39 degrees

oh hello

Friends, I was unable to get into my Substack account for two months. I tried so many things and (obviously) just today, I got in!

I don’t want to talk about it.

(I was using the wrong email address to log in the whole entire time…and you would think the thingy would say “there is no account with this email address” but no, it did not. I talked to an AI bot thingy that brought up the possibility of a different email address being associated with this account and…yeah…GENIUS.)

Anyyyywaaaaay.

It feels good to be able to write again, when I can. Of course, I have had 1,298 ideas; things I want to say and how I want to say them, for two months. And of course, I remember none of them in this moment.

Except this one.

I drive what was once my parent’s car now. In the winter, there is this thing that happens, god knows why,

DING! it says, and I look down, thinking the gas is getting low or a tire is about to go flat, but no. A light has come on with the loud DING that says, “39” with the little degrees symbol next to it. The car is telling me, as the temp around the car is dropping from the garage temp to the cold outside air temp, when it hits 39 degrees on its way down. DING!

Every time this happens, I roll my eyes, like my dad always did while he would blurt, THIRTY NINE DEGREES!, like an announcement after the DING! Then he would mumble, I don’t know why it needs to do that.

So now if my kids are in the car with me, I do it, too.

DING!

THIRTY NINE DEGREES!

Sidenote: Today it is -1 here in Minnesota (like no degrees, but extra no degrees), with a “feels like” temp of -13 thanks to the damn wind. I just thought you should know.

(There has not been a DING today, in other words, because the garage can’t be above 39 degrees in the first place when it’s this cold.) (Science.)

But none of that is my point. Well, I don’t know that I have a point, as per usual, other than to try to express how things like this most-every-day DING feels when you miss someone.

It used to feel only like a slap across the heart.

Now, it feels…sometimes, maybe, like a visit. A painful and also reassuring visit. I hear his voice. I see the glint in his eyes as he rolls them; the little grin. And just for that second, I feel like I’m riding along with him again.

People say the ones you lose are always with you, and that is the truth. But often the void created by their physical absence is so wide that you can think of nothing other than the truth of grief. It is an echo in the canyon so loud, it brings you nothing but a pain you can’t feel your way out of, and you cannot, in the worst echoing moments, remember that they’re “always with you.”

It simply does not feel true.

At least that’s how it is for me.

I once told my dad that I wasn’t sure if I would know how to be a person in the world without him here. I hoped I would be wrong, but I wasn’t.

When one of your closest favorite people, one of the most kindred, has left this world, the change and absence is so heavy and profound, the weight of it completely changes who you are. Every way they played a part in your life, every inside joke, and every shared memory, feels torn in half, tossed into that canyon. So, what is left inside you is not wholeness, and I doubt it ever will be.

I’m adjusting. Maybe that’s most of what life is.

I’m living around it, not through it. I don’t get that line, “You’ll get through it.” No, not this. Not grief. That isn’t to say there will never be peace and joy, but living out those things changes shape, too. Every joyful moment is a part of that echo of sadness because you aren’t sharing it with your person, or people, the way you once did. You then feel utterly not yourself.

The echo lives inside you and outside you all at once, making it impossible to go through it without gravity pulling you straight to the bottom of the chasm. So you step carefully around, and that’s okay.

DING!

39 degrees. 39 degrees. 39 degrees.