The Auntie Vi Memorial Morning Weather Report
This morning, there was almost no condensation on my windows, so I figured it must be warmer than the past few very cold mornings, when the windows were so wet they were dripping.
Sure enough--it's 22º, forecast to rise to 37º.
The streets are still mucky, but I'm going to bike. I'll take the street with the WIDE bike lane to the Greenway bike path, which the City keeps shoveled. It goes a couple blocks from the thrift store.
I'm extra-motivated because the bus connections are so slow.
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Did you watch Fleabag?
The main character (unnamed, played by the show's creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge) is driven by the grief of a close friend's death, and, further back, her mother's death.
This essay "To Fleabag, with Grief" is good about it--after witnessing a friend killed by a car, the (young) author writes, "I was more sensitive, and meaner, and more empathetic".
Ha, yes. Nicer. And meaner. I get that.
Also: "Surprisingly for how universal the experience of grief is, most media about loss is not very good."
Indeed. Along with the movie Love, Liza, Fleabag is the only media about the weirdness of grief that I deeply relate to.
Most of us who have remained in blogspotland are old, and we know grief. But still, I think, it's hard to get it right, its expression.
While I related to her grief, Fleabag is not like me, personally, except in one way--in her relationship with her sister, Claire, her only sibling. Their relationship reminds me of mine with my sister.
Fleabag and Claire are opposites, aligned differently to their father (who makes no secret that he prefers Claire), and they are often at odds--not in a make-cute way, but seriously. Like me and my sister. They're not happy friends, and yet they've been through devastation together.
At their father's wedding to a woman they despise, Fleabag tries to convince her [married] sister, Claire, to go to the airport to intercept the man she truly loves. Fleabag says something about how romantic it would be to run through an airport.
Claire replies, "The only person I'd run through an airport for is you."
Sometimes I kinda hate my sister (just kinda, though), and I guess she sometimes feels something like that toward me. She's the elder, so maybe, probably, it's not hate she feels. I don't know, but I sense it's more like frustration, bafflement, and DISAPPROVAL that she feels.
This past spring, when I was house-sitting for four months on the block my sister lives on––a few houses away––she came over only a few times. Once, she said something so objectionable (personal to me, not political), I told her to leave.
I never went to her house because I wasn't allowed in, ever since her wife and I had had a big fight a few years ago.
My sister has let me down in big ways.
So have I let her down. Like, I didn't attend her wedding!
I was going to--I even had a free airline ticket to San Francisco lined up. (Sister and her bride-to-be were getting married in California, which had just legalized same-sex marriage.)
Then it turned out our brother was going.
My sister had told me that she wasn't even going to invite him--he had barely talked to her, and to me not at all, since our mother died six years earlier.
But she did invite him after all, and his wife made him accept. Of course our father would be there too--my sister was his favorite person. With the addition of Brother, now the gathering comprised a preponderance of people, including the woman my sister was marrying, who didn't like me. It felt dangerous.
I didn't go.
But still. Not to be in any way nice or romantic about
it--my sister and I don't exactly trust each other, and we've let each
other down--and yet, when I told her I loved and related to the line about running through the airport,
she said she felt the same.
Maybe it's only the sharing of a movie moment (I used to blog those). It might not translate reliably into action. But sharing a story-–that's a good thing.
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After the house-sitting gig ended, I got an email from Sister-in-Law (SIL) asking if I would like to "normalize" our relationship.
I wrote right back and said yes, if she meant that I would come over sometime and sit on their back deck for a beer or coffee, like I used to.
That's exactly what she meant, she wrote back. If I didn't need to "process the past", she didn't either.
God spare me from processing the past (in this instance).
I did go over for a beer and to carve pumpkins this Halloween, and no unkind words were said. Good! We all get along better if we do something, or go somewhere.
Sister and I are going on another field trip to an outlying library next week--our third such library visit. I'm excited! We're both taking Christmas cards along, to sit at the library and write and address them.
I need to get some stamps.
Meanwhile, Brother has drifted further and further away from my (our) sister. He and I had never been close, and he stopped talking to me entirely many years ago. When I saw him at our father's deathbed five summers ago, he could barely say hello to me.
My sister, however, had stepped into mothering him when our mother left. She was fifteen, and he was four. Maybe that was a problem for him as much as anything, but they had stayed close up until our mother's death. Sister remains deeply grieved that he is now only a dot on the horizon of her life.
I can't see even a dot of my brother--haven't for a long time.
But I suppose if he needed me to run through the airport for him, I would. Not that I'll ever know if he does.