Tag: loss

When You Were
Grief & Loss · Nostalgic Posts · Poetry

When You Were

Beth DeFries5 Comments

You were pine scented card stock

dangling from the rearview mirror on elastic string,

packs of tissues strapped to the visor, 

and a little American flag fixed to the rear antenna-

when you were.

You were cans of Pepsi, 

cigarette butts in ashtrays all around,

and sweatshirts printed with cutesy cats, bears, and flowers.

You were snores on the sofa with the TV on loud-

true crime stories,

Irish folk songs, 

and the turn-dial TV,

bright white sneakers with shamrock laces

or American flags.

You were transitional lenses slow to adjust,

hair mousse, painted nails,

and yellow American cheese wrapped in paper and plastic from Acme.

You were egg drop soup, custard cups, and the corner store.

You were microwaved mugs of Lipton black tea, 

Oh When the Saints Go Marching In blaring on your hip,

God Bless America in light snow that February.

I can hear it now.

You were popular, authentic, and distinct.

I still remember the smell of your house,

that shelter for wayfaring family and friends, decade after decade.

It’s someone esle’s home now.

I wonder if you visit.

I still feel the icy shock of the kitchen tiles on bare feet in the mornings,

the twinge of fourteen years gone by with no new memories of you.

Still, we were lucky.

You were here for a while.

You were ours

and you loved us

when you were.

Health & Lifestyle · Movies · Nostalgic Posts · Reviews & Reflections

Empty Venues

Beth DeFries5 Comments

When I was fifteen, I had the honor of being invited to attend my twin friends’ extravagant sixteenth birthday celebration in New York City. My friends had chosen to take a group of us out to a nice dinner and a Broadway show and afterwards, we all had a slumber party at the Waldorf Astoria. We snacked on decadent Godiva, chocolate-covered strawberries and Twizzlers from Walgreens and once we were all sugared up, we wandered the halls of the historic hotel in search of adventure, movie filming locations, and a ghost girl with a red balloon.

We never did find the ghost girl, but we rode the elevators like John Cusack and Kate Beckinsale in Serendipity (2001) and roamed the glamorous lobby in our hotel slippers and pajamas. I remember wandering into the empty Grand Ballroom, a cavernous hall with box seating all around the walls and a massive, glittering, chandelier overhead, illuminating the room in a dimmed glow.

We walked up onto the stage and looked out at the room, each with a feeling that it was exactly where we were all supposed to be at that exact moment in time. Aside from the Waldorf already having established itself for its serendipitous traits in Peter Chelsom and Marc Klein’s movie, it was something else to feel it for ourselves.

We looked out at the spotless ballroom, the banquet tables and chairs stored away in some closet or basement, the red patterned carpet – vacuumed, and the wooden dance floor – waxed and shining. We were the only things in the room to fill the space, a group of teenaged girls, our souls and energy so immense in the company of each other that the wallpapered walls and towering ceiling could hardly contain us.

I feel very alive in an empty venue. Perhaps it is the minimalist in me or perhaps the possibility that empty venues hold or once held. More likely, it is my love of Cameron Crowe’s movies and the impact they had on my adolescence, namely Almost Famous (2000) and Elizabethtown (2005).

Cameron Crowe has a talent for creating flawed, loveable, relatable characters and for developing relationships between them. He is also able to give empty venues as much life as full ones. His movies push me out to the stars and bring me safely back to the ground with each watch.

My favorite scene in Almost Famous depicts Kate Hudson’s character, Penny Lane, dancing around the floor of an empty concert venue after a Stillwater show has ended. The scene is set to Cat Stevens’ The Wind and captures the sense of clinging to something special extra hard when you don’t want it to end and the melancholy of accepting the fleeting nature of the experience once it’s over. The stage lights glow golden on the wooden floor as Penny slides around the venue alone, balancing on discarded cocktail napkins, while gracefully swinging a single rose around in her hand. It is beautiful, hopeful, and heartbreaking all at once and it reminds me that great experiences would not be so great if they were not so fleeting. Loss is a necessary evil of life. Without it, life’s experiences would hold no weight and coping with it is the first step back to joy.

Crowe’s Elizabethtown illustrates this cyclical concept well. There are two scenes in the movie that depict a hotel banquet hall. There is one in which the room is full of people for a very epic memorial service, courtesy of Susan Sarandon’s exceptional acting skills, Crowe’s incredible writing, and a rendition of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Free Bird that is literally on fire. There is another in which the banquet hall is empty aside from the main characters, Drew (Orlando Bloom), Claire (Kirsten Dunst), and a cremated Mitch, Drew’s late father, in his urn. The scene with fewer characters has just as much energy and tension as the scene with a crowd and I feel Claire’s apprehension, brevity, and excitement as she marches up to the podium and announces to Drew, “IIIII LIIIKE YOU!” through the echoing microphone, with only a cremated Mitch for an audience. There is so much life in the scene despite the obvious presence of death in the movie and the slow build of the characters falling in love without recognizing it in real time, amid a period of loss, makes my heart swell every time.

I did theater in high school and college and it was always bittersweet to end a show. On one hand, I’d have free time again and on the other, it made me sad to help break down something that I had devoted so much energy to for months, from auditions to strike.

I think I love being in a theater more than I like being onstage. On stage, there is nowhere to hide and it is hot and harrowing under the bright lights. The darkness and secretiveness of the wings and the catwalks were always my favorite parts of participating in shows – the anticipation and the adventure, the whispers, the intense listening for cues through heavy curtain legs, and the intimacy, trust and speed of a quick change or stage transition. In theater, working together makes these changes so much smoother. Theater is art imitating life but it is also so much life behind the scenes. It transforms empty venues to alternate realities and puts them back to their original state afterwards almost as though nothing ever happened.

