Grief Matters

Knock. Knock.

I’d answer with the proverbial who’s there, but I know very well that this is the knock of a solar salesperson. This is suburbia 2022. No one knocks unless they’re selling something and, in sunny California, during what I hope is the apex of global warming, there’s a 90% chance that it’s them.

The slippery bastards know not to use our Ring doorbell because then we can dismiss them via the app without even coming to the door.

 Our two dogs, plus our bonus dog that we’ve just inherited from my parents, are going absolutely nuts. The quickest way to quiet them, as their piercing barks amplify on our entryway’s hardwood floors, is to deal with the interloper head on.

I open the door just enough to frame my face, preventing the dogs from getting out while displaying body language that reads: No, I do not accept being sold to all day long by phone and in person and then also be sold to while in my home sanctuary.

There she is in her uniform of khakis and a polo, confirming my suspicion. “We’re not interested. Thank you,” I say firmly but somehow in the range of polite-ish, and I close the door.

“Who was it,” Russ asks when I return to the family room.

 “Somebody selling some…,” I start saying with exasperation. 

Knock. Knock.

“Oh no, she didn’t,” I say, bubbling up with some fight or fight energy.

“Just ignore it,” my soother-in-chief says.

Knock. Knock.

The dogs and I outnumber him. I rush back to the door.

I frame my face again and look at her with crazy eyes.

“It’s about your smart meter. Are you the owner who…,” she says, matching my energy.

“You’re. Clearly. Trying. To. Sell. Me. Something,” I seethe.

“It’s about your smart meter,” she repeats.

“This is fucking annoying.” I slam the door and march back to the family room.

“I can’t believe you just did that,” Russ says, equal parts maybe proud and embarrassed if those two things can exist concurrently. 

“Me either. The worst part is that she had to walk past the huge ‘Kindness Matters’ magnet on my car to get to our door.”

We laugh uproariously at the irony.

But then, as the hours pass, I start thinking about who I try to be and I don’t feel so proud at all.  

Do I loooooathe door-to-door salespeople? Yes. Do I need to be the jerk I hate to see in the world? No.

The next morning, I throw that magnet in the garbage. You see, I don’t really trust myself right now and I can’t be repping kindness if I’m not sure I can actually be kind.

Whichever wise wordsmith said, “Hurt people hurt people” summed me up that day.

There was fresh pain to process in Mom’s Alzheimer’s journey.  While it’s been five years going, the past two plus years have been extra rough. For 810 days, I have had VIP access to all of it. The paranoid accusations, the hallucinations, the forgetting who her loved ones are, the non-sensical words, the vacant eyes, the incontinence, the gradual rejection of food, the utter dependency.  

Her existence has become as passive and vulnerable as that of an infant relying, for the most part, on the care of strangers.

Just two hours before that sales gal and I became my knock-knock joke, Mom fell while trying to use the toilet, cutting her shin and requiring three staff members at her memory-care facility to lift her from the floor and clean up all the indignity that surrounded her.  

I wish I had cried away the pain of what I saw in the aftermath instead of letting it morph into that snap of anger at the innocent-ish sales gal.

But there would be a chance for that the very next morning.

“Will you let Bella in,” I ask Russ while making our coffee.

“Oh no,” he whispers with dread. “She was barking because there’s a bird on the patio. I think it flew into the window. Well, maybe it’s just stunned. If we leave it alone, maybe it will fly off,” he adds with a voice of weak optimism.

 We drink our coffee and read the morning news, but the plight of this bird is bringing to the surface a mix of dread and grief and cortisol that’s been churning within me for a long time now.

It’s a feeling that I can usually regulate with my new philosophy that there’s no denying the hard things in life, but you can make choices in the day that make it a little better instead of a little worse.

Yoga. The elliptical. Writing. Connecting with people. Getting to the beach when I can. Listening to inspiring podcasts. These are my tricks.

They have gotten me to day 810, but even they cannot keep me from falling to my knees in sobs after stealing a glance out the window to see that tiny bird lifeless, alone. Passive and vulnerable, the shell of her now in the hands of strangers.