Emotional Advent Day One (I Want to Be Who I Was)

Last night at dinner Judi brought up Ruth, a friend of ours who died four years ago. Two days ago I was thinking about Ruth as I drove home along Rio Grande Boulevard. I wondered why; I looked in my journal to see the last time we had all been together with Ruth and her partner Ellen (who died two years before Ruth, from cancer). We had last seen them in early December, at Ellen's very last birthday party in 2008.  Ellen had just turned 50, reaching her goal. She made it two months beyond that and died at home, in bed with Ruth.

Judi, her husband Paul, Dave, and I were in a Mexican restaurant last night. Judi and Paul are friendly with the owners and they sent out a plate of sweet tamales (which I don't like) for us to try before our dinners arrived. In the next room, forty-five Brazilians were having a pre-Christmas Christmas party. "Brazilians know how to party," the woman who owns the restaurant told us. "We could all learn something from them."

You know that thing where you can tell when someone is talking to a group but they don't like you, you specifically out of other people in the group? They don't direct their comments to you. They don't make eye contact with you. That woman did that thing to me. She was friendly enough on the surface, very likeable even, so much so that if I mentioned the thing I just told you to the other people I was with, they would tell me that I was imagining it.

Before dinner, Dave and I had taken Crunch for a walk around the neighborhood. He was very excited to be outside and wanted to walk for quite a while. In the middle of the walk, we sat on a bench in one of the parks and I fed him a handful of stale dog biscuits, just to thwart Judi's efforts to make him skinny.

Judi had gone in the afternoon to see a movie, the new one with Tommy Lee Jones and Hillary Swank. Over dinner, she told us about the movie. It sounded relentlessly depressing, a real Christmas season downer. In it, Hillary Swank's character hangs herself. When Judi was describing that, I had to turn off some part of myself, some listening part of myself. I have to do this now whenever people talk about suicide.

The demons like to hear about suicide, it's true, but I don't have any choice about whether or not to feed the demons. I can't afford to do it anymore.  It was fun in the beginning, kind of like buying a little baby crocodile, like being able to forget when you buy a little baby crocodile that with time and attention, cute little crocodiles grow up to be enormously dangerous adult crocodiles. Like crocodiles, demons never bond with you.  They're never so attached to you that they won't sacrifice you for the first, tiniest reason that comes along. After awhile you stop being able to keep them in a little tank next to the bed

That was how Ruth died, suicide. She couldn't face life without her partner Ellen, so on Ellen's birthday she swallowed a handful of pills and went to sleep and never woke up.

It just occurred to me: People are relentlessly delusional and it either saves them or it eats them alive. Sometimes it does both at once.

This is how I process grief. It takes a long time, decades sometimes.