Bittersweet

Spring is an odd time to be writing about loss. Spring is, after all, the season of gain: more daylight, more heat, more color, more wildflowers, shoots and buds and blossoms, more rabbits and foxes and (ugh) deer–and more energy, the special, crazy, optimistic kind that overtakes the backyard gardener who thinks: yes, this will be the year I can grow a cantaloup bigger than an orange; yes, this will be the year the slugs drink (and drown in) beer before they feast on the snap peas.

And yet, the reality of loss does not evaporate in the spring sunshine. Sometimes, unexpectedly, unbidden, the spring sunshine does the opposite: It illuminates the loss. Like seeing the first blossoms on the apple trees out in the orchard, and all of a sudden remembering that year we rented an old-fashioned wooden press and made our own cider. Like out mowing the lawn, and all of a sudden seeing a mirage on the meadow. He is out there riding the mower wearing the only hat that fits his oversized head, the one I bought him at least a decade ago. He’s listening to some audio book to drown out the drone of the engine. One year I gave him a card with a cartoon of a guy on a riding mower, “the lawn ranger.” Like putting on the filthy old barn jacket, his, to go out and check on the chickens and finding a balled up tissue, his, in the pocket (with, according to the New York Times, “copious amounts of [his] DNA.”)

I am re-reading Susan Cain’s Bittersweet. I read it as I eat dinner, most often fish and a plate of the roasted vegetables he hated. That’s the bitter (he’s not here to tell me how much he detests Brussel’s sprouts and that cauliflower is overrated) and the sweet (I get to eat them all I want).

Which brings me to page 227 in Cain’s book and this sentence: “The idea is not to paper over your loss…the idea is smaller than that, yet also grander: that after all the grief and loss and disruption you are still—you always will be—exactly who you are.”

And so I am.