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It wasn't a celebration but it was my divorce-iversary
Saturday, January 9, 2010 Last Thursday, the calendar told me it was exactly one year since my divorce finally became final. My heart, my head, my sense of calm, my whole life tells me that the disconnection happened long before the day the judge proclaimed my marriage dissolved.
One year, my divorce-iversary will pass by unnoticed and that will speak to ways my life has continued to move on, ways I cannot yet imagine. This year, though, I woke up thinking about how I buttoned up a dress I put on for the occasion, slipped on my power jewelry and headed downtown to the courthouse on the train with my dad. I remembered the dinner after it was all over, the one where my parents and I confounded the waitress at the steak house by ordering bubbly and toasting to the glorious ending, the even better beginning.
I didn't have a plan for a celebration or really any way to honor this first divorce-iversary. And as it happened, life swept me up out of my work and schedule and landed me in the county nursing home in downstate Illinois, where my family was told my 101-year old grandmother was dying.
My mother got the call that her vitals were very concerning, that my Grandma Alice probably only had hours left. Although I've been preparing for that call for five years since she was first diagnosed with Alzheimer's and although I moved quickly but steadily as I threw five days' worth of clothes into a suitcase within minutes, I felt the franticness curl around the calm.
I made arrangements with Lil E, shut down my laptop and did my best to keep the emotion level as my mother and I drove through ice and snow drifts three hours south of the city.
She said it only once, "What if she dies before we get there?"
"We're doing the best we can," I said. It was the only thing I could think of to say. "It will all be OK."
Somehow, it was all OK when we got there. My grandmother was weak and refusing to eat more than a few bites at a meal, but she was stable. She didn't know me -- she hasn't for a few years and I am at peace with that -- but she smiled and was giddy when I spoke to her, wrapped my arms around her in her wheelchair, massaged lotion into her hands.
My mother and I were still emotional, and we teared up out of relief and confusion that my grandmother seemed nowhere near death. We wondered in whispers to each other if it was real, if we were reading the situation right.
We decided to stay overnight to see what the morning would hold. But before we left for a nearby hotel, we sat with my grandmother in her room.
It was 8 p.m. She was tucked in to bed and sleeping soundly. We'd been there for four hours, but it felt like we had been there for days.
A few feet away but separated by a drawn curtain and the darkness, my grandmother's roommate talked and talked and talked into the emptiness around the baskets of silk flowers and pictures of small children posted on the walls.
The roommate, a nice lady at the talkative stage of Alzheimer's, wears a hat and coat and rubber gloves and carries her purse with her everywhere, tucks it next to her in her recliner on the other side of the green and white curtain.
At first she narrated.
"Oh, there is someone out there in the hall. Seems like they are coming in. They are talking to someone. Who are they talking to? It's women. There are women out there. Maybe I should turn the light on."
But it wasn't until the play-by-play lapsed into a story from her past that her talk was more than background chatter as we sat with my grandmother.
She told a story about three attractive men with wavy brown hair and their very attractive wives. She knew them from the country club, loved that their stellar personalities matched their good looks. She tried to help teach one man to dance. He wasn't very good. Oh, how they laughed together. Sometimes, they drove to another country club in Indianapolis.
It sounded like they had good times.
She was interested in one of those men. But then there was the millionaire she had an opportunity to marry. A friend of her "blood father" who she said was too rich for her. She walked away and then met the man who became the father of her children. He was a fine man.
She said that -- he was a fine man. Those country club days sure were fun, though.
I had my palm resting on my grandmother's cheek. Her fingers were wrapped around mine. Her silver hair shone even against the white pillows under her head and shoulders. I was quiet and still and listening.
What stories will be rolling through my thoughts when I am an old woman? That question came to mind as the country club stories continued to unwind from the lady in the recliner.
And what memories will rise to the surface from a thousand years before and seem like yesterday?
Perhaps these two women and I are not so different. I thought that the next afternoon as my mother and I decided my grandmother was stable enough for us to return to our lives, said our goodbyes and then reluctantly walked away.
For one woman, her past and her choices are as clear as the squeaky sounds of people walking into her room after bedtime. And then there is my grandmother, who can be at the edge of a crisis and tiptoe toward clarity and lucidness, all in a matter of hours.
Once in a while, that other life, the one where I was gooby in love and married, does rise up to the surface. And, I am so familiar with how a life can change with one choice, in one day.
Maybe it is melodramatic to say that the three of us are linked by more than sharing a space that night in the nursing home. I do know for sure that one reason I've found serenity during these last emotional, tugging years with my grandmother is knowing how much of a life she's had in more than a century of time on this planet. I like to think that the roommate, at least in those days when she was laughing while doing a fox trot or jitterbug with the wavy-haired boy, has filled up her years with brave choices and persevering and loving big, too.
My day, my divorce-iversary, came and went. Not celebrated, but not unnoticed.
Stretched out in the center of my own bed, I thought that this one happened just as it should have.
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