I have spent many moments in empty venues and have come to realize that in those moments, they are not really empty at all. One person can fill a space with their voice, a dance, silence, love, or even just with their imagination. There is possibility resting in the dimmed lights and the energy of past moments seeps into the floors, hangs on the walls and curtains, and tarnishes the fixtures. Like Stevens and his music, I let these moments take me where my heart wants to go. And even when the time comes to move on, I do not waste it on regret or disappointment, and instead prefer to anticipate what lies ahead.

Grief & Loss · Health & Lifestyle · Mental Health

Star Matter to Dark Matter and Back

Beth DeFries1 Comment

I began to minimize my faith in religion back in 2012. It was a very confusing and draining time in my life, brought on by my great aunt’s losing battle with pancreatic cancer a year earlier.

After her death, I was not the same person and I felt the cavity of her absence to my core. In attempts to be happy again, I talked to Mike almost every day, despite living in different cities. I watched dozens of DVDs from my university’s library, escaping into Singin’ in the Rain, Finding Neverland, and Ever After, to name a few. I bottled up my grief – wrote stories and essays about loss for class assignments, and pulled myself up from piles of blankets and sweatshirts on my dorm room bed. I took a trip to Florida and met Mike’s aunt and uncle for the first time and they took us to Disney World. It all helped a little, bit by bit, but I still felt lost. I prayed to God and to my aunt each night, longing to be heard. I cried till my nose grew raw with the salt of grief each time there was no response, and after a year – I stopped praying all together.

I slowly came to terms with an understanding that she was gone permanently and I that couldn’t talk with her anymore, only to her memory. I rationalized the unlikelihood that there was really a heaven, to the point where such a concept did not make sense to me anymore. I began to view Jesus as a good, self-sacrificing, historical figure who lived by contagious ethical values and began to realize that his mother, Mary, may have just been a young girl, newly married, and uneducated in matters of sexuality.

I began to stumble across my aunt in dreams, but she was different – not the person I had known. Something was always off about her. I’d be dreaming that I was walking around the corner in our family shore house and happen upon her standing there, wordless, in the middle of the kitchen, lit only by the bulb inside the refrigerator, her back to me. She never spoke to me in these early dreams. She was child-like, but looked even older than she did just before she died. She seemed happy in the dreams, but always with an air of infantile innocence about her, as though she were a newborn old person.

To not be able to speak with her was painful, and to fear her was worse, because at the time, all I needed to know was that she was still there if I needed her, that I could somehow break through the curtain between the realm of the dead and the living. I just didn’t know how yet.

I gained more of an interest in the science of the how the universe works and an appreciation for quantum theory a few years later, recognizing in them new ways to describe what I once called faith. I marveled in the idea that most of the elements in human bodies were formed in stars and gained an appreciation for the existence of humanity as we know it. I grew fascinated by the concept of time and how it works differently in the vastness of space than on Earth. At one point, I felt overwhelmingly small and helpless, a miniscule person, afraid, on a miniscule rock in an infinite stretch of something my brain will never fully comprehend. I learned about energy, the duality of electrons, and Schroedinger’s theory and wondered how many versions of each of us exist in infinite alternate realities, if at all. I wondered if my aunt was still alive in one. Or if I was dead in another. I began to appreciate my reality more and was fascinated by the mystery and possibility of it all. I started to feel comfortable with the unknown again. I still feel small, but also part of it all, and not alone. I am but one compilation of star matter trying to make sense of dark matter(s) and accepting that it’s ok if I can’t.

Grief & Loss · Health & Lifestyle

Turn, turn, turn

Beth DeFries3 Comments

Where to begin. We lost my Nana at 11:58PM on St. Patrick’s Day; my dad’s birthday, her dad’s birthday, and one of our family’s most appreciated holidays. We toasted with Chivas and an Irish blessing and recounted old stories and even some long suppressed confessions that had us reeling and telling each other, “Shh, people are sleeping,” through hysteric laughter (without any enforced change in volume at all).

Collected from her final party once it started to die down, its attendees gone home for a night’s rest to prepare for another day of uncertainty, she left us wrapped in the warmth of her family’s love, snapshots of her incredible life flashing before her – the memories jogged by recounted stories as best could be remembered and shared by her children, children in law, and granddaughters. She held hands with her youngest son and my younger cousin on all of our behalf before going off to hitch a ride home with her sister, her neighbor, and her father. That’s how I choose to think of it, anyway, the idea presented by my aunt and cousin… and I thought I didn’t even believe in that sort of thing anymore. I’ll make the exception for this.

We spent her final day surrounding her in her small, yellow room in suburban Pennsylvania, seated on assorted chairs and stools borrowed from the facility’s communal areas. We were watched over with care by images frozen in the blissful timeline of our own happy family memories captured and command stripped or taped to the walls. We rotated frequently and each held her hands. Some flew from the west, racing against an unknown deadline with all their might, and some said goodbye through others and through phone calls and videos. We all made it in time in that she knew we were each thinking of her. Of that I am absolutely certain.

We told her we loved her so much and that we knew she loved us too even though she couldn’t say it with words. So powerful was our matriarch, even in her final days that she drew us to her like moths to her sheltered flame. Wordless, her energy’s container frail, our need to be near her was so strong. We let her know she made us who we were- members of a family, a close knit tribe unlike any I’ve ever heard of – despite living on split coasts and across different states.

The grief comes in salty Atlantic waves with foamy Pacific crests and words get crumpled up like moist Kleenex sometimes. Tomorrow will be easier and each tomorrow after.

There is a season.

Turn, turn, turn.