Of healing and hyper saturation
For the week leading up to Chet’s funeral, I cried every day at the drop of a hat. Memories, catching snatches of songs, doing the little things that Mortgaged and I could do to help his family and the waterworks would begin. The funeral was cathartic and I thought I was more under control. Then, a few days later I found myself sobbing in a coworker’s office for no reason.
It was the perfect scene for a comedy really. This particular coworker is a lot like me, in that we both might as well be stereotypical guys when a woman who isn’t family begins crying in front of us. Wh-wh-what do I do? Hug? *begin to move arms to hug* No. *Halt arm movement* Pat shoulder? *begin to move arms to pat shoulder* No. *Halt arm movement* Hug? *begin to move arms to hug* No. *Halt arm movement* Say something comforting? *mumble something sincerely desirous of being comforting that is ultimately unintelligible.* No. Pat shoulder? *begin to move arms to pat shoulder* No. *Halt arm movement* You get the general idea.
Basically, my assessment that I was fine was laughably incorrect. Instead, I was apparently hyper saturated with emotion to the point that my demeanor mimicked calm, much like boiling sugar and water well on the way to becoming caramel might appear to be liquid but is really a solution hyper saturated with sugar. I discovered this when, much with like the proto caramel analogy, the addition of even one sliver of additional emotion, in this case disagreeing slightly over a photo for the newsletter, became like a seed crystal which pulled all of the other emotions out of solution into one big emotional mess.
So there I was trying desperately not to cry over something that, of course, seemed to my coworker to be nothing even remotely worth crying over. So I tried to explain myself which just made the tears that much more inevitable. Once the tears simply refused to be blinked back, she reacted as I described above, which added yet one more emotional seed crystal to my rapidly falling out of solution, emotional solution: guilt and discomfort that I was dumping this on her inappropriately and causing her discomfort. That caused the outright sobbing to begin as she half tried to hug me, then pat my shoulder, then say something comforting and then began it all over again. High comedy, really. Fit for the big screen. But somewhat cathartic again.
I’ve been better by bits and stages since then. No tears for a few days, then lots of random tears. Fine for a few days again, then insomnia. I can write again, which is great because writing is therapy, and then I can’t. Okay, so it’s grieving mother-may-I style. Two steps forward, 1.75 steps back…if I’m lucky. The other day, climbing into my car, the song on the radio was Tim McGraw’s Live Like You Were Dying, a song that usually causes me to change the station for being over the top maudlin, but that day it just hit me and I started to tear up.
Before I actually started to cry though, I could just picture Chet reacting to the situation if, somehow, I were telling him the story and all of the tears were for someone else. Really? Over Old Whiny Pants Tim McGraw? This is exactly how Chet always referred to Mr. McGraw and his musical stylings and, while I do own a couple of his CDs, I can’t say the description isn’t apt. I could practically hear his voice and picture the mixture of concern and mild mocking on his face saying it, which made me smile and prompted a memory - discussing Old Whiny Pants Tim McGraw and other musicians we appreciated but only some of the time with Chet while driving down a pitch black stretch of middle of nowhere road at some wee hour while Mortgaged slept in the back seat on one of those many, many trips the three of us took to Las Vegas and Laughlin over the years. And I smiled more deeply and started to laugh. It’s been kind of a roller coaster but I guess this is how getting better begins?