Very Good Grief

On Saturdays, thoughts inevitably drift back to the work week, or the workplace, which if you are retired and seven-months-post-spousal-death, amounts to the grief group.  Where a couple of weeks ago one enterprising rabbi handed out something along the lines of a 'Grieving Person's Bill Of Rights.'  Which is absolutely way cool.  Because when I go over these myriad ways in which the non-grieving public is encouraged to cut their grief-stricken peers some additional slack...well, damned if these things shouldn't be a permanent part of my repertoire.

Starting with the mail.  I don't read it.  I don't know why people send it to me.  I don't even open it most of the time, which can be problematic.  You never know what's going to be in those little envelopes, do you?  Recently, one from the California Department of Motor Vehicles was halfway into the rubbish bin and on to Recycle City, owing to the fact that I had paid my van registration, just received my new driver's license good for five years, thank you very much, and had no further business with cars and governments...when I decided to give the State the benefit of the doubt.  Whoops.  Marlou's car, or the one I think of as being Marlou's car, also requires a registration, a fee, a sticker to peel off and place prominently atop its predecessor.  And my momentary impulse to forward the registration to Marlou, while admirable in attention to detail, is too weirdly Oliver Sacks, much like an amputee buying wool socks to warm his absent right foot.

The point being, one must open the mail.  After all, so much in the mail opens itself to us.  Take AT&T.  Damned if I didn't get a recent letter addressed to me by hand from someone in that very company.  Furthermore, on the printed letter was a yellow sticky note, also handwritten.  Okay, upon closer inspection, the handwriting was computer-generated, but one could only tell by holding letter and envelope up to the light, the way one does with counterfeit money.  Still, I was hooked, or it least engaged, in whatever AT&T had to say.  And what they had to say was intensely personal and amounted to this: where was I?  Hadn't we been friends a long time?  Hadn't they been there for me all these years, and didn't I owe them the courtesy of a response to their very generous offer to combine every single communication service imaginable, including Internet, phone, fax, Navaho smoke signals, ship-to-shore flags and Morse code, all for $60 a month?  Because we had been there so long, AT&T and I, and by now we had this thing.  Which was bigger than both of us and deserved a little nurturing, and certainly deserved a little letter opener action down the spine of an envelope.

Which is the next point.  Letter openers and quadriplegics do not mix.  I open most letters by holding the envelope in my teeth, working my finger under some portion of the flap and giving the thing a mighty rip.  Which has a way of ripping whatever is inside and creating a clear spillway to the floor.  But this is not the point, not really, because so much mail is now virtual.  And there's nothing to complain about in missives that on the physical level barely exist.  They reside wholly on the level of fluorescence, pixels arrayed the way on May Day thousands of Chinese used to compose pictures of Chairman Mao with flags.  No, there is nothing to open except my eyes.  And I'm having trouble with that these days.

Friends send me e-mails, and I stare at them blankly.  It doesn't matter if they are long or short, singing with deathless prose or coughing along ungrammatically.  It all feels like too much.  So I let them slip by me, and by now there are so many unanswered e-mails from so many people, so far back, that even the crudest ham-fisted notion of correspondence etiquette no longer applies.  I have the dim sense that there were several people I promised to get back to during the Clinton Administration...and if they will just give me a moment or two, I will pick up where we left off.

After all, my wife hadn't died during the Clinton Administration and, in fact, I did not even have one.  Which leads to several possible conclusions.  One is that I have had a level of grief all along, and so cut practicalities adrift at an early stage.  The other is that grief is a false concept, like compassionate conservatism.  I'm not really in grief these days, but shock, remarkably long-lasting.  Why not?  

There is probably some quasi-sentient band of molecules just south of Beetlejuice that still can't get over the Big Bang.  And that little molecular cluster is going about terribly confused...sometimes thinking the bang was way too big...other times complaining of too little bang for the buck.  Don't tell them, the molecules, to get over it.  And in view of the track record, advising to 'give it some time' will fall on deaf molecular ears.  Better advice: give it a wide berth.