My Uncle Brad

“I guessed that only at the last possible minute did the soul in a determined fashion flee the dying flesh. Who could blame it for its reluctance? We loved our lives more than we ever knew, and at the end felt the bounty of them, as one would say in church, felt even the richness of their missed opportunities, or just understood that they were more than we had realized during the living of them and a lot to give up.”

— lorrie moore

Uncle Brad always seemed to like Christmas. When I was 8, and the only niece/granddaughter for another year, Uncle Brad got me a super cool vinyl suitcase with a matching vinyl umbrella. Both were white with embellished neon pink and turquoise lines, in line with early 90s fashion. When I went off to college at Eastern Michigan, he bought me my first college sweatshirt and a calling card so I could call my long distance boyfriend. The next year, he bought me a string of Christmas lights that were lit-up cows with Santa hats. I hung them proudly in the kitchen of my college sophomore year duplex. They paired well with the Bruce Springsteen chore chart and giant Bob Dylan head poster.

When I was home to visit at the tail end of October this year, Uncle Brad asked for the Anderson's bag to be brought down from his room. He unearthed a set of tractor Christmas lights he had been saving for 20 years, in the same bag he bought them.

"Those were like the cows you bought me," I said. He didn't remember. He smiled broadly looking at the box. We didn't talk about time. It didn't matter what day it was. He wanted to hang them up for people to see them. So did I. After four days of puzzles, leftover lunches and the beautiful leaf-littered farm, Uncle Brad hugged me weakly before I caught my plane back and thanked me for flying across the country to see him, even if it was just for 4 days. 

He passed away 7 days later and I catch myself forgetting that it happened, then accepting it happened, and feel everything all over again.

My dad gave me the news that they gave my Uncle Brad "one month" on October 2nd. I cried so hard I couldn't breathe. I drove my Jeep through the mountains haphazardly and pulled into the beach parking lot to cry until I felt people staring.

There are many people that deal with death gracefully. They understand our mortality in a matter-of-fact way and I'm sure they all grieve, but an edge seems to be missing from their view. I've never been able to grasp this, let alone practice it. I am reduced to a depressed, hollow shell of a person for weeks, desperate for something to be funny again, but always going back to the fact that I will never see this person again. The finality shakes me until I eventually wedge things in between the sadness. It fades, but it never disappears.

When my Uncle Brad died, I told myself that I had a lot of time to prepare. I told myself that it wasn't a shock, that I did my best to see him before he transitioned, that it was okay that I couldn't go to the funeral. But me as a whole felt like I had failed. I felt selfish that I had chosen to live 2,000 miles away, especially when my whole family assembled after the funeral to light his fireworks and drink his homemade wine. They sent him off in such a beautiful way. That was closure, Ronau style. But what was I supposed to do?

The first news with ticking time attached is always the hardest. Crying always feels like it has no bottom until you become aware of your surroundings and that someone may be feeling uncomfortable. But you never feel like you're done, like the sadness of this person being pulled away from you in this strange doctor-given time frame ever leaves. It just hangs there, in the door frame, in the last holiday photo, in the tractor Christmas lights he wanted so badly to hang in October, and it never leaves. 

Maybe I don't want it to leave. I'd rather be sad than forget. And all of these people that have left, that still stir the hollow crying, the deep sadness that never goes away, I'll take it to remember we had you for a while. How incredibly lucky are we?

Last week, my acupuncturist led me through a powerful Tibetan trauma practice that helped me reach the closure that I sought. It's called Phowa (pronounced po-wa) and it helped me transition through the grief and the guilt of being far away from my family at this time. If you're dealing with grief, even years later, consider reading through this practice. It's an amazing way to process the transition of death.

Read about Phowa here.

The Beech Keepers

I get it LeBron. I totally get it.   

I watched the new Nike commercial today about LeBron's return to Cleveland. If you don't get teary, you don't have a pulse. 

I just spent four days back home. On the second day, as my dad drove us home at dusk after a long day at the farm, I was floored at how beautiful that side of the country was. Had I always known that or was this literally a different place than where I grew up?

"About a week ago was my favorite time of year," he said.

"Harvest?"

"Yeah. When the combines come out. Growin' up, it meant a lot of things. Getting paid was a big one."

He looked like he should be driving an old beat up pickup truck instead of a Prius. We had a full day of puzzles and attempting to find small objects in giant outbuildings. I should've worn less fashionable, more practical boots. I was an amateur. Was the girl that caught frogs with her brother still in there somewhere? I didn't know, but did wish I had some old beat up work boots and that my flannel wasn't from The Gap.

