Ocean Waves at Lowe's
Sometimes you let it tow you under
The first time I went into a hardware store after Eric died, I wasn’t thinking about him. Jake and I were just out and about, running errands, checking stuff off our lists.
Jake waited for me in the car, and I remember walking through the automatic doors, adjusting my face mask… and two steps past the shopping cart vestibule, it hit me.
I’ve been to hardware stores lots of times by myself… but there were way more trips with Eric. We’d make quick stops to pick up a box of screws or a can of paint, or we’d wander around looking at kitchen displays and appliances for date night. I’ve spent hours in the lumber aisle helping Eric choose the straightest boards while he double-checked his plans sketched on a scrap of graph paper.
I should have known. I should have been prepared, but Jake and I had been busy, and I didn’t stop to think… Oh, this store might be difficult. I just waltzed in like it was a normal day for a normal person looking for lightbulbs.
I’m running out of ways to describe the way grief crashes over me without warning. A handful of years ago, I went to California with my sister and cousin and spent hours of my life stubbornly trying to learn to boogie board. I am not graceful or naturally athletic and while my sister can get up on water skis during her first try and ski for literal hours without falling down, I will try and try and try and take private lessons and watch how-to videos and read books about water skiing and still never master the skill. Little kids were swimming out into the ocean, getting a few minutes of instruction, and then body surfing and boogie boarding all the way to the shore. It looked so simple.
Hahaha.
I couldn’t do it.
I’d try to time my jump just right. I’d watch the other swimmers and jump when they jumped, but my timing was always just a little off, or my jump a little too weak. Instead of surfing toward the shore, the waves would attack me again and again, and I’d find myself upside down under water with sea salt in my sinuses and sand dragging my swim bottoms down past my butt crack. I was pushed repeatedly—arms and legs sprawling—onto the shore like something distasteful and disgusting the ocean wanted to expel from its depths as quickly as possible. I was unwanted ocean phlegm.
A little Asian family gathered to watch—even holding up their phones to take video—as I repeatedly tried and failed, ending up sprawled at their feet with my gray hair matted and soaked, those sand-logged swim bottoms barely hanging on for dear life.
I don’t know how long it took me, but I finally did it. My sister, cousin, and that little Asian family cheered and clapped for me, but I didn’t feel triumphant. I felt angry and defeated and stomped over to my towel swearing under my breath.
That day in the Lowe’s entry area, grief felt like that. Like a giant, mean-spirited wave, determined to crush my soul beneath its powerful force. The only difference was, I suppose, it came out of nowhere. I wasn’t hanging onto a slippery boogie board trying to time my jump so I could (hopefully) coast shoreward. No, I was just wearing mom jeans and a faded “Cullen Baseball” t-shirt (yes, really) with socks on under my Birkenstocks (I didn’t care), oblivious and unprepared, and then… WHAM.
The tears were instant, leaking down my face and soaking into my mask. My vision blurred and I couldn’t read the aisle numbers or signs.
Eric was everywhere in that store. His essence seemed to fill every aisle; cloud-like wisps of memory swirling around me so thick I thought I might choke. I could see his big hands carrying nuts and bolts, his tall form crouching to read the labels on the different types of insulation, his smile when I climbed into a bathtub on display and pretended to sink beneath the bubbles.
Eventually, I found the aisle with the lightbulbs and they didn’t even have what I needed. I left empty handed.
Back in the car, I ripped off my glasses and mask, bent over the steering wheel, and sobbed my heart out. Jake didn’t even have to ask. He just rubbed my back and let me cry.
“Oh,” was all he said. “It’s a dad store.”
Yep.
During that California trip, my sister eventually coaxed me back into the ocean. She handed me a pair of goggles and led me farther out where we dove into the waves instead of trying to ride them. It was a totally different experience, and eventually I felt as though I’d made an uneasy and probably temporary peace with the ocean. Beneath the waves, everything was a mottled blue-green; it was murky and saturated with sediment. The light from above danced through the water and made my skin look like I might belong there.
There’s some big grief analogy here though I’m not sure it entirely works. I want to say that what I did at Lowe’s was dive into the wave rather than fight with it. I didn’t try to ride it or waste energy making myself into something I’m not. I didn’t let the wave spit me out into the parking lot like a wad of something unpleasant it had coughed up. I just… dove in, I guess. The aisle with all the lightbulbs didn’t feel like the calm depths of a mysterious and complicated ocean, but it was a space where I held my own, albeit snot-faced and weeping. After all, I didn’t flee when the Eric-memories nearly knocked me over. I un-fogged my reading glasses, wiped my eyes, and checked and re-checked the display before collapsing in the car to cry.
But I don’t think grief works with tidy analogies. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. There is no way I could have planned how I’d handle a grief tsunami at Lowe’s beforehand. Standing my ground and searching for the right bulbs with tears streaming down my face doesn’t really mean anything. It’s not a story I can tell another widow and say, “Here’s how you survive this.” It doesn’t work that way, because if I’d turned back to the car, that would have been okay too.
I’ve been distracting myself a lot with different projects around the house. It’s a productive sort of numbing and I think there are worse ways to navigate the endless pain of grief. But there’s also this phenomenon where the tide of sorrow I’ve been holding at bay comes rushing back in once a big job is complete. It’s like it was only biding its time while I was cleaning out closets and re-arranging furniture. Afterward, it expands to fill all the freed up space inside my heart and mind.
