Grace's Place

Eastern Standard Time.

I couldn’t breathe the other night.

I felt as if there were a sharp knife stuck in my collarbone.

And I panicked.

Short, sobbing breaths made oxygen absorption even less of a possibility.

I’m not 100% sure what triggered it.

It didn’t help that my husband asked me to descend the steps to our basement in order to watch a movie on the Big Screen.

Each step mocked me with ubiquitous school pictures of beaming little girls.

Close to the bottom, I see Katherine receiving a bouquet of roses as Fraternity Sweetheart. Next, she’s the college beauty queen. Then there’s Miss Alabama stuff. Theater posters. Modeling shots. Family beach pictures.

Balancing my tray, I try to avoid much eye contact with the wall. Too much contrast. The wall is a collage of change and loss. Souvenirs of a different life…one that’s over now.

 I pick my way down the steps, careful not to fall.

We start to watch “Invictus.”

I know (and love) South Africans. I am irrationally emotional throughout the film.

At one point, I’m distracted by the light coming from the playhouse in a corner of our basement. My husband has turned on its little porch light so we don’t have to eat in total darkness. Labeled “Grace’s Place” after our youngest, it remains a tangible reminder of the girls who played dress-up there long before they played other games in the basement.

We’d finished eating by then, so I go over to turn off the light. But I am drawn inside. I see the three American Girl dolls, all dressed up for tea at the corner table. I look at the sweet pictures that once graced the girls’ bedroom walls. I open the curtain to the dress-up clothes. I sit on the floor and rifle through the princess dresses and ballet costumes. I smell one, hoping to discover the residual scent of a little girl. I sniff a faint hint of mildew instead.

The dam bursts.

My husband bends his large frame down to enter the miniature doorway. I’m doing Annette Bening’s last scene from American Beauty, where she collapses, sobbing, into her dead husband’s clothes. He gently lifts me up and hugs me.

“What’s this about?” he asks.

I can’t talk.

But he knows. He feels it, too.

Back upstairs, the knife in the neck seems to penetrate my lungs.

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The next morning, I stare at myself in the mirror, surveying the damage I’ve done to my poor over-worked eyes. How can I avoid this every time I come home, I wonder.

Should we just strip the walls bare…redecorate the bedrooms?

Remove all vestiges of the former life?

Move?

I don’t want to end up like Blanche DuBois, trailing around crying about the good old days long after they’ve gone up in smoke. Or pretending they haven’t.

Nor do I want to completely eradicate the past from the present. To negate the joy that was then.

It’s all part of the mix. The recipe contains both sweet and sour elements. I need to savor them both.

“Living in the now” has become clichéd from over-use. So many in our race-track, multi-tasking world are seeking to be more fully, mindfully present in our fleeting moments on earth. It is a worthy aspiration. But I realize that it is no longer just a life goal for me, but a mandatory requirement at this point. That is the way it was…and it was good. This is the way it is now…

and it is good.

I suppose that I will grieve as many times as I need to grieve. Until there are no more tears.

But I must continually choose to celebrate the now, remembering that, one day, I will live in the eternally perfect present tense.

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( I have touched on this topic before at In The Meantime: http://kimarnoldblog.blogspot.com/2010/03/holding-on-while-letting-go.html)

                              

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A note about the previous post:

I want to make sure that no one confused intimacy with irreverance, because none was intended.  I believe that we should approach the throne confidently, but with a sense of awe…as well-beloved children of a King who is worthy of our deference and reverence.

But who is able to handle our honesty.

And our reality, whatever it is...

even when it's ugly or flawed or messy or incorrect.