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Tiny Magic, Twenty Years In
This afternoon we had a moment, my wife and I.
It was the same moment but in different rooms. We had it at the same time, but we didn’t have it together…at least not in the traditional sense.
She’d just lost her mother whom she’d been tending to for the past fifteen years. I’d just lost my brother. While my brother and I were nowhere near as close as Elena and her mother, grief is grief and it sneaks up on you.
Plus, I’d just had surgery on both my feet for a long overdue series of problems. Since I was in pain, immobile and unable to help around the house, Elena now had to do everything and care for me. While also trying to find her way without the grounding orientation of her mother’s life, or the map of her mother’s needs.
If you make a sauce of all this and add to it an obscene dollop of mass shootings all over the country, you will have a perfect recipe for the kind of angst that beleaguers some (maybe all) marriage long haulers.
Credit to my wife, she fights back. She doesn’t just sink like I do. When she gets wobbly and disconnected, one of the things she does is fill the house with the music of her youth. Phyllis Hyman, Stephanie Mills, Luther Vandross. Donny Hathaway.