Last night was the end of a very long week. I’d been up at 7am, washing walls and sanding the spackle I’d applied the day before. I taped off trim and protected the floors and by the time I was done, I’d painted almost every wall in the house. The day before I re-painted my entire bathroom. The day before that, I re-painted my bedroom. The day before that, I touched up all the baseboards. The day before that, I was on my hands and knees scrubbing soapy water into my bedroom carpet (I have a waterproof memory foam pad underneath) and sucking it all back up with an extractor on the shop vac.
Exhausted and sore, I wanted to fall into bed around 8, but there was the season finale of WandaVision to watch with the kids (holy grief show, Batman) and it turned into one of those nights where we’re all just hanging out and getting along and talking and I didn’t want to speak up and ruin it. But at last, around midnight, I was alone. I pulled up my giant to-do list and enjoyed the little dopamine hits from checking off the projects I’d completed.
And then it was just me. And the great big waves started coming and wouldn’t stop. I didn’t want to suit up and dive through and I didn’t want to cuss and storm away. I just wanted to let it pummel me.
Sometimes when that happens, and after I’ve cried for an hour, the crushing sadness turns a corner, and the whole experience starts to feel sort of… sacred, for lack of a better word. Like I’m communing directly with Eric’s memory. And even though all the hurt and sorrow and love and grief and longing are mixed up into one giant (and very draining) storm, I don’t want it to end.
It happens sometimes after I’ve driven around at night, crying over the steering wheel. When I get home and pull into the garage, there’s this big part of me that doesn’t want to get out of the car and go inside, because the communion, or the sacrament, or whatever it is that’s happening… will end.
It felt like that last night.
Close to 3am I knew I had to get up to go to the bathroom and I knew that in doing so, the wave-crashing grief space would end. I don’t know why that is. Because if Eric’s spirit continues to exist and if he is with me, then why couldn’t he just… follow me into the bathroom? Why wouldn’t he just stay with me? Maybe he does, but maybe it’s my connection to it… whatever it is… that ends. Because it does have to end. I do, eventually, have to sleep. I am only human.
And I did sleep. But I didn’t dream of him. I almost never do.
I woke up this morning feeling like I’d been thrashed to pieces. It was like the ocean had won and I’d been reduced to a pile of sun-bleached rubble drifting across the bottom of the ocean floor with bits of sea shell and sand.
The feeling didn’t wear off. I didn’t find a mid-morning surge of energy or even an early afternoon burst of will to get up and sand down the patched area where one of my kids slammed a wooden sword into the corner of the downstairs hallway. It’s the last spot to paint and if I could just go check it off the list, I could clean up all the painter’s tape, paint cans, and brushes.
Instead, I’m wrapped up in a quilt made of his shirts and thinking about all the things Eric would be enjoying if he were here.
He would have loved WandaVision. He would have initiated a marathon re-watch of all the Avenger’s movies and he would have asked Ben to bring out all the comic book related stuff that didn’t make it into the films. He’d be cueing up his VPN and Hehe Streams accounts so he could watch the Utah Jazz play their best season of his entire life (I cannot believe he’s missing this).
Caption: Eric is in the orange; watching a game with his brother, Casey at their mom & dad’s house.
He’d be thrilled the Batman movies made it to Netflix and he’d be watching The Dark Knight with Nate. He and Jake would be debating the minimum wage and covid relief funds in the kitchen. He’d be working hard in the shop to rewire the enormous laser cutter he ordered from overseas that none of us know what to do with. He’d be outside in the melting slush throwing the baseball around with Ben and signing up for time at the batting cages to get ready for the coaching season. He’d be researching desktop computers for Katie and building her a desk, making a new sketch on graph paper to her specifications.
And tonight we’d go on a date somewhere. Maybe to Lowe’s to get lumber for Katie’s desk. And I wouldn’t cry in the checkout line or while loading the boards into the car, because he’d be here. I wouldn’t understand loss like this and I wouldn’t understand the way grief fills up your insides and has to come spilling out of your eyes and mouth and fingertips. It wouldn’t feel like there was an elephant perched permanently on my chest.
Caption: Eric and I at Laguna Beach, though there was absolutely no boogie boarding.
Instead, Ben will show me his comic books and explain who the Scarlet Witch is and why the mind stones are so important. Nate will watch the Batman movies with Jake when they can wrap their heads around watching them without dad. Katie and I will buy a desk built by somebody else, and I’ll get Ben a punch pass to the batting cages. Instead of going on a date with Eric tonight, I’ll cue up another episode of Gilmore Girls because it’s easy and requires no brain power and none of the storylines will make me cry.
There will (probably) be no pummeling tonight because the wave has receded; pulled away by the tide of an unseen moon. It will be back, but perhaps not for a while. I’ll get a little space to recover and plan my next project, and maybe next time I’ll be—if not prepared—a little more familiar with the process. Perhaps one day I’ll welcome each wave with open arms. “Hi, Eric,” I’ll say, like I do when I get in the car and it feels like he has sat down beside me. “Let’s go for a ride.”