No prompt to write from today, only the on-the-verge-of-breaking-down feeling that’s fluttered in my chest for two days. Days that, on the surface, I probably seemed fine. I laughed with my students, cracked wise with my coworkers, visited through a haircut. Made the executive decision to take home supper from Hy-Vee. I functioned. I was almost okay.
That’s what’s tricky for me. I’ve had decent days lately. If (ok, when) I cried, it was brief. I’ve been able to be myself, albeit my new self, around other people. Things were . . . okay. Are okay, I guess. What’s happening inside seems inversely proportional to what’s visible outside. As I write this, my hands look steady and strong on the keyboard, but what I feel is a constant tremor, an unsettled, unmoored sensation. Nothing about me feels steady or strong. Not a single thing.
Maybe this is part of grief. Maybe it’s part of healing. Maybe it’s both. I don’t know. I know it’s there when I’m wide awake in the middle of the night, just as it’s there through the day and the evening. I think this must be what wind-up toys feel when some jerk winds and winds and winds, then holds them in place, all that tension and energy caught, but not released.
I wrote the above on my lunch hour. Let’s skip ahead to 7th period, not an hour later. Whatever entity was holding the fully-wound wind-up toy finally let go.
My last hour class was finishing the Into the Wild movie. Spoiler alert: he dies. It’s not a spoiler at all; we know from the beginning that the main character, Chris McCandless, doesn’t survive. Today’s part of the movie depicted Chris’s final days, and I can’t watch that decline, see Chris’s sunken cheeks and gaunt features, without also seeing Cooper’s face when he came home in June after 10 days in the Shawnee. Cooper filled in many of the gaps from that time, sharing bits of stories on our evening drives or while hanging out in the hammock swings, but even he didn’t know all that happened. What I do know is that we came terrifyingly close to losing him physically in June. We did lose him emotionally. He came home malnourished and dehydrated, covered in bruises shoulder to foot on his left side, with a split forehead and numerous other wounds. His experience was harrowing. In his mind, he died that week.
Watching that part of the movie was a mistake. I have a paraprofessional that period; I could’ve stepped into the hall, but I stayed. I’d handled that scene once today. I should be able to handle it again, right? Wrong. So wrong. For the first time, I cried during class. The lights were off and I kept it to sniffles, but I cried. The wind-up toy unwound. And . . . somewhere during that 40-minute period, one of Coop’s forestry professors sent a picture I’d never seen. The combination of the movie and the picture turned out to be too much.
I kept it almost together until the kids left, and that’s about it. A dear friend happened to stop by school to pick something up and came by my room to visit. His timing couldn’t have been better. He saw me, and all he had to say was, “rough day?” He called me Kiddo, gave me a side hug, and sat down. He knew Cooper. He knows me. The spinning-out wind-up toy finally stopped. Pseudo-normalcy returned.
The wind-up toy has had a rough day, but maybe sleep will be kind tonight. My streak of fairly good days is broken. Tonight, I’m broken. I had a few days’ respite. It helped, but it didn’t last. I’m learning grief is not remotely predictable. Ambushes are awful. Fairly good days are to be treasured; they are emotional vacation days. And just like actual vacation days, eventually I have to go back to reality. Right now, reality sucks.
Woods Writes 