68 acres of radishes, my dad and a barn

There had been many out of town visitors recently, but I had come the farthest, by plane.  I helped grandma wrap up the sleeping bags and climbed up the narrow staircase to put them in the upstairs closet. I couldn't help but think about the generations before me who had climbed these stairs. At least three. The upstairs hallway, much like the parlor walls, was lined with bookshelves, stuffed to the brim with books. It was and always has been the best way to decorate a wall. I wondered if my grandma had read them all.

Sitting in the dining room at the helm of the first puzzle of my visit, I noticed the most interesting similarities between my grandmother and I. She does the crossword in the paper with her coffee every morning. She hated chickens (they're condescending). Her book collection is staggering. And our seriousness with puzzles had no limit. It was the best time to do puzzles when everything around us proved extremely hard. It made me feel a sense of understanding that I hadn't felt before.

The farm had always been my sanctuary from the city growing up. It's where I learned how to swim, how to truly get lost in the woods, how to win at sword fighting with corn stalks, how to find the best raspberry on the bush, how to dig for worms and wrangle a blue gill off the hook. Nowhere, besides Tahoe, had ever given me such peace. And ever since I can remember, the farm has always been my favorite place on earth. 

Paying my respects to the vegetables that I was about to consume

Had this place changed or had I changed?  Without attaching how "uncool" northwest Ohio seems to be, a lack of culture and an understanding of people who choose to only eat fish, I felt the need to stay. I wanted to help my family through this difficult stuff that made us all stare at our boots and throw ourselves into puzzles when there wasn't anything to say.  I wanted to stick my toe in the soil and be planted there. And that feeling hasn't changed on my return to the mountains.

Someday, I want to come back to my favorite place on this planet, another place that reduces me to my 12 year old self, my best self. Someday soon. Because if LeBron can take his talents back to Ohio, maybe I can, too.

The Last Tater Tot and E"turtle" Love

I got married in a tiny winding staircase in the first apartment Paul and I shared. We were navigating a flower patterned love seat up the labyrinth with careful precision of lowering a corner, raising the middle, much to the chagrin of the audience of pale peach painted wood paneling. A game of centimeters, we miscalculated and took to unscrewing the cheap plastic feet of the love seat while balancing the entire thing on the ancient railing and one of our knees, both hanging on by moments. Once feetless, it seemed to float up by itself, finally resting in our equally tiny attic apartment. Exhausted and eventually distracted, it lay feetless for a while like a helpless baby bird, in a nest of the ugliest 1970s carpet in the tristate area, complete with the iconic swirl of shitbrown, eggshell white, and peppered with black specks. The whole of it was matted down, perhaps after years of angry pacing. And it was the seventh address I'd had in four years. 

We stayed in that tiny place with a bed sheet for a bedroom door for two blissful years, where we navigated domestic chores: who makes dinner, who does the dishes, who sweeps the carpet to make it look exactly like it looked before. The house was built in the early 1900s and age settled into every crack, so much that when one cleaned, it never looked any different. But we adored the built-in bookshelves that hugged the living room windows and showed off the square window that led out to a tiny shelf at the very top point of the front of the house. Paul would feed the squirrels with discount mixed nuts we purchased with our pennies at Big Lots and he would smile when they came down from their tree houses to snack. A sweat lodge in the summer, it ushered us outside to enjoy the outskirts of the Old West End, a historic neighborhood just outside downtown Toledo, oscillating between startling poverty and gorgeous architecture.

We moved out of what was eventually called the Mustard Jar, a comment on its musty yellow exterior walls and its enormity of three floors and a basement, four months before Paul proposed by way of my Easter basket. He slipped my mother's ring on the wing of a tiny owl that made a magic wand sound when you pressed its tummy. As a new Beyonce (what I called fiancé, because I'm funny), I was met with a host of crabby women in teacher's lounges, event planning meetings, grocery story lines, that would always caution my excitement with "Wait 'til you're married."

But ever since the flowered love seat, the built-in bookshelves, the sheet for a door, I had already been. Which led me to vehemently deny that I wanted marriage, because the fact that Paul and I made a home, the first address that felt like home in four years, that was all I needed. Why wait for a man in a suit to give me a new name in a church on a Saturday afternoon when I already said "I do" to the audience of friendly squirrels, pale peach wood paneling, who witnessed the first fight over dishes, the creation of mashed potato pizza, the stress of making rent, having gas money, food in the fridge, on a college kid job and a long commute to not much better?

