THANKFUL FRIDAY
Cindy Maddera
I went to bed and laid there waiting for sleep. I could hear a heated basketball game happening at a house somewhere behind our’s. The thumping bass of a car stereo vibrated my heart as the car rolled up the street. Josephine softly growled at the dog we could hear barking somewhere in the distance. I finally drifted off to sleep with the sounds of the neighborhood as my lullaby. Then I was standing in a bar with Michael, who had been carrying a crate of junk. He set it down and said he was getting a drink. I was annoyed. He was supposed to be taking me home. I looked at him and said “I guess I’ll call an Uber then.” He got bent out of shape because I didn’t want to sit at the bar and drink with him. Josephine was with us and I set her down to call for an Uber. When I hung up, Josephine was gone and I spent the rest of my time desperately calling her name and looking for her. I woke, disoriented and patting around on the bed, searching for my puppy. I sighed with relief when my fingers touched her warm soft body. Then I looked at the clock.
I had only been asleep for an hour.
The rest of the night continued in this pattern of nightmares and waking every other hour. The losing Josephine dream is the only one that I really remember. Probably because all of it is plausible. I remember all too well when Josephine went through her escape artist phase and getting a call from animal control while I was on a plane to NYC. Josephine has caused my heart to seize up in fear more than once or twice. The problem is that I might just love her too much. Dr. Mary and I discussed this when I saw her this week. Dreams and dogs. She told me about a movie she saw where the recent widow had to then bury her dog. I told her about how I had to do the same thing. We were both crying by the end of it all. Then I told her about the dream I had about sitting next to Stephanie as she lay in a hospital bed. It was a terrible dream that had me texting her the next day. Checking in. Touching stone. We are living in an environment where we are all too aware of what we have to lose. Some of us are living in an environment of loss and are clinging desperately to things we know we could lose.
My friend Sarah’s new mantra: Pandemics are hard.
I have been thinking about what exactly makes a pandemic life so difficult. This has been a battle week, a week of fighting brain fog and sleep demons. I burned my kitcheri in the Instapot because I forgot to add water. Yesterday, Michael refilled the water bin for the chickens and without thinking, closed the door to the pen on his way out. The chickens couldn’t put themselves to bed and when I went out there to check on them, they were freaking out. Two were fighting for space in a window well. One, Foghorn our flyer, was on top of the pen. Margaret was huddled under a chair and made a beeline for the pen as soon as the door was open. The remaining three had to be herded into the pen and they talked about it the whole time. They were tired and they just wanted to go to their bed and they had complaints. The chickens are creatures of habit, just like us.
Pandemics are hard. First there was the loss of a habit, your daily routine. Then there was a moment of mourning that loss, which might sound silly or trivial. But loss is loss. You go through all the same emotions as any other kind of grief. Sadness, despair, denial, anger. Sometimes tucked in between all of those is a moment of joy and eventually we get used to the loss of our routines and daily habits. This week I have felt that shift where I am not necessarily grieving for the loss of my routine as much as I am preparing myself to grieve for the loss of something more important than a daily routine. I am very aware of what I have lost. Who I have lost. It is only natural for me to be fearful and anxious about what else I could lose. I am all too aware and so I spend my nights dreaming of holding onto the things I could lose with the tightest of grips. I need to loosen that grip.
Today I am thankful for the reminder to relax my grip and to stop holding so tightly to what I could lose.
