Wandering
Anyone who has read this blog for a while (or let’s be honest, who has met me for ten minutes) knows that I’m a huge Lord of the Rings fan.
One of the most quoted lines from the books and movies is “Not all those who wander are lost.” But this week, as I return to my life after losing my beloved Nana, I can’t help but feel that I’m not just wandering. I am lost in some strange wilderness without her constant love and guidance, and no amount of happy memories or cherished keepsakes can fix the fact that she’s not here anymore.
Even though she never read the books or saw the movies, Nana was highly supportive of my passion for Lord of the Rings. She cared about everything I cared about, and after hearing about me saving up for a movie tour of New Zealand for over half my life, she was thrilled that I finally got to go.
I was completely unprepared to come home and find out that Nana had fallen while I was gone, and even though we thought she was okay, she quickly deteriorated in a series of highly upsetting events until I got The Call.
It was two in the morning after an entire day of her making the death rattle, after a day of knowing that she was doing that in Georgia and I was in Chicago crocheting everything I could get my hands on and going to Walgreens at 10 PM to make sure her locket would have a picture for the funeral. I was playing a brand-new video game, yet another distraction, when I got a simple text from my mom: “Can I call?”
I knew it was The Call, the one that would tell me that I lost my best friend, but I appreciated that Mom still remembered one of the many accommodations I used to help me process losing Nana in a way that worked with my brain chemistry.
Getting a text ahead of time meant that I never needed to worry about being startled when I got a phone call - I knew it wasn’t The Call and everything was okay, at least for the moment.
I wanted to be “in the know” about Nana’s medical condition day by day, but I made sure to let Mom know what sorts of things I needed not to know - the sorts of things my OCD has fixated on in the past that I didn’t want to risk getting triggered by again.
And although my regular therapist has been out of town since the day before Nana died, I reached out to a grief counselor in her practice who came up with some other ways to help me feel not quite so lost in my wandering.
The thing I was most worried about was that a loss of this magnitude would send me back to the nervous breakdown I had my junior year of college, the hardest and scariest time of my life that I have trouble even thinking about all these years later. But I still do think about it, and remember that it was caused by trauma, and it was surely traumatic to endure a loss like this and to have to watch even half of it with my own eyes…
The grief counselor told me that the best way to avoid a reaction like I had junior year was to not be in denial about what was happening. That’s what got me in trouble junior year, so this time, I had to face things. After my first session with her literally in the cemetery, I participated in the funeral, even the activities I found upsetting.
I managed to look at the plain pine box that held my favorite person and dropped some rocks she found in Israel inside the hole. I read my eulogy three times - once at the funeral, and twice at the nights of shiva my family observed back in Georgia. I went through her apartment and took back some of my favorite things from our time together.
And still, I’m scared because it somehow doesn’t feel real.
I think I know why.
My brain protected me from remembering most of the day I watched her have her own nervous breakdown combined with a seizure that was the first signal anything was wrong. But I do still remember bits and pieces of it. I was sitting at the front right seat of her kitchen table, the one that’s been donated to a furniture bank now, playing Pokemon Go because I knew there was nothing I could do to help her and all I could do was trust something familiar when I was scared.
I was never scared of Nana before, but I am lost because I had to watch her fall apart before my eyes. She was my rock, and watching her crumble was a kind of pain I never knew before.
I’m lost because for the only time in my life, I had to fake a smile for her. I made myself do it when I saw her for the last time because I knew my two options were to fake a smile or cry forever. She remembered enough at the time to recall my overly happy smile from New Zealand, when I was wandering in a far more pleasant place. She asked me if I still smiled like that, and I didn’t have the heart to lie.
I’m lost because my mailbox is empty and so are my arms. I’m never going to hug her again, because she is in a plain pine box in the ground under dirt that my fastidious Nana would never let touch her in life.
I’m lost because I have some of her things - the pot we cooked pasta in, her beloved work apron and nametag, our memory box, some jewelry - but none of those things are her.
I’m lost because people are talking about her in the past tense, like she’s not here anymore, and even though I know it’s grammatically true, I can’t read cooked or thought or was without wanting to run away.
I’m lost because on the flight home from shiva, I watched the first half of Fellowship of the Ring and half-heartedly pointed at the places I had just visited when the world felt right. All I could think was that I called Nana from halfway around the planet at those very places and she was there with her cheery voice full of love, excited to hear what I was up to even if she didn’t understand it at all.
In the last whirlwind of a week, I’ve been thinking about all these things and so many more as I try to find my way in a world where the person with the biggest heart I’ve ever seen no longer has a heart that beats.
I’ve been told that love can be a map out of this strange place, but right now, I feel like the character in my new video game, lost in dark depths, searching for little lights that make the wandering more bearable. One day, I know those lights will connect to make a string that will guide me to a better place, but for now, it’s enough work just to stay afloat.
I’m reading grief books, journaling, and doing everything the grief counselor says. I’m going for walks in the sunshine and connecting with my remaining family and watching the world for signs that somewhere out there, Nana is thinking of me and wants me to feel her love.
And most of all, I’m trying to accept the wandering. To accept the fact that I don’t have my shit together nor will I in the near future, and that’s okay. To accept the fact that I am lost because I was so dearly loved by someone so wonderful that the world feels empty without her no matter how many people crammed into my house for shiva. To accept that my writing, which she loved so much, isn’t beautiful right now, and I don’t know when it will be.
But it’s here, and so am I - and no matter how long I find myself wandering, I am going to keep going, for Nana’s sake.
Michelle Cohen, a writer in the Chicago area, was diagnosed with OCD at age 3. She hopes to educate others about her condition and end the stigma against mental illness.