Griefbus

Here’s what I wrote today on my long bus ride, more or less unedited:

…

Jenny and I rode the bus to Syracuse together, but she’s staying an extra week, so I’m riding back to Buffalo alone. It was an idyllic weekend with her and her mom. Me, two women that love me, three dogs that love attention, and ten cats that are getting used to me. I got anxious on the car ride to the bus station, getting ready to say good-bye to my girlfriend and probably future mother-in-law. At first, I thought I was just getting anxious from leaving Jenny for a week, and traveling alone. But then it all echoed: the last time I traveled alone, it was the day after Christmas, and I was also taking a bus out of Syracuse. I was heading to New Jersey for my friend Laura’s funeral.

I wrote in this notebook on that bus ride too, but most of it was shit. I wrote about seven pages of what I’d loved about Laura, but it was emotionless distant drek, as if written ten years after the fact, filled with obvious novelty at writing her in the past tense. I fancied it a good piece then, and intended to speak it at her funeral, but when people spoke at that Jewish graveyard, they were crying and I was crying and my homilies were worthless.

But that remains the only time I’ve cried. Seems like I can only cry when someone else is crying, like at that funeral. You know the last time I cried before that? Fucking Joe Torre. I was alone, watching SportsCenter after the Yankees were bounced out of the playoffs, and Manager Joe Torre knew it was likely his last year with the team, and he cried, right there on TV. Seeing him cry, I cried too. I had and have no idea why I cried then. I fucking hate the Yankees. I’m not some weepy guy who cries easily. Far from it. I just cry when I’m cued in that it’s okay to cry, I guess.

I feel like crying now, but of course I can’t do that here, on a Greyhound, alone with 80 strangers. I’ve thought about getting drunk, that might help me cry. Or going to this grief counselor Jenny’s been talking up. (Probably healthier than Smirnoff, though also more expensive. Vodka – the poor man’s grief counselor. Is it a wonder it comes from Russia?)

But what I think I’m going to do is: this week, with Jenny gone, I’m going to set aside some time (between work and blogging and refreshing web sites) to get really, really sad. I’m going to think of the saddest things I know and interweave thoughts of Laura’s death. You know what really might do the trick: thinking about Braveheart. And Goldberry.

Ever see Braveheart? True, it’s hard to get teary at scenes of people you don’t know dying on a battlefield. But when someone’s horse gets run through during battle… Watch it with a group of people sometime, and you’ll see a different reaction. “That horse,” people think, “it didn’t volunteer its life. It’s not trying to kill its fellow man (or I guess horse) for land. It’s totally innocent.” Aye, and there’s the rub. “Innocent.” Unknowing. Maybe it’s a Christian “Original Sin” kinda thing, I don’t know. When a person dies on screen, well… he either did something bad during the movie, or must’ve at some point in his life, right? I mean, we’re “only human,” we do shitty or downright evil things to each otehr every chance we get. But an animal, a horse, a dog…

When Godlberry died I was there. My family and I held her while they injected her with whatever, we petted her as she wagged her tail, and we cried, and we watched her eyelids droop down, and I pulled my hand away because I could goddamn feel that there was no life in there anymore, she wasn’t breathing, her shoulder where I’d laid my hand had become not bone but wood, and hollow wood at that, encasing nothing at all, an empty casket of a dog.

I’m almost losing it here, writing, now on the local Buffalo bus from the Greyhound station to my home. I can’t here, with not 80 but still a half-dozen strangers around. But later… I may not need to set time aside. I may lose it, lose as much as I can, tonight, alone. Having to equate a pet dog to Laura to make it real for my shocked robot head.