90. To Morrows

It’s hard to know what to say to someone who’s going through a truly awful time. Nora often returns to this poem her sister wrote when she’s at a loss for comforting words.

Transcripts may not appear in their final version and are subject to change.

INTRO MUSIC

Today’s episode is for anyone who is feeling very sad. Who is carrying something big and heavy, the kind of thing that people don’t want to talk about, the kind of thing that makes people avoid eye contact with you, that really just sucks all of the oxygen out of the room, that makes you feel like nobody will ever understand what you are going through, that you are all alone in this.

And today’s episode is for anyone who does not know what to say to the person in their life who is in the middle of it. Who keep opening their texts or ALMOST dialing the phone, who bought a card they never sent because what do you write in it?

Because sometimes you’re the first kind of person, and sometimes you’re the second. And you’ll be both, over and over and over again in your lifetime.

It’s a piece of writing that’s been stuck in my ribs for almost two decades.

So let’s go back in time. To 2005, maybe 2006.

I was a fresh college graduate who I spent a lot of time online. I guess I still spend a lot of time online, but this was a time of internet cafes, a time before wifi, really, a time where my phone still flipped shut and when I got home after a long day spent in front of a computer, I…got back on my computer.

I was young. And I was lonely. And I found a lot of comfort reading blogs written by people who were older than me. Blogs by people who appeared to have their lives together, or who were very honest about how NOT together their lives were, which made me feel better about the way I wanted to puke on the way to work, while I was at work, when I left work.

What I’m describing I know now was anxiety and depression, but at the time I just thought, oh, there is something deeply, deeply wrong with me. There is nobody else who seems to live underneath a raincloud the way that dirty kid in Snoopy lived below a cloud of dust.

I loved sad songs. I spent hours and hours listening to Bright Eyes with my sad best friend, who is now not so sad and who made the theme music for this podcast. We were just so…blue, truly. Just so sad about everything and nothing all at once.

A part of me thought that it was a sixth sense, something inside of me preparing for a future sadness I couldn’t even comprehend yet…something horrible that was going to happen to me. And of course something horrible DID happen but not because I was a psychic, because things just HAPPEN. All the time! Every day! For reasons we can understand and reasons we cannot. The lizard in our backyard narrowly escapes the hungry bird…the cricket does not. Poor cricket.

I listened to sad songs and I read sad books and I read a ton of blogs, and one of those…was my sister’s. Oldest sisters, especially those minted in the 70s, 80s, 90s…are a special kind of person. Parentified, even if they’re a scant year or so older than their siblings. My sister is older than me by 8 years, and I always thought of her as a second mom. WHich is insane, because she was in SECOND GRADE WHEN I WAS BORN! But when you’re 10, and your sister lives in an apartment by Lake Harriet and picks you up to take you to McDonald’s and smokes cigarettes even though you just graduated from DARE and beg her to stop careening towards an early death…they kind of feel like a mom. When you’re 22, and your sister is grown up and married with a husband and a house in the suburbs and is pregnant with your very first niece or nephew – you’re not sure yet – she feels like she is living on another planet. A great planet, where there is a sofa in the basement and two cars in the driveway and dishes that match each other. A planet that feels infinitely better than the apartment where the cockroaches aren’t even afraid of you. 

I read Meghan’s blog every day. Every. Day. I waited for her posts about work, about marriage, about the little person she was growing inside of her. 

And one day, she posted this. A poem for her friend, who’d just lost her own pregnancy…very, very late term. She called it To Morrows.

I could not think of a flower or word

That could soothe this terrible thing

So all day I have cried to the east

My aural airborne telegram to you.

I’m sorry (stop)

I’m sorry (stop)

I’m sorry (stop)

I read this poem at work in my little cubicle, and let tears flow down my cheeks for the baby that never got to be here, for the baby my sister was growing…who I’d never thought could be lost or hurt, who would be born in a few months into a world where anything could happen, and would, like it or not.

They’re words I’ve returned to whenever I know someone is in pain, or when I myself feel lost and alone. I imagine all of us who feel alone in our sorrow or our usefulness, crying out, our voices joining somewhere on the wind, and finding the person who needs them.

I’m sorry (stop). I’m sorry (stop). I’m sorry (stop).

OUTRO MUSIC 

CREDITS