And so this week’s moment of happiness despite the news.
My life ever since January 17th, 2024, the day Michael was struck and then run over by a passenger van, has been a Roller Coaster. Yes, with capital letters. It should also be bolded and in the largest font a laptop can produce. It’s been nothing short of chaotic. There was his accident, the time in the hospital (6 weeks), the time in rehab (3 weeks), the time at home with a revolving door of home healthcare workers (just over a month), his last time in the hospital (a month), his time in hospice (5 days, barely), and then this long, long haul after his death (almost a year). Mixed in with all that was the death of my two cats, Edgar Allen Paw (14 years old) and Muse (20 years old). There was my trying to keep up with my own schedule, plus everything that Michael used to do around here.
There have been decisions to make. Decisions, decisions, and more decisions. And now nobody to be a sounding board. Michael couldn’t make a decision to save his soul, that weight has always been on me, but he was a great listener.
Then last week, the book-banning story hit. I wasn’t expecting the hoo-ha that came with it, For a little bit there, I felt like I was trying to swim upstream against a rapids of stampeding plesiosaurs (look them up). I wear a ring on what used to be my wedding ring finger. The ring is called Swimming Against The Current, and it shows many little silver fish swimming in a circle around my finger, but there is one little gold fish trying to swim the other direction.
I about twisted that ring into a groove down to the bone last week. I was that little gold fish.
Which is why, yesterday, when I suddenly had a quiet day, filled with nothing but simple pleasure, I posted on Facebook, “I don’t say this often. But I had the nicest day,” followed by a smiley face emoji. As almost 100 people “liked” the post, I’d say it’s been pretty obvious that I’ve been under some stress.
My day was simple. It was my one day off a week. I do a different day each week, so that I can keep my full schedule of clients and classes, and everyone on each day of the week knows that every five weeks, they’re going to have a day off. So I slept in, until 12:30. I had breakfast in my recliner with a good book, not in front of my computer. I went in to see my chiropractor, who got a crunch out of my neck that made me instantly three inches taller. Then I went for a pedicure and a warm stone massage.
I’ve only started pedicures since Michael died. I have fibromyalgia, which makes me very stiff and often in pain, and so contorting myself into taking care of my own toenails has become impossible. Michael used to take care of it for me.
One of the things he’s no longer around to do.
I mostly wear sneakers and boots, so I didn’t used to color my toenails. But now, as long as I’m at the spa, I do. It gives me pleasure to look down and see a bright color winking up at me.
The massage…oh, the massage. I started doing warm stone massages after I was diagnosed with fibro, at the suggestion of my rheumatologist. I am a great lover of heat, and I soon fell in love with the heated bed, the heated stones, the heated towels, and the warm, warm hands of the massage therapist. The therapists (there have been a few over the years) learned quickly that even in the high heat of summer, they need to have the bed cranked up to its highest temperature.
The warm stone massage also, for some reason, unleashes my mind. I often get the best story ideas when I’m under so much heat. My favorite massage story was when, in the middle of a massage, I suddenly heard the opening line to my novel, Learning To Tell (A Life)Time. It’s the sequel to my first novel, The Home For Wayward Clocks, and despite requests, I’d said, often and in public, that I would not be writing a sequel. Another book was published after Clocks, and I was working on a different new novel, when, facedown on the massage bed, I heard, “I never expected to cry when my mother died.” I knew, without a doubt, that this was Cooley, a main character in Clocks. “Shit!” I exclaimed, and my therapist’s hands flew off of me.
“I’m sorry!” she said. “Did I hurt you?”
“No,” I said. “I have to go home and write a book.” By the time I left the spa that day, I knew the book was set sixteen years after Clocks, that James, the other main character, was no longer with us, that Ione, a secondary character, was in “the garden of dementia” (because Cooley was told that Ione didn’t have Alzheimer’s, but “garden variety dementia”), and the book was going to be about Cooley trying to learn about her mother, who she’d been estranged from for all the sixteen years between books.
The cost of the massage was more than worth it that day.
The massages fell away from my life after Michael’s accident. I simply didn’t have time, and while it sounds odd to say, I didn’t have the energy. Everything was about Michael. It had to be. I don’t regret it. I wish I’d had more time to devote to him.
But now I was back. I had a day off. I had time.
As I lay with closed eyes on the massage table, turned up high, and as I felt the warm stones, the warm towels, and the warm, warm hands of the therapist, I realized something else I’d been missing since Michael died.
Touch.
When Michael was alive, I couldn’t walk past him without his hooking me with an arm and pulling me in for a hug. When we sat side by side on our reclining loveseat, his hand always found its way to my arm. In the car, as I drove, always drove, because Michael was phobic about driving, his hand was on my thigh. Whenever we walked together anywhere, his hand would clasp mine. At night, as I fell asleep, he was an extra blanket, his arm and leg thrown over me, tucking me tightly to him. And there were a myriad of other touches during the day. For twenty-five years.
I’ve been told that people often cry on the massage table. Something is released. That never happened to me before, but it surely did yesterday.
Crying would not normally be considered a moment of happiness, but for me, the more I release this grief like no other, let it out into the world and not just roiling around inside of me, the more I recover. And return to myself, but minus a very important part.
I returned home, every muscle loose and relaxed, and my mind there too. It was in the eighties here yesterday, but I drove home in the convertible with the heated seat on.
I don’t say this often. But I had the nicest day.
And yes, that helps. Despite. Anyway.





