Strangers Among Us

Living in Oz

LIVING IN OZ

Bev Geddes

The door squeaked open. Old doors in old homes were the best for that. Freaked people out to no end. I never understood why. Old homes are old homes. That’s part of the deal. Not so good when you’re trying to sneak in past curfew or keep sleeping babies asleep. Now, the squeaky doors were useful to me.

The smell of soggy tissues and coffee hung in the air. He really should empty that wastebasket more often. It was a welcome place, relaxed and easy. I’d been here a few times. Before. I threw myself onto the worn couch and announced, “I’m here.”

He didn’t even look up from the papers he was studying at his desk, scribbling a note here and there with a half chewed pencil stub. The silence stretched. I waited. It sometimes took a while.

“I know you’re there,” he said, finally looking up. With a sigh, he pushed his glasses up onto the top of his head, hair shaved to a frosted stubble. He was slim and fit and had a smile that eased the tension out of the room. It wasn’t a put-on kind of thing. Bernie wasn’t that kind of psychologist. He never made you feel crazy. “It’s been a while.”

“Over here, on the couch.” I waved, though I didn’t know why. Hard to break old habits, I guess.

“I know,” he repeated. “I’m just slow today. It’s been a busy day.” He pushed away from his battered oak desk and slumped down into the winged chair facing me, tucking his legs beneath himself. He didn’t pick up the tablet of paper that had been thrown onto the end table beside him with obvious abandon. “You’ve been invisible again, haven’t you?”

“Comes with the territory,” I muttered.

“Not necessarily.” He folded his hands across this stomach weaving his fingers together. He was settling in. “We’ve discussed this.”

“Um hmm. And you still don’t get it.”

“Then why do you come here, if I don’t understand your situation? That doesn’t make much sense. Looking for a convert?” A slow smile curled into the corners of his mouth.

“Because you hear me.” I folded my legs underneath myself too. It was warmer that way, and I was tired of being so damn cold. I spent my life being cold in a city gripped with snow and ice for six months of the year, and now I was still cold in this unfamiliar terrain. It wasn’t right. There ought to be some advantages to being in my present state. “I need someone to really hear me. I don’t know why.”

“Lots of other people would hear you, if you’d let them.” He paused and I knew what would come next. “They would see you, too.”

I waved my hand at him, dismissing that last comment. It looked thinner . . . more translucent than before. I wondered how long I would have that hand.

“People don’t want to see me.”

“I think you’re underestimating them. Friends and family at least.”

I laughed at that. My laugh sounded harsh. The edges of it scraped the ear. It came from just below the surface, with no depth and no softness. Someone had once said that I had the best laugh, a belly laugh that seemed to fill my whole body. A laugh that could nudge smiles onto faces. It was real. I remember. Now it was just an echo.

“They were too tired.” I made another useless gesture with my hand, indicating my body, “This was too much for them. I was a burden. I knew that. Even if they didn’t use the word. That’s why I left. It was the only option open to me anymore.”

“You’re wrong. It isn’t too late. They can still see you. You’re still you, just different. Trust them.”

“Different? People don’t do ‘different’ very well. If you don’t fit into the box, they have no clue how to interact with you.”

“Not all people. You have to try. Give it a chance.”

“I’ve tried.”

Bernie’s eyebrows knitted together, and he got that intense look that would flit briefly across his face before he relaxed back into therapy mode. “You’ve tried? Tell me when? What did you do?”

“Today on the bus, as I was getting on, I saw a woman sitting there. Her face was so very sad. She was crying. She seemed embarrassed to cry. We’re not supposed to let people know that side of us. It makes them uncomfortable. But I could feel her grief. It shone from her like a beacon. I sat behind her, trying to send all the warmth and comfort I could. To let her know it would get better, that the grief would ease.”

But some grief doesn’t just ease. It crashes over you like a wave or laps at your toes the rest of the time, always there ready to take you down. It doesn’t go away.

