Part 2

I left off at Tuesday but it’s been so many days since I last tried to write that I’m afraid my memory is going to be pretty severely tarnished. I’ll give it a try regardless.

Tuesday

Uneventful. My aunt and uncle took me out to a local place for breakfast. They make their gravy like my Mamaw did. My uncle calls it brown gravy, really it’s a white breakfast gravy with so much sausage drippings left in it that it turns brown as it cools. Sounds gross but it’s amazing. It having been many years since my mamaw made gravy and now knowing it’s not something she’ll ever make again, it was a great way to start off the day.

We parted ways after though we both headed in the same direction. He needed to go back to Tazewell to sign papers at the funeral home while I was heading back to my Mamaw/Mom’s house. I detoured through another city and had lunch.

That was really the day. I saw my in laws again for a few hours that night but otherwise the evening was spent visiting and watching TV.

Wednesday

It was supposed to be my last night in town and it was seemingly as uneventful as the day before. Spent the day lounging around the house with Mom, watching daytime TV and chatting. That night around 7 Lainea came over to cook us supper. I don’t know if it’s this way everywhere but in the south when someone dies the family gets bombarded with food. Everyone sends KFC or homemade dishes so the family doesn’t have to worry about cooking. Lainea waited till Wednesday knowing that’s about when the stream of food would start to slow down.

She made chicken casserole, corn, potatoes, and brownies while we chatted in the kitchen. I stuffed myself and we moved to the front porch to talk for a while. It was a chilly night but it felt awesome to sit out in the country again. I spent much of my teenage summers reading or thinking out on that deck. We were having a great talk when someone brought me the phone to say my uncle Mike wanted to talk to me. It was around midnight and I knew he was supposed to go back to work the next day. I’d already talked to him hours earlier to say ‘bye’ so I knew whatever the call was about couldn’t be good.

It wasn’t. His best friend of 30 years had died that afternoon. He had a heart attack which caused a tear in his aorta. He bled out in the Cath Lab. I was heartbroken for him. His mother and his best friend within 4 days of each other.

Lainea left and I went in to tell Mom. I told them both that the week felt surreal. Not just our personal tragedies but also the goings on in the world. It was light hearted but I said it made me think how the Muggles must have felt at the end of Harry Potter. The whole world is falling apart and people are dying. It’s all unrelated but so chaotic you can’t help but wonder if there’s some greater force at work.

I asked, rhetorically, what could happen next?

Next was the explosion in Texas and the storm that trapped my husband in Wyoming and grounded the plane that was supposed to take me back to Utah.

Thursday

The delayed flight was a blessing in disguise. I made it all the way to the airport (about an hour and a half away) before I got the call telling me the flight was reschedule for the next day. I used the extra time to go visit Mike again. It was a hard day. He alternated between joking about memories of his friend to weeping quietly. Regardless, I’m glad I went. I don’t know if it helped him at all for me to be there but I felt better about being capable of being there for him.

Friday

He cried as I went to leave. It was hard. It was hard leaving Tennessee. I’d never felt so attached to the place before. It was a desperate kind of sadness driving toward the airport. I didn’t want to leave my family.

I left earlier than I needed to so that I could have time to sit alone for a while. I went to Panera Bread and bought something hot and sweet, then used their wifi to write the last entry. I left there to discover yet another flight was delayed. This time it was only an hour but it put enough of a crunch in between flights that I blew money I didn’t want to spend switching out my carryon for one that I wouldn’t have to valet check.

The flights were long. Too much time to think and be sad. I felt a heavy exhaustion as we landed in SLC. The thought of the walk to the bus and the car was daunting. Finally, just after 11pm, I reached the car only to realize I had a flat tire. There was almost no reaction to it at that point. I started to tear for just a second then it passed into acceptance. Of course there’s a flat tire. Why wouldn’t there be?

Fortunately it was much less of an ordeal than I thought. Zac, thoughtfully, keeps a small air compressor in the car. It was a 20 minute delay and I was enroute to home again. I finally got there just after midnight where I collapsed onto Zac and cried.

I can’t even really say why I did. Maybe because it had been exactly a week since Mom had called to say Mamaw had died. The next day was spotted with lots of short crying sessions, too. I felt like I was leaking all the emotion I’d tried to keep in check in front of my family. I kept remembering things that overwhelmed me. Gradually that tapered off and some sense of control has come back but I still find myself sad and disjointed. I’ll try to write more on that later.

For now I need to go back to work and try to summon up some sense of caring about what’s going on in the world around me.