Socks and Denial ... Denial and Socks

When Nicki was little, but old enough to understand that people gave each other gifts, it occurred to me that I should come up with something that she could give to me for Christmas, birthdays, whatever. When I was a kid, my dad had two things that he needed on a regular basis -- a key case and a wallet. Each would last about two years before wearing out and it went to me to be the one to replace them each Christmas. There was no surprise to it, but at least they were things that I could afford and it pleased me to see him use them on a daily basis.

At the time that I was trying to come up with something, I had just bought some knee-high boots. I realized that I needed to wear them with relatively bulky socks in order to be comfortable. I bought some and got a kick out of getting what I thought were extremely tacky-looking socks with crazy stripes, weird-colored argyles, strange patterns because I knew they would be hidden in the boots. I could look very "put together" and stylish, all the while wearing something completely outrageous.

It hit me that socks were something that Nicki could give me. She could have fun looking for the most outrageously tacky pair of socks she could find, they weren't very expensive for a child's budget and they were something that I knew I would be able to use. It was a very special thing between the two of us. I sort of let it be known in the family that no one else was to give me tacky socks. That was Nicki's domain alone.

Over the years, she gave me some of the most outrageous socks I could ever hope for. We would laugh together when I opened my present at how truly ugly some of them were, and she would laugh again when she saw me wear them. My last birthday before she died, she gave me a dozen pair of socks, including two pairs of Christmas socks and a Halloween pair with skulls and pumpkins.

Naturally, some of them have worn out over the years or been eaten by clothes dryers. I'm not much for darning, so when a pair has become unwearable, I've placed the remnants in a special part of a dresser drawer. With her being gone, I've been running out. I bought some at The Joy of Socks, but it's just not the same.

Since my relatively recent return to knitting, I've been reading about a lot of people making socks. I've never made true socks before. Some slipper-type socks, but not socks that anybody could actually wear with shoes. they require the use of really fine yarn and little tiny needles, both of which I have avoided like the plague.

I decided to give them a try, though. I bought some extremely expensive yarn and made my first pair for Jim, as the first thing I've ever made for him. He liked them a lot. I've just finished my second pair for him. "Just" as in within the past half hour.

I've been thinking about how Nicki liked to knit and it would likely have been a logical progression for her to learn to knit socks by now, continuing our tradition of tacky socks by making them herself, rather than buying them. There is quite a trend these days of rather outrageous sock yarn, including self-striping yarn. I got several different colorways of it and I'm going to make myself socks next. The first one is this combination of blues and purple and green called "Martinique." I know it's a form of denial to imagine that she's making them for me, but that's okay. Denial's what gets me from one day to the next, or, as Lennon said, it's what gets me through the night.

An open letter to whoever is supposedly in charge of things

Dear Powers that Be-–

You really suck.

See, there was this extremely nice young man named Andy. He was bright, intelligent, witty, funny, caring, giving –- everything that is the absolute best that a young man should be and whole lot better than a whole lot of other people in this world.

He got a cavity in a tooth when he was in his late 20s and, like a whole lot of other young men of that age, blew it off for a while. It got infected and then he couldn’t blow it off any more, so he went to get it taken care of. This is something that most everybody does at some point in their life and, once the hassle of dealing with the infection is over with, should be just a mildly unpleasant memory after a while.

But you, PtB, decided that for this particular young man, this minor lapse in judgement would not end there. Oh, no. You had to make the infection travel to his heart muscle and put him in the hospital. But you wouldn’t even let it rest there. Once the immediate effect was over, this infection kept doing its nasty work over the course of five years or so. And now he’s dead. Because of a fragging cavity in his tooth.

I didn’t know him well. I only chatted with him a couple of times. But he touched me and charmed me like he did every other person that he came in contact with. He went out of his way to do things for people. This week, since he’s been gone, I’ve found out even more of the things he did. When he was just a kid in high school, a friend’s brother died. Andy took it upon himself to help his friend through his grief, to the point of sleeping on the friend’s floor so he could be there if he was needed in the night and starting up a memorial scholarship in honor of the lost brother. Even now, his family has asked that donations be made to this scholarship fund that is in the name of someone else, rather than setting up one in Andy’s memory, because that’s what Andy would want.

