This Place of Wonder

by Barbara O'Neal

That’s the thing about grief. It spirals up and up and up, revisiting us again and again, reaching out with electrified tentacles to sting us when we least expect it.

A handful of women greet me, offer the slogans that seem so corny unless you need them: keep coming back; it works if you work it; easy does it.

Walking was possible. I could do it when it didn’t feel like I could do anything else. I couldn’t think. I couldn’t have functioned at all in the outside world. I can’t sit still all the time. I can’t always focus enough to read. Even when I’m walking, things pop up, memories and regrets and shame and guilt, but they don’t stick around and needle me the same way.

Stay where your feet are.

My therapist said that the reason alcohol is so hard to give up is because it works.

One thing: stay sober.

It seems wildly unfair that I am no longer allowed the drug of peace.

One of the great pieces of luck in my life was landing in a foster home filled with books when I was seven. I mean, overflowing with books. They were stacked on shelves, as books are meant to be, or so I learned, in the living room and in the bedrooms, and stacked on a shelf by the stairs that led to the basement. In the kitchen, cookbooks lined the top of the fridge, a place I’d only ever seen boxes of cereal, and filled up one whole counter. It wasn’t the nicest house in the world. It smelled of dogs and the cigarettes my foster mom Susan smoked, and she loved reading so much she didn’t spend all that much time cleaning, although the army of children she cared for did a lot of it. We had chores, ordinary kinds of chores, like teaming up to do the dishes after meals, and taking turns vacuuming and cleaning bathrooms and watering the garden, not like some places I lived later, where kids were treated like slaves.

“Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground,”

Why didn’t I just stop? That’s what people ask, the Muggles who don’t understand. Why not just stop? Why not just have one? Why keep doing something that makes you feel so awful?

If only. It just doesn’t work that way. Not for me. Not for the millions and millions of people who are also plagued with this addictive thing in a world where it’s perfectly normal to drink, and keep drinking, and laugh about going overboard and even blacking out, and make Mommy-wine memes about the stresses of parenthood driving you to the bottle, and you have to explain why you don’t drink rather than why you do. If people quit smoking, the world says, “Oh hey, good for you.” If you quit drinking, they peer at you and say, “Why?”

grief is a thing you have to carry.

Deborah coached me on letting other people be who they are, and it’s hard but I can have boundaries but also give her room to figure things out.