A Story from Lori
You know how I like (need) to tell stories ~ the act of writing is a way of processing, unlike speaking, which is distilled somehow by what is going on with one’s face and hands, lolol. We are in our second heat wave. After Doug’s shift, he has to do Security, which is a horribly long brutal day for him. I call him around 5 to see how he’s doing. Yesterday when I ask if he’s busy he says, “I’m dumpster diving.” (sometimes facial cues are good and necessary, I admit). Ur, is that a good fun thing (there’s a big mound of discarded plants I used to dive into there, but they don’t allow that anymore). He told me the woman, my now friend, I’ll call her Wilma, has called the police because someone stole a pinwheel from her mother’s grave. She thinks it’s someone who works at the cemetery, though Doug assured her that couldn’t be so. Sadly, people steal, but his people wouldn’t. She would not listen to reason. He looked, knowing he wouldn’t find it, for over an hour in the crazy heat, in that big metal heat trap. She got agitated at *him* and he has been nothing but kind to her. The reason we became friends is because of this very thing, well over a year ago. The grounds clean up happened a day before scheduled, an office error, and the guys picked up something dear to her and threw it away and she didn’t get it back. I felt so sorry and sad when I heard this, I wanted to ‘reach out to her’ (when everyone started using this, the dentist, etc., all at the same time it seemed, I grew to dislike it. That only deepened. I love words, but not the rote ones everyone uses because everyone uses them). I digress. So we hit it off with Doug as letter carrier, and I would send poems and pictures and she would send long letters and sweet gifts. It was lovely. She said she hasn’t many friends, she took care of her mother who was bed-ridden for 20 something years, I can’t even imagine. And then her mother died, and then she had nothing to do so she comes sits at the cemetery and talks to her (she reads her all the words I send her). So Doug, who has the patience of a saint, says at the end of the call, “I am done with her.” And I know her upset isn’t about the $1.99 pinwheel but she isn’t handling it any better than she did the first time this kind of thing happened which brings me to my drawn out query: How do we heal? And why do we not? And how can we help someone, given that they wish to receive help? To turn on Doug, and she tried to bring me into it (“How would Lori feel if someone came and snipped the heads off her flowers?” Doug said, “Let’s leave her out of this”, bless his heart). I feel doubly bad for her now but I do identify. When I found out where my old therapist was working, the man who made the call which saved my life, in my eating-disordered days, and wrote him to say, “Hey, I’m doing okay now!” and I didn’t hear back and I couldn’t understand why and couldn’t accept his silence, I Kept Writing! I wrote him 30,000 words because I was trying to make contact. It was that important to me. I am embarrassed now, but my feelings took precedence over logic. I would like to help Wilma, should she ‘reach out to me’ but I honestly don’t know what to say. She’s had a difficult life, and every little knock seems amplified (i can relate to this as well. I used to ‘catastrophize’, lump every bad thing together, it’s overwhelming in a big ball like that). Thanks for listening. I feel better now. Poor Doug. It takes a lot for him to say, “That’s it.” I have made in-roads with our Snitty neighbor but Doug still wishes her house would blow away with her in it. Peace! Love you guys. Poor Wilma has no internet. No wonder she’s not connected (i was the last of my friends to get email. It sounded so perfect for me!)
