One minute, I was rinsing out a never-opened Trader Joe’s chai bottle in my sink (which had just paid too much money to replace the garbage disposal). The next minute I was wailing, crying, lowering myself to the dirty kitchen floor, where I would continue to cry for at least 5 minutes, while another part of myself was watching. Get it together. What’s going on here? Why aren’t you listening to me? Stop crying. Get up. These thoughts are calm, why are you still crying?

The trigger was looking at the date of the chai bottle, I couldn’t tell if it said 2025. I couldn’t remember when I bought it, but if its best buy date truly was October of 2025, Jon was still alive when I bought it. My brain flashed to a specific memory, and its not like I don’t have memories or flashes of the horrors that are the most vulnerable and disgusting parts of being human, and the heartbreak of being witness to them. Ripping me open like a body pulverized by a runaway train, the aftermath after I slowly picked myself up off the ground was a cowering fear that this might become my new normal.

I come to you in pieces. A clamp slowly releasing, exposing all the parts unglued. It’s part of the process, a wise widow reminded me this week. She’s walked this road, but I wish there was a better guidebook, maybe Rick Steve’s could provide one, because this terrain is rough and the waystations ill-equipped.

The garbage disposal was last replaced in 2016. It was the first time our house started crying. Jon was at Clarion West, and I was home with the kids, then 2 and 4, and barely holding it together. The house leaks, from moisture through the chimney column, dishwasher, faucets, washing machine, seemed to correlate with Jon’s absence or illness. The story I started telling myself was that it wasn’t ghosts, but rather the spirit of the house that was protective and concerned, expressing itself through pools of water.

I never really believed in this story, but I liked the idea of a loving, protective house that cared and grieved for its inhabitants. After Jon passed, I expected more leaks, a flooded basement, perhaps? But nothing. I was disappointed that not only was I not visited by Jon’s ghost, the house I had grown to be comforted by didn’t seem to care. It was just a story.

And in some ways I’m grateful the calamity has been so limited, because a routine, overpriced and poorly (not) negotiated repair (due to dissociation) sent my day unrecoverably sideways.

I’m not entirely new to PTSD and dissociation. It’s been a part of my life more than not, but active symptoms like I have been experiencing over the past couple months are bits I hoped I had resolved and left behind — like that’s a thing? The good news is my familiarity means I have resources and can remind myself of grounding techniques.

I realized that a few days ago I didn’t have the radio on as much as usual. It happens sometimes during my workday, because I have meetings, and the day I had folks working in the house. I almost always have KEXP on if I’m in the house, from the time I wake up until I finish making dinner. It’s in my car. It’s in my ears when I’m on the bus or sometimes on a walk.

I occurred to me that KEXP, by being live radio, filled with familiar or adjacent music, people, keeps me present. Even if a song provokes a memory, the next song or break will carry me along in the present time. I hadn’t realized it until this morning that the music is my regulator, and human-centered radio is there holding my hand, always available to provide the anchor and line for me to hold on to when I can’t hold on to myself.

Last night, after dinner with the neighbors I went on a twilight walk, ending up a mile straight west from my house to an overlook with a view of the Sound. Yesterday, I obsessively listened to Hannah Lew’s song ‘Sunday,’ until it saturated my nervous system. Seventeen years ago, I realized ‘Just Dance’ by Lady Gaga held my hand through another grieving time. I don’t know why some songs get their hooks in me, but Hannah Lew has done it.

When I got to the overlook, I took some pictures, marveled at the scene, I heard hand drumming in the distance, probably on the beach at Golden Gardens. There were birds in the foreground. Below the overlook are train tracks, and I had forgotten that except that when I turned on my sound recording app to capture the ambiance a train started rumbling towards the scene, and I recorded all of it. It had a musical quality to it, and I hung on waiting for each new sound to squeal in. The train was pulling containers this time, and I was grateful it wasn’t the coal or oil trains. I started wondering the different music the cargo would make.

After the train passed, I headed back home as the sun’s glow was starting to wain. I put in my AirPods and listened to my recording. I listened to it again. And again. Finding the music, the texture and saturation in this unedited, amateur recorded piece. It’s everything I love about photography in sound. Not the edits or the manupulation, but the truth in time for what is already there. Not that you can’t make it more interesting, edit, remix, collage and paint - but that the raw experience itself is beautiful, even when sometimes loud, excruciating, or overwhelming.