She brought food so Breyan let her in. She’s taking to feeding my kids. When the kids tell her I’m out of commission she whips up a casserole or lasagna and drops it by. Which, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about, I may be sick but not stupid. The problem is that she’s so lonely and I hate to lose a captive audience so she stays. And stays. And stays. And stays.
This time she was here until 3 am. We talked about her holidays—she visited friends and family. How she was coping with grief—she still doesn’t sleep and hasn’t returned to work. How she spent New Years—at a gay bar.
Now you know me, I was very sympathetic, offered her chamomile tea and Kleenex and offered practical suggestions on how to cope with the loss of a child. I gave her lots of hugs and we talked about the funeral and her ex-husbands idiocy.
Get this; After spending two hours standing by her only daughters coffin and greeting guests, Marion's started feeling woozy. (Who wouldn’t?) She quietly asks her nephew to get her a chair and holds onto the coffin for dear life praying not to faint. What does the imbecile ex do? He comes up behind her and snarks, "This is not the time for you to make a scene. Grow up Rose! (His new wife’s name.)"
Now if this was me, I would have been looking for a baseball bat, (an umbrella will also do in a pinch) told him what he could do with it and proceed straight to wailing loudly in my handkerchief, remembering all the dramatic voice projection lessons I’ve ever had and cry something like, "But George! (Her ex-boyfriend in high schools name, the one who made him so jealous in their marriage,) My baby is dead and you are telling me I’m not allowed to grieve? No wonder I divorced you!!!! Your emotionally short-changed as well as anatomically!"
But this is Marion who is a good farm girl who never talks back and always does the right thing. She just went and thanked her nephew for the chair, made sure she got something to eat and got on with her grieving with dignity in private. Poor baby.
What a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that grief this bad doesn’t really sink in until a long time after the funeral. It took me a year to really believe that Deanna was dead. I mean, you know it in your head but your heart resists the information with every fibre of it’s being. I often think that it’s the people who have their heart and their head recognize their grief at the same time that end up the suicides.
So Marion has now hit stage two which is when the heart recognizes grief. It means she has to start the whole "seven-step" grieving process over. We talked a lot and I hope that helped but also being me I brought up the stuff she didn’t think was proper to say out loud. For example; that she was getting grey early and that the grief was aging her. Someone told her the other day, "Oh my God, you look so old!" She was devastated. She kept thinking, "Can everyone see her grief? Does she look that bad?"
Now the correct answer to this is, "It’s been a hard year." Which Marion gave her with a sad smile.
The Kimberley answer to this is to smile, give the woman a nice ringing smack and go directly out to dye my hair and see a make-up artist who specializes in crow’s feet and dark circles under the eyes.
One thing I’ve really been trying to encourage her to do is get out of her house. She has no other children so she’s in the house 24/7 by herself with the ghost of her daughter. It doesn’t help that she’s been divorced for four years and hasn’t had sex for seven, which makes the divorce self-explanatory. She’s not your traditional sex kitten or cougar so she’s having a little problem with getting back into dating. She’s more your traditional Italian grandmother with a low sense of self-esteem and no wooden spoon.
Personally, I told her to get herself a vibrator and a good Bonk-buster novel but she blushed so hard I thought she was going to expire on my couch from a heart attack. (Which probably means she has one.)
So what does this lady do for New Years Eve? Does she stay at home and sulk? Does she join a few friends at a house party where she can sit in the corner and nurse a gin and tonic and try to make stilted conversation with divorced, weird men laden down with emotional baggage and having prospective mates thrown at her by her well-intentioned match-making relatives?
Nope! She goes to the gay bar!! Boy I like this girl!!!!
Now part of this makes perfect sense to me. Why go to a regular bar where you have to compete with anorexic teeny-boppers whom you’d rather ask if it isn’t past their curfew and have to put yourself in direct line for rejection and heartache? Why not go to a place where Men are Men but they dress better than the sheep? Why not go to a place where the women compete FOR each other rather than against each other?
I admire her. This must have taken a lot of courage for a farm girl from Gatineau who is in her "Silver" years. (She’s too close to my age for me to say Golden years, it makes me nervous.) No she goes to a place where she can reject the offers from women with good excuse and not even worry about offers from men. (Unless it’s for them to restyle her hair, which, yes, I love her but her last hair styling was in the early seventies and it hasn’t changed.)