I'm not sure what those old ladies were referring to when they told me to "Wait 'til you're married." Instead of getting excited and offended, maybe their stank faces and eye rolls were cleverly hiding the fact that I should wait for it to, every year, improve exponentially. Wait until he loves you enough to give you the last tater tot! Wait until he haphazardly agrees to be a "turtle in love" for Halloween, with shells that spell "E-Turtle Love." Wait until he looks at you on a Sunday night while you binge watch "Gilmore Girls" in your sweats and crazy bun hair and you will swear that he is falling in love with you all over again. Wait until you celebrate 8+ years of marriage and the memories between you will fill the room with stories of that Volvo you named Murphy with the crank moon roof and no heat, the bats that took over and ran you both into the iconic windy stairway, the squirrels that got too familiar and took to breaking in to find their cashews and peanuts, the dishwasher that solved 89% of your arguments. 

So many things have happened in four years that it's hard to keep track. And if you throw in the four years before, these eight years have felt like a life time, and easily the best eight+ years of my life. Paul makes me better, separately and together, and I practice gratitude everyday because of him. And if these eight years are any indication of what's next, those ladies were so right. Wait until you're married for years to Paul Young: it will make your smile so much wider than when you only wore one ring on your ring finger in your six month engagement.

Married for four years, together for eight, making you all nauseated with all this love.

And now your annual viewing of the Jubilee video.

Thirty years and 3.5 months old. Real old.

There was a time this past month that I was certain I was with child. Eventually a test proved me wrong but I couldn't make sense of this weeping. All. The. Time.
Not just when it's appropriate, like seeing a tiny baby wearing a baseball hat. Like always. Colbie Callait songs (Why do I try so hard?!).
Crying about crying to Colbie Callait songs.
Firefighters saving pet hamsters.
Tiny chipmunks racing across the street.
And then there were hot flashes. I tried to figure out if I was with child or just making really poor wardrobe choices (like how do you really know it's sweater weather? You roll the dice and wear a sweater!).

I consulted Siri (really helpful!) and my cousin who happens to be 11 days younger than me with two kids.

It's not time to have kids especially since I don't have health insurance and live in a tiny apartment. But half of me wanted to be so these symptoms could be explained. How do you go from being semi-normal to being Rita Wilson from "Sleepless in Seattle?"

Well, I guess the final explanation is that I'm thirty. And no one told me that this is just what happens. 

1. Feelings. All of them. Sometimes at the same time. All tiny things including tiny forks make you a little insane. You are always seconds away from being a weepy mess.
    
2. It's time to have kids and it's time to have 17 of them. For a person who always constantly needs a plan, that has been overridden. If I was pregnant today, I would be terrified and incredibly excited. And that never ever existed before. This epiphany will hit you when you're minding your own business in the shoe aisle at Target and your eye will catch something tiny. Then, cue #1.
    
3. Staying in pajamas and organizing the closet has never felt so good. Natural high. And it has officially replaced capturing that real good hair and makeup by taking a real good photo on a Saturday night.
    
4. Indigestion. Without warning. For no reason. "Avoid spicy foods and laying down after a meal." Doesn't apply. Plain oatmeal for breakfast gives me heartburn. So does oxygen.
    
5. I actually refer back to Pinterest and make things, like dinner and scarves and my own shampoo. 
    
6. Skinny jeans make my knees ache. And I don't want to talk about it.
    
7. One day you'll be sitting on the couch and your partner will tenderly reach out to brush a hair off your cheek and realize it's connected to skin and you will want to die. And your partner will be genuinely intrigued by this tree branch growing out of your face and you will run to the bathroom and Rita Wilson all over the sink.

With a body that is constantly changing into a new one, and feeling like there are too many similarities with that radioactive ooze creating the Ninja Turtles, there are perks. I have less of a tendency to put up with nonsense, in the fact that alone time has become incredibly important and more important than collecting a pile of friends eager to fill up their social calendar. I don't need anyone's permission to make choices, mistakes, big life decisions, when I thought I absolutely did before. My body maybe turning into a cartoon mutant turtle, but I've never felt so alive, in tune to what I want and need, and aware of who and what is good for me and who and what the universe put in my path to teach me a lesson on patience and love. And sometimes Paul is so scared of my crying spells that he buys me sushi and wine and gives me "hormone balancing advice" from Dr. Oz.

This life is a wild ride, friends. What do you guys got goin on in the 30+ department?