Madi Diaz wrote one of the songs that hit me hardest this year, and this song hits some of the same notes: hopeful but not optimistic, melancholy about the imperfections of one’s life while trying to rally together a positive orientation:
Waking up at 5 AM before the winter sun is coming in
Is it just a stupid wish or could I ever get it back again?
I think I could feel like a kid on Christmas
Looking out the window right on time
It reminds me of a poem that my girlfriend and I have talked about several times this year, which I have copied below in full:
I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life,
a really good one even, sitting in the kitchen
in Kentucky, imagining how agreeable I’ll be—
the advance of fulfillment, and of desire—
all these needs met, then unmet again.
When I was a kid, I was excited about carrots,
their spidery neon tops in the garden’s plot.
And so I ripped them all out. I broke the new roots
and carried them, like a prize, to my father
who scolded me, rightly, for killing his whole crop.
I loved them: my own bright dead things.
I’m thirty-five and remember all that I’ve done wrong.
Yesterday I was nice, but in truth I resented
the contentment of the field. Why must we practice
this surrender? What I mean is: there are days
I still want to kill the carrots because I can.― I Remember the Carrots, Ada Limón
There is something beautifully defiant about the opening ― I haven’t given up on trying to live a good life ― and a little childish, too ― a really good one even. I think Limón is trying to confront her niceness, and the guilt she feels about the times she isn’t nice, but the idea of a good life hits harder for me when I focus on a more painfully hopeful reading, not a good life according to someone else’s rules, but a life that you enjoy, that treats you well, a really good one even.
I’ve been seeing a therapist to work through some of the imperfections of my life. She described me as a grief case. Zach died five and a half years ago, and there are still times when it feels irreparably wrong to live a life without them. I said, not long after: Zach died, and everything is worse now. That final now has lost some of its power with the passing years, and so I have to ask myself: worse compared to what? To the world where they didn’t die, surely, but everything left is so distant from that world, and so am I.
About six months ago, during a late-night airport pickup, I lost the ring that Zach gave me, the small damascus steel circle that I wore every day and spoke about in their eulogy. By the time I noticed it was gone, I couldn’t find it. Fallen into an SFO gutter, somehow, as if it wasn’t precious to me. I have thought about replacing it, but can’t bring myself to decide: do I buy the same kind of ring? There would be small differences in the cut of the steel; it wouldn't be the same as it was. I could get a different design, but what if I had already found the best of all possible rings, and accepting any other is too great a compromise? I suspect this is not only a feeling about jewellery.
Sometimes, unsure of my mood, I check in on how I would react to a terminal diagnosis; with horror, thankfully. There are many ways in which my life is a good one. There are many things I want to do that I haven’t. But it’s never only horror; I can feel the part of me that would be relieved: at last, I don’t have to keep up the effort of going on without Zach; it was so hard.
I wonder how everyone used to go on when young people died more often. In the 1960s, over 50% of women lost a child or a sibling before they were five years old. How did they do it? Were they better at being bereaved than I am? If I picture myself at five years old, it’s easier to awaken the defiant part of me that believes that everyone, including me, deserves flourishing and joy, a really good one even. In my weary adulthood, I wonder if that is achievable only for people who are better at avoiding depression, or better at grief, or, well, better than the way I am. I would like the defiant part of me to win out.
Is it just a stupid wish or could I ever get it back again?
- Tessa