“Grief is a storm,” I said, nodding at this thought. It’s more than a wave, more devastating, longer lasting. A wave hits and then recedes. Storms build, descend, wreak havoc, then scurry away only to circle back again. “The storms are different all the time. It’s just a matter of degree.”

My gaze drifted out the window, frost-etched patterns of silver blocking the view of the street. I didn’t share the rest of my thoughts on grief storms but I counted out the ones that I knew so intimately.

The white-out of the blizzard storm where there is nothing but surge upon surge of driving snow. Each snowflake stings with memory and settles on the soul a grief so pressing the body screams beneath its weight. The world doesn’t exist outside of this storm. Here there is no end.

Then there’s the crazed thunderstorm full of fury and red-hot strikes that shake the earth below you. You scramble for cover knowing the storm will seek you out and there is no escape from the crackling stab of lightning.

The sudden north wind pain that rakes your face with icy fingers and pulls the breath out of you. This one sneaks up on you like rounding a sheltered corner only to be blasted back into grief with a single gust of wind.

The rich earthy storm of the fall that heralds the cold of winter is less overwhelming but, with the constant drizzle of days, it is grey and pressing. It wears down the heart slowly.

Finally, the dead calm of an August afternoon when the heat seems endless—and so does your life. When you feel nothing, and there is nothing. Nothing in front, nothing beside, nothing behind you. It’s just an endless sheet of still water and your boat is sinking.

Grief is so many different storms.

“Sometimes words don’t help,” I said, looking down at the rug, a mottled richly hued old Indian one that Bernie had found on the boulevard a few years back. He was so proud of it. I could tell by the way he uncurled from his chair and rubbed his feet along its thick warmth, allowing a smile to wrinkle his eyes into a half-moon.

Bernie leaned forward and scratched his nose. I could hear his fingernail rake the skin and I was surprised he didn’t have welts from scratching too hard. I knew it meant he was choosing his words carefully. “No, you’re right. Words don’t always help. But sometimes just letting someone know you’re there and it matters that they’re struggling is enough. Sometimes a hug or a touch is good. A day, a week, a year, three years later. Always.”

I nodded quickly. I knew this. He had said this to me before.

“I did. I touched that lady’s shoulder. Squeezed it as I left the bus. I wanted her to know someone cared.”

“And?” Bernie’s eyes were bright. “She saw you then, didn’t she?”

He deflated as I shook my head. “She looked up, but no, she didn’t see me.”

There was a part of me that wished she had, that someone could. Being like this was like watching the world through a slightly distorted pane of glass, wavy and indistinct. I could see people carrying on, laughing, falling in love, fussing about bills, eating food and really tasting it, complaining about their kids or jobs or spouses. All, so simple. So taken for granted, the basic act of continuing to live.

Somehow I had lost the ability to carry on. Bernie had said it was something that got messed up in my brain that day, something biochemical. It was like a light switch turned off or on, depending on your perspective, and nothing was the same anymore. I wasn’t the same anymore. Nothing made sense.

I lowered my head and rubbed my hands along my thighs. It seemed as though the outline of my legs had faded further into the red plush of the couch. Was I fading faster than I thought? The process of leaving this world had been so slow. How I wished it would end and the final wisp of whatever I had become would be gone; sucked into the breeze like the smoke from a chimney in the autumn chill. Then I could remain in the Other—for good.

I could feel myself trembling. “I haven’t got the strength. I’m not in Kansas anymore,” I whispered.

“Bullshit!”

My head snapped up at the sharp tone of Bernie’s voice. It hadn’t been a loud expletive, but his tone shocked me into attention. He had never spoken to me like that before. I felt my eyes widen. “What?” I stammered.

Bernie didn’t move, but I could see his jaw working. He was wrestling with himself about something. We held each other’s gaze as the web of silence stretched between us.

