Watched “Voicemails for Isabelle” today.
So many thoughts.
Mom and I used to say, “Did you come to the party?” a lot.
I don’t remember where it originated. Maybe with Gram, when she was confined to a hospital bed in the living room.
Mom would cook and decorate (and Gram would be mad it wasn’t done her way — which I now realize, she was just pissed off that she couldn’t do it herself).
And to make sure Gram was involved, she’d ask, “Did you come to the party?”
Well, now that no one’s at my party, that party really sucks without them.
I was looking around the absolute shitshow that Mom’s bedroom has become.
I’ve donated a metric fuckload. Selling online hasn’t worked for me; I made one sale.
And yet I have A) a lot of our stuff and B) more stuff that I bought thinking it would fit but oops, still fat.
I’m not really attached to some of the stuff I kept. Like, all the ladybug stuff. All the hot peppers and flip flop stuff. The Christmas stuff.
I had a halfway original thought about it yesterday.
That it was for a life we were building together.
That it’s what she left to me, to have of her.
That’s why it’s so hard to either do something with it or get rid of it.
Like, I don’t even want all my sugar skull shit anymore — though we so painstakingly coordinated all that together — because it’s just one more thing making me crazy.
But it was also MY thing.
And if there is one thing I’ve learned in two solid years of grief …
Your interests can and do change.
I don’t have to love or eat or do (insert thing we did together) anymore.
We did it. It’s done. It’s over. The joy was in the companionship.
And I just want the stuff to bring me joy — to bring her back for a few moments. To feel like she somehow decorated my future house.
Which of course I can’t get to with all this stuff.
I just don’t want to be in an empty place someday, or wherever I’m about to die, and not have a thing that might make me feel happy because of some memory of shopping for it that it might trigger.
There’s a wonderful line in the Netflix documentary “Marty: Life Is Short.”
Steve Martin says you host a dinner party, and you find out Martin Short can’t come.
What do you do? “You cancel the party.”
Party’s over, people. Nothing to see here.
Still trying to figure out what this whole Party of One still looks like.
For real, I just want a month off to plan it.