Unfortunately, she had a bit of a problem. Well, a bit of a stalker actually. She had been invited out by Francis’ best friend. (Francis is/was her daughter in case I confuse you as usual.) Now this friend, Annie, is a great girl. She loves Marion and does everything in her power to be a substitute daughter. (Or son when I think of it. She’s a manly girl, flannel shirts and all.) She includes her in holiday plans and calls once or twice a week to check up on Marion. She didn’t want Marion to be alone and Marion being one of the more opened-minded people I know for her background agreed to go to this club.
I have to admit I wished I’d seen it. Imagine this. You are in a dance club. It’s hot and sweaty and there is an overwhelming aroma of perspiration and poor choices in perfume. There are clouds of smoke hanging in the air from the smoke machine on the dance floor and the floor is littered with beautiful men/women in teeny-tiny clothes that wouldn’t cover a hamster. The music is so loud that a deaf person would not be sure if the tremor under their feet was an earthquake or ‘Frankie Goes to Hollywood.’
In this middle of this chaos, there sits Marion, hands folded neatly in her lap and posture straight, desperately trying not to look at the man who has the butt cut out of his jeans and wondering why in hell she could never have a bum like that? A fifty-four year old farm woman with salt and pepper hair, who keeps telling herself that she could lose those extra fifty pounds anytime but has been five foot, both ways since she was thirteen. There she was in her "going-out" clothes, a matching set, plum-coloured sequined sweater and pants with a fly, rather than elastic waist. I have to admit I still roar when I think of it.
It turns out that some women like other women to be "real" women. This one woman decided Marion was her New Year’s Gift and started coming on to Marion full-steam ahead. Marion was disconcerted. She told me, "I told her, ‘Thank you but I’m not interested,’ ‘I’m sorry but you have the wrong number,’ and finally ‘I’m straight.’ But the woman didn’t pay any attention and she kept trying to put her arm around me and pinch my bum." Marion takes a deep sip of her tea. "I don’t understand why she wouldn’t understand?’ But it’s not like I have a lot of experience fighting men off and fighting off a woman never even occurred to me. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings but really she just wouldn’t go away."
Meanwhile, I’m doing my best to listen with a calm supporting aura and desperately trying to figure out how to take a sip of my tea without choking. She went on. "So finally at midnight when she grabbed me and kissed me I was just stunned. I mean, I just met her two hours ago and here she was trying to put her tongue in my mouth. What could I do? I just looked at her and said ‘Thank you.’ Then I left. "
I gave up the ghost at that and pealed laughter. I told her, "Well you have two choices. Enjoy it and look at it as a new life experience or pretend she’s a guy and do what you would to a guy who did that. Kick her in the shin and leave."
Wide-eyed she answered, "Oh no!" she cried, "I couldn’t do that! It wouldn’t be polite!!!!"
I had to excuse myself to the bathroom at this point because I was sure I was going to pee in my pants from laughing.
On a weirder note, we were discussing how she was coping day to day with her grief. I was worried at one point when she was telling me how tired she was. She has locked herself into a chronic fatigue state and is having a devil of a time getting out of it. She told me at one point she was looking at Fran’s picture and she just started crying and thinking, "Fran, honey I can’t do it. I’m just too tired and I can’t take it anymore. Come and get me please."
Not two minutes later the phone rings and it’s Annie. Annie asked Marion how she was really doing when Marion tried to fob her off with the usual, "I’m fine." Annie then proceeded to tell her that she was sorry for calling so late but she had been fast asleep when Fran appeared in her dream. Fran told her to wake up and call Marion. "Fran," Annie said, had asked her to, "Tell [Mum] it’s not her time yet." So Annie did. I really admire a girl who is willing to call someone at three am to give them a message from the other side.
I admire someone more who gets the call and doesn’t shriek, "It’s 3 am you stupid git! Get a life and some psychotherapy while you’re at it."
Marion had the same reaction I had when Breyan told me that his grandmother came to visit with Deanna at night and wanted me to stop crying because she was taking care of Deanna and would see me when it was my time.
First reaction: Oh my God, he’s seeing ghosts!
Well finally after I dosed her with a good gallon of chamomile tea to make her sleepy she went home and I have to remember to return her lasagna dish, though Breyan washed dishes that night so I’d better make sure it’s actually clean before I give it back. I hope she’s going to make it. I’m a little worried by her health condition. She already has high blood pressure and not having a life makes her a prime heart attack candidate. I worry that she will drive herself to a heart attack so that it technically couldn’t be called suicide and she could still be buried in the Catholic church.
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