Spring Break: The roundup

Yesterday, I returned from a week in Hawaii with a house full of people in various states of grief and mourning (which, as I learned in Joan Didion's newest book, are two different psychological states). It was one of the more intense intrapersonal experiences I've endured in many, many years.

I'd rank it up there with sitting around for hours -- and days -- on end in various and sundry rooms of the ICU after my youngest brother slipped into a coma from which he would never recover.

Only in Hawaii, the person who drew us together was already dead, and during the entire week, I ended up having perhaps just two hours in which I was alone. A lack of alone time was a significant stressor, but far more gut-wrenching was the experience of watching a very close family begin the process of undoing some of their very close ties.

There were moments in which I wanted to pull out my hair. And moments in which I wanted to pull out my heart.

The last day of my visit, I sat on the lawn with my oldest cousin and listened quietly as she unloaded some of the pain she felt around a series of events just prior to her mom's death. It has been a long time since I have seen a face so burdened with sorrow. The memory of that moment lasted through the afternoon, haunted me in the airport, revisited me this morning upon waking.

I do not know what to do with it.

As if there is something I can do.

Usually, I have a better ability to compartmentalize things. I learned a long time ago how to file away the difficulties of others. It's not that I lack empathy; it's just that I know where to put things.

But there was something in that moment that seems to have penetrated what is generally an impermeable boundary. I've been wondering why.

Is it simply that her anguish was so palpable?

Or that it got expressed there at the end of my visit, when just she and I and her 2-year-old son were at the house, and thus became the lingering capstone image of a week of incredible emotional intensity?

Is it that I have known her since she was a toddler, that somewhere along the line many years ago, I felt a sense of responsibility for her because of our 13-year difference in age, and that some element of that still exists?

Perhaps it's because I know how obscenely difficult it has been for *me* to lose her mom and because I, consequently, assume the contortions that sorrow brought to her face in my company are only the faintest representations of how this loss has affected her. (And how staggeringly awful must that be?)

I don't know.

Whatever the case, it was heartbreaking and hellish, all at once. I so wish I had an ounce of insight, a moment where my sometimes gilded tongue had a useful word or two at its tip.

But there were no words. And that, perhaps, was the best insight I had.

So I sat silently for most of it. Silently looking at her. Unaware of just how much that face was fixing itself in my memory, leaving an imprint, showing me in some new way what sorrow looks like, reminding me again (because I haven't learned it well enough) of life's "meaning."

(There is no intrinsic meaning, but our personal meanings are inescapable.)

In any case, I parted company with all of them on Wednesday night. I took my duffel and I took my leave, but part of me is still there, still standing and milling around (as this part of my family tends to do), still regarding the messiness of our collective sorrow and wondering what will come of the events now in motion (my youngest cousin returning to New Orleans; the prospect of my unanchored uncle sailing west and disappearing).

I came back to Portland, where I am feeling the weight of emotions I did not have the space to feel this past week. I have all day had on the edge of my eyes the tears I could not release at my aunt's memorial service. My body is sore from stress, despite a few good swims in the ocean. And I am battling a deep fatigue.

Hardly the way to conclude my Spring Break.

Although, to its credit, there was plenty of booze and otherwise altered states involved. There was sand, surf and sun. I did some volunteer work. I got a sunburn. I read two books that had nothing to do with school. I ate fresh-from-the-tree-in-the-yard avacados and papayas every day. I went snorkeling a few times and each time saw at least one type of fish I'd never seen. I saw my fair share of sunsets.

Looked at that way, you could say I had a swell time.

Except for the fact that I didn't.