Journal of a Sabbatical

August 12, 2000

retrospect

Today's Reading: The Sea and the Ice by Louis J. Halle, Among the Isles of Shoals by Celia Thaxter

Today's Starting Pitcher: Tim Wakefield

I notice I didn't write an entry for the Friday after Billy's funeral when we all gathered for dinner at my mother's house to recognize Donald's and Bobby's birthdays and send Bobby back to the Balkans. A later entry mentions the family gathering but leaves out much of the context, the feelings, the strangeness ... I kept feeling like it was my turn to give Billy a ride to the family gathering and I'd forgotten him.

Nobody knew where to sit at the dining room table. This happens every time somebody dies. Nobody knows where to sit anymore. Nobody's really known where to sit since my Dad died. Of late, Billy had been sitting in Dad's spot. It's the little things all thrown off that get to you.

My mother called Tim Steven. After the stunned silence, everybody joked about how she called all my brothers the wrong names when we were kids. Nobody said, hey you called him Steven because you're thinking about dead people. Would she have called Mary Kathleen if Kevin's entourage had been there?

Reading back over my journal entries for the past few weeks, I see a pattern. I leave out the hard stuff. I fear my grief and my anger so much that all I want to do is submerge it all in the daily stream of life. I have a bizarre notion that I overreact to grief and death. That somehow grieving for longer than the three-day approved time off the job or letting my performance flag in whatever arena I'm supposed to be performing in is pathological.

This notion is based on the way I behaved when my father died. Oh, I got through all the formalities without breaking down. What I couldn't handle was the depression that followed. The fatigue and inability to think crisply or get things done quickly didn't go away in a few weeks.

The notion got reinforced when I started to experience problems keeping my emotions from showing on my face when I worked at Cosmodemonic. Any evidence of a personal life was anathema, and having facial expressions that betrayed worry or sadness about dying family members was likely to be interpreted as some sort of workplace feud or something since I could never say what was going on inside my head or in my personal life. I never figured out how to keep a neutral face or how to compartmentalize work stuff and personal stuff.

I still haven't learned to compartmentalize effectively. I just try to keep my grief and anger at arm's length. I don't know why I do that in the journal, but apparently I do.

I wrote a very short entry about my brother Billy's death because I was still numb and couldn't write anything else until I'd at least acknowledged it. And I avoided writing more because I wanted to avoid what I regarded as the outsized feelings.

Even my account of Yankee Homecoming completely omitted my interaction with a little kid from Newburyport Youth Hockey. When the kid in an oversized hockey shirt approached me selling raffle tickets to support youth hockey all I could think of was how much Billy loved hockey as a kid. How happy it made him. How the thing he wanted most in the world one Xmas was Bauer Black Panther skates. How I faked being his mother at one high school game so he could go back on the ice after being treated for an injury by the team doctor who needed parental permission. How I would drive him to practice, picking up his teammates along the way until my car couldn't hold anymore kids or gear. Needless to say, I bought a raffle ticket from the kid, the least I could do in Billy's memory.