relationships are our tool for a hopeful reality.
the redemptions of relationships, even with expectations, forgiveness, and mixups.
“I don’t know what part is not being used to being around people, and what’s about missing Jack,” Carrie says.
It’s understandable. It’s odd to say amidst such suffering, but Carrie’s pandemic has been difficult, and her awareness of her relative safety and ease can’t change that. Her husband Jack, a man with whom she fell joyfully, passionately, in love in mid-life, died of ALS in June 2020, never quite fully engaged with the world’s shifting direction.
“I don’t really like the social things,” Carrie continues. “I do them all the time, and they were important for Jack, but they’re hard for me.”
Carrie is an introvert, a fact which always surprises those who’ve met her — tall, elegant, and striking, she’s also so brilliant the air around her feels super-charged. Jack was a perfect, complementary match and navigated social environments of all types with ease and naturalness. Invitations are both a bitter reminder of her loss and a hand, extended to lead her onward. They cannot be only one thing.
Stray hounds are common in rural Virginia where we live. There’s a big hunting culture here, and the blue-blooded foxhounds joyfully reproduce with wandering local Lotharios — puppies can be unwelcome news for surprised weekend hunters.
So 3 weeks ago when my husband called and told me he’d seen an adolescent pup, I wasn’t much surprised.
“She goes up driveways, looks, and comes back out. She’s lost. Someone dumped her. She won’t get in the car for me — will you come?”
All puppies are impossible and long-legged, 8-month-old, street-smart (meadow-smart? forest-smart?) hounds are contenders for the title. Lynda Bird is a nightmare, loud and ill-mannered and insatiably greedy, but still, today, I find myself in a yogi squat beside her, whispering this in her ear:
“Everyone loves you because you’re beautiful and sweet and snuggly and hilarious. Those are true things. You’re impossible but you won’t always be impossible and we all love you. Everyone who meets you loves you. It’s true. You are Lynda Bird and you are beautiful and loving and you love your family and we love you and those things are all true."
And they are true. They’re real. I know these things are true, and I know — at least generally — what kind of yikes Lynda Bird will inflict upon my family over the coming summer, and they’re still true. In fact, they’re even more true, because we’re forging a bond together, a relationship built on shared investment, shared trust, a series of comprehensible, welcome exchanges, and so what if on her side that’s expressed in kibble, it’s still true.
I heard Patton Oswalt on a podcast, describing falling in love with his wife Meredith Salenger after the tragic loss of his first wife to cancer. I’ll mangle it, and I apologize — I did look for the transcript, possibly not hard enough — but he was talking about a series of phone conversations, late at night, while each of them lay in the dark, speaking low, telling about the day. It wasn’t this, but it was something like this:
When you’re married, you have someone to validate your reality in the dark. ‘Did that really happen?’ you can say, and your partner will be there, with you, in the same reality.
Patton Oswalt’s right — this verification of what’s true and what’s real is a relationship by-product, and not only in romantic relationships. And it’s precious, isn’t it, that validation: yep, she said that — it was crazy! — you’re not losing your mind.
“After 9/11,” I say now to Carrie, “I had a flight and I couldn’t do it — just could not get on the plane. I turned around and left. If you need to do that, tonight, just shoot me a text — it’s okay.”
Oh no! I hear a sharp little indrawn breath. Poor Carrie.
“I can’t just use it as an excuse,” she says.
“It’s okay,” I say again. “It’s really okay.”
I don’t know if Carrie will come tonight. It may be too soon, or too hard, or just not a good enough return for the energy it would ask of her. I’d love to see her, but if this isn’t the right thing, I’ll make the time in a way that is.
I don’t know if Lynda Bird will ever, again, sit at my request. I know she’ll carry on being hilarious — she jumps up with all four paws at once! with no warning! It’s like magic! — and I expect at least 3 more run-ins with skunks, this summer. So there’s that to look forward to.
And sometimes, in the night, I’ll lie in bed, and I’ll say something, out loud — Really?!? Did that really happen?!? — and there will be a response, a validation, an answer.
It’s enough.