unicorns. No sudden opening of my door and Michael walking in, saying, “Surprise! It was all a big mix-up involving my doppelganger!” No gift of a clock that turns back time so I could call Michael and divert him long enough to keep him from stepping into that intersection until that blue passenger van drove by, leaving him unharmed. No. It was just one small good thing after another.

First was the arrival of new dishes. When Michael and I moved into this condo 19 years ago, Michael was surprised when I told the kitchen designer that I wanted a plate rack. I wasn’t even sure why I wanted one. I’ve always been the type that likes things neatly stacked and tucked away. But being able to have the plates easily within reach, and also treated as art, just appealed to me. When I went on a search for plates, I couldn’t find any that I liked. Finally at Goodwill, I mix and matched a set of solid burgundy plates with solid hunter green plates – the two colors used the most in our very bright condo. For 19 years, they’ve lived in the plate rack, but as time went by and some broke, they did not break evenly. I now had more burgundy than hunter green, and the lack of a cohesive rhythmic pattern was making me crazy in my newly reorganized kitchen. I even used a wooden silverware organizer to organize my BATTERIES by size. The plates that just weren’t even just screamed at me.

When I went for a plate search last weekend, it was like when we moved in all over again. It seemed like all the plates were white or beige. Some had pretty prints on their surface, but their edges were still white or beige. It took a lot of searching, but then I found them. And they arrived on my doorstep on Friday, the day after I posted my blog.

The outer edge of the surface is every color imaginable. The surface you eat on varies by the plate, from orange to green to yellow to blue. The rim that faces into the room when they’re in the rack match the surface. It was like my kitchen suddenly lit up and sang with brightness. With joy.

Well, with rainbows. I guess rainbows were involved.

I packed up my old dishes and brought them to Goodwill, back from whence they came, hopefully to give someone else some of the happiness they’d given me. As I drove home, down Main Street, of all streets, how down home can you get, I looked ahead and saw a man walking behind a young girl on the brightest yellow bike. Daffodil yellow. My favorite flower. As I got closer, I thought, that looks like my son. That looks like my granddaughter.

It was! They were!

I drove around the block so I could come up beside them. Hearing my son’s, “Hi!” and my granddaughter’s even brighter “Hi!” just melted me. And I have to say, there is no more beautiful sight in this world than my long-haired, long-legged granddaughter on a daffodil yellow bike. She was a poem. I wish I’d thought to take a photo, but I was too busy admiring her.

Back at home, I tackled the last of my second floor decluttering/organization goals. Michael always wanted a card catalog, like we used to use in the library. I found one for him at an antique mall soon after we moved in to the condo. It’s in my back room, where my treadmill is now, and we used it as a medicine cabinet. Bandages under B, Sudafed under S, we argued over if Tylenol should be under T for Tylenol or A for Acetaminophen. The T won. However, as I discovered when I started to clean out the multitude of drawers, it was another victim of Michael’s hidden hoarding. Every drawer was stuffed to the brim – and there was no sense to the alphabetization. I threw out over 200 pens – all of them dead. Receipts. A set of magnets. A set of fake bloody fingers, bought to scare us at Halloween. A Lone Ranger badge. Old autograph books. A working Viewmaster and reels.

I threw out three bags of garbage. I did, however, sell the autograph books and Viewmaster and reels within 24 hours of listing them.

But it was done. Every bit of the second floor of this condo is now organized according to my very strict rules. Even the batteries. I feel like I am calming chaos.

Then, in the mail, there was a package with a book I’d ordered. It contained a poem I hadn’t thought of in years, but that came to me suddenly one night, and so I looked it up, found it, and ordered the book.

Years ago, when I was a student at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, six lines of this poem were published, I believe in an article in the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper. I loved the six lines so much, I cut them out and thumbtacked them to a bulletin board I kept for years, filled with lines I loved from all the things I read. At the time, the name of the poet wasn’t included, nor the title, and I thought this was the whole poem:

The night I lost you

someone pointed me towards

the Five Stages of Grief.

Go that way, they said,

it’s easy, like learning to climb

stairs after the amputation.

The day these words came back to me last week was a few days after I was told by someone important to me that I needed to move on, let it go. I was, he said, in “pity city.” And now this poem came back, glowing like a moonlit path in the darkness.

I Googled the words and found that this is a much longer poem, called “The Five Stages of Grief”, by Linda Pastan. It was in a book with the same title. I searched further online, found a copy, and bought it.

Now it was in my hands. As I slid it out of the envelope, I found it was originally a library book. Inside was stamped “No longer the property of Falvey Memorial Library, Villanova University, Villanova, Pennsylvania.”

I clutched the book and wondered if it felt as abandoned as I’ve been feeling. And now, well, I’d saved it.

That night, in bed, I read the entire poem. And again, I cried, this time over the final stanza:

Acceptance. I finally

reach it.

But something is wrong.

Grief is a circular staircase.

I have lost you.

Grief is a circular staircase. The perfect definition. Crying over a ham sandwich. Elating over the poem that is my granddaughter. Feeling accomplished over thoroughly organizing a floor of my home. Crying over a poem that resonated decades before it would resonate with me in an even deeper way. I saved the poem. Now it saved me.

That’s who I am right now, and it’s okay. I am not living in pity city.  I am on a circular staircase. I am living my life. And when rainbow dishes and daffodil bikes and things being where I know I will find them lift my spirits like the sunshine of spring, I know I’m doing fine.

On Monday, a coaching client returned to me after a break. She’d sold her first book, and now was ready to start on the second. She brought me a vase filled with the most gorgeous daffodils.

My favorite flower.

On the tag wrapped with ribbon around the vase, it said, “The daffodil announces the end of the cold dark days – symbolizing rebirth and new beginnings.”

Daffodils and a bicycle. Rebirth and new beginnings. Finding an old friend in a discarded library book. Tears over a single sentence in a novel.

A circular staircase.

And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.