Just Like That

My Granny died worn-out. The last few years toward ninety-four she fought and fought, like Rocky Marciano with his gloves taped up. Then one day she just said, “I’m tired” and with independent grace untied the mitts. Then she laid down on the bed and went to sleep. A few days later as I sat in the recliner by her bedside sort of watching TV and mostly, out the side of my eye, counting the seconds between the rise and fall of her chest, she shed the body that had served her for so long so well. I watched her lungs fill and deflate. Fill and deflate. Fill and deflate and, just like that, not fill.

Slowly she went. Then suddenly she was gone. 

What seems slow to get here, often feels fast to flee. And vice versa. All rites of passage—both real and realized—consist of slogs punctuated by wind sprints. 

Gritty drags, sharp drops, gradual sloping . . .they’re all a part of the haphazard way we get to the other side.

The morning after my youngest’s wedding, I woke up achingly sad. It felt as if my heart had come untied. The second day after, as I sorted and stacked and reshelved, I couldn’t shake it. No matter what I did or tried to do, I functioned (at best) two swallows away from a cry. 

My best friend’s youngest son had tied the knot on the same day my daughter did and on the third morning after the fact I received her text: “I can’t quit crying. Is something wrong with me?”  

“Noooooo!” I responded.” I’m weepy, too!” while secretly fearing I might be bleeding out. “Is this ever going to go away?”

Then I woke up on Wednesday and the hole had somehow closed.

Acclimation comes in fits and starts. 

Someone asked me last week as they prepared to take the last of their litter off to college, “What’s this empty nest thing gonna be like?”  

“You’re gonna pull your car off to the side of the road a lot, to cry,” I said. Or at least I did. And then it gets better. A little bit, then a lot, then a little bit again.

That’s the way growing goes.

We watch it with our kids. They lengthen almost overnight for the first two years. Then, things decelerate a bit for the next seven to ten before hitting puberty where they take off again like Usain Bolt.  From there, things level out as physical growth slows until they’re as tall as they’re going to get. It’s jagged. The steps aren’t perfectly spaced like stairs with a precise seven-inch rise.

It goes fast. Then it goes slow. Then it goes fast again. But not in predictable time. We don’t expand with a rhythm you can keep with a tap of your toe. 

While coaching USA basketball one summer, I lived on the fourth floor of a hotel in the Czech Republic for about three weeks. Even though the summers there can get as hot as ours, the hotel where we were stationed had no air conditioning. My room, however, had an enormous picture window as wide and about half as tall as a set of double doors. By a giant lever, once unlatched, the window could swing open like a gate into the room. Nights there were pleasant and with the assistance of a nocturnal breeze, the space was bearable, but the window freaked me out. It sat about mid-thigh high on a frame with a ledge approximately two foot in width, with no screen, no balcony fencing, not one thing between me and the cement below except the Czechoslovakian air. The first time I opened the glass wall, I couldn’t make myself walk near it.  I skirted the gaping hatch, terrified I might accidentally trip and tumble out.

Then one day I found myself sitting on the ledge-- one leg out, one in --as if it were a horse.  I don’t know how or when it happened. But I realized that while I wasn’t looking, my fear decided it had somewhere else to be.

Sometimes we lurch. Or rather life lurches and we hold on for all we’re worth. And sometimes we slip and slide so slowly that we have no recollection of the land we have traversed. Bumpy muck gives way at different rates of speed.

If you ask me, “What’s the best way out?” I’ll probably quote Frost and tell you, “Through.”  But no one can predict how long it will take to get there. The only thing we know for sure is that it won’t be all at once.

P.S. Up on the Watershed