PtB, there are a whole lot of people walking around that this world could much more easily do without and who have done much more unwise things than letting a cavity go for a bit too long. I can even give you a list of ones that I know personally, if you'd like. But did you take them instead? No-o-o-o-o. You took Andy’s parents’ only child. We’ll never know the people who won’t be helped now because he’s gone. I know that the world as a whole is a whole lot dimmer place because this light is now gone.

So, PtB, you truly suck.

Signed,
Someone who wishes she could see him one more time

A bit of background

I've been assuming that the only people who read my blog are a couple of folks that I've known for years and who know me inside and out. Lately I've been aware of some others reading it who might be wondering about some of the things I have alluded to. I've tried several times to write "the story" here, but I just fall apart and can't. I did, however, write a very bare-bones version for another group of people and I thought I'd copy it here. I hope you don't mind the recycling.

My daughter Nicki was 18 when she died. She was also 8 months pregnant. She died from a complication of her pregnancy called "eclampsia." (Some of the older folks might remember something called "toxemia" that they used to talk about pregnant women getting. Same thing.) She was under a doctor's care and had been hospitalized twice in the months before she died, but she was doing pretty well. On a Saturday night she said to my husband (I was out of town, visiting Steph) that her feet were swelling up again, but she had an appointment to see the doctor on Monday, so she would just wait until then. When my husband got up the next morning, he found her. She had got up to use the bathroom in the night, went into a seizure and died.

December 2008 marked the 18th anniversary of her death. Hard to imagine that much time has gone by. I think of her every day, wondering what she would make of things happening in the news or on the soap opera we used to watch together. Some days are harder than others, often for quite odd reasons.

One of the questions that people often have is about eclampsia and what the cause is. Nobody knows for sure. There are a lot of possibilities, but none have been proven to be correct. That's one of the most difficult things for me. It's hard to accept that she's gone without knowing why. I don't suppose I ever will.

I don't have any other children. I had an only child by choice, and, even if I'd known that I was going to lose her, I probably would have made the same decision.

I don't mean to be depressing and maybe nobody has wondered. But in case anybody has, that's it.

Sometimes I Just Have to Talk About It

I don't usually post about my experience of grief. It's depressing for other people to read and I hate it when people feel sorry for me. I'm also very conscious of seeming to be Ms. Grief Expert. From early on, I thought about the Beatles song "She Said, She Said":

She said I know what it's like to be dead
I know what it is to be sad
And she's making me feel like I've never been born

I always felt sorry for Lennon and wasn't too thrilled with Peter Fonda (about whom the song is said to have been written), for making John feel that way. Now I find that I may be in Peter's shoes.

The fact is, though, missing Nicki is a part of my life every day and I've accepted that it is. Most of the time talking about it doesn't do much good and only brings stuff to the fore that would be better off left in the background. Still, every once in a while there's things that I need to say.

I had a conversation the other day in which I mentioned using other things to "fill the void" left in my life when Nicki died. I've been thinking of that phrase and, more specifically, of the void itself. There was a rather strange thing that happened in the first weeks and months after she died. Everybody has seen the cartoons where the bad critter is chasing the good critter and the good critter gets a cannon and shoots at the bad critter. The cannon ball goes right through the baddie's body, leaving a hole, but it doesn't kill the baddie and in the next shot, the baddie is all back together again. That's what losing Nicki felt like, except for the getting back together again. Having a physical hole in the middle of my body. Or, like Oz said to Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, " I miss you. Like, every second. Almost like I lost an arm, or worse, a torso." Yeah. That says it.

Nicki died in December, so even in southern California where we lived at the time, it was pretty chilly outside. When I would go out, it was like I could feel the cold wind blowing right through that hole in my torso. My mind told me it was impossible to experience that, but that's how it felt. I guess over the years, it has eased a bit. The wound is not so raw any more, but the hole is still there, gaping and obvious. I keep trying to cram it with other stuff, just to keep the wind from blowing through, shoving wadded up newspaper into the corners because nothing is truly Nicki-shaped and I have to make do. Whatever I use is a poor substitute, but I will take whatever I can get and I might get just a bit testy when I feel that it's threatened.

I really hope I haven't made anyone feel like they've never been born. Not my intention.