“You’re looking for proof that you’re in this world. That doesn’t come from other people. Sometimes you’re just stuck in some nightmare place that you can’t wake up from, like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz finding out she wasn’t in Kansas anymore. There’s no escape from this. You have to re-learn how to live in the world. Our world. This world. Not Oz.” He ran his fingers across his stubbled head, knocking his glasses. They tipped precariously over one ear. He didn’t seem to notice.

“It sucks. It’s f*****g hard.”

He looked dispirited suddenly, spreading his hands out in front of himself, palms up. “You have to decide every day that you’re here. Every single day. Wake up in the morning and say to yourself, even if it’s just for today, I am.”

I turned away for a moment. There was something he missed. Something he couldn’t understand. Something only those who have been to this hell understand. We are here, but we are not here.

The tornado that ripped me out of my life was a massive funnel cloud of roiling black that billowed out of the west and then dropped out of a clear blue sky. It was sudden, unexpected. I had no warning. One moment I was standing in my kitchen, laughing, and the next I was thrown into that heaving sky. Even the birds didn’t have a chance to go silent in front of this storm. It came. It obliterated. And then it pitched me into a world that had no sense of familiarity, no foundation, no home.

“You have to choose. Only you can decide.”

The deep ache in my chest throbbed. I could feel the darkness that swirled, like that funnel cloud, filling the space where my heart had once been.

“I died that day, Bernie,” I whispered. My voice sounded like the wind soughing in the trees. I wasn’t sure he could even hear me.

“No, you didn’t. You’re here in front of me. Your son died that day.”

I shook my head trying to clear the image that flashed in the front of my brain endlessly. Over and over. My body twitched as though a shock of electric current had been shot through my veins. The agony cut through every corner of my body, slashing and searing. Branding me. It was physical and all-encompassing like no other pain I had ever endured. Even sleep provided no escape as nightmares rolled through the dark, one after the other. I wept for my son, for the life he would miss, for me. My tears formed a river that dragged me under its raging current.

“When I cut my son down from the rafters, my heart died with him.”

Bernie moved over to the couch and I could feel his arms circling my shoulders, squeezing, bringing me back to the present. To the moment. To the only place I could breathe.

“Just stay. You’ll never be the same, but we need you here.”

“What’s the good of having a body if you haven’t got a heart?”

Bernie barked a laugh. “It seems to me that even the Tin Man managed to make a difference, heart or no heart.” He squeezed me tight and returned to his chair across from me. His eyes glowed with warmth. “But you have to let people hear the truth. You have to help them understand what you carry every day. What many people carry every day.”

“But people don’t want to know.”

“So what? It’s time for everyone to listen. The more we talk about it, the less frightening that Wicked Witch becomes.” He grinned again. “Since we’re talking about Oz, maybe you need to become Dorothy instead of the Tin Man. She was the brave one. She was lost but kept on going. That’s courage.”

The tightness in my chest eased at the memory of my favorite childhood story. I stood up, my legs trembling, and tottered over to the window. I breathed out slowly, the warm, moist air forming a mist on the window pane. I sketched out a heart in the fog with my finger tip. I said nothing as the outline of the heart slowly filled in and then melted away.

Strange how that story seemed to fit. I had thought about it for a long time but, as with so many things, the pieces snap into place in their own good time. It had been the tornado of my son’s death that ripped my life from its foundation and dropped me in a place that was nothing like home, just like Dorothy. Somehow she managed to find her way down a long, treacherous road. There were no signposts or directions and the path led through horrible places. I sighed deeply and turned, one final thought whispering through my mind, like a spring breeze that holds the promise of better days—it was a story of courage and hope and friendship. It was a story of returning.

I raised my eyes to meet Bernie’s gaze. I felt a tug of warmth behind the pain like the glow of a porch light through the dark of a summer night. The light was flickering. Faint. It would take everything I had to keep the storms from blowing the tiny spark out. There were no guarantees. But I had seen it. It had come from inside of me, and that was a beginning.

“So I guess I’m living in Oz,” I whispered.

“For now.”

“And I need to find my way home.” I glanced out the window again at the quickening twilight.

Home.

One ruby-slippered step at a time.