Let Them Eat Grief Cake

This week’s grief post brought to you by Will Stegemann, who told me that after his father died he ate cake every day. He went to a bakery and got a piece of cake and ate it. He did this every. Day.

That is one tasty ritual. He doesn’t do that anymore. Now he runs, all healthy-like, and he and his wife Nina ran in a race to honor Lisa after she passed. I just sat around and drank too much wine and got maudlin on Facebook.

I don’t have a grief ritual, exactly. When I go to sleep every night I do glance at a prayer card my mother gave me in the days after Lisa died. I also make a point to visit her parents regularly. I still have a key to her house, so sometimes I think about going there just to be at a place she loved so much, but let’s be honest. It’s all the way across town. It’s Los Angeles and I am a busy mother. I don’t have time to visit an empty house just to brood.

Get Your Pain Off the Internet

Last weekend I visited her “new hilltop residence,” as her friends and I have decided to call it, to “celebrate” Lisa’s birthday, which was last Wednesday. She would have been 41. We sat in the pretty grass and we ate crackers and cheese and drank wine and talked about her.

I didn’t want to go at first. See above about not wanting to drive across town. It was in the middle of my Saturday. I missed Kyle’s first flag football touchdown (and his second, and his disputed third). I had a ton of stuff to do. Still, I went. I learned how to find a grave at an enormous cemetery. I read the inscriptions on many headstones, and I located a bathroom nearby Lisa’s spot. Lots of unwelcome education.

What I realized in talking with Lisa’s friends and my own is that oh yeah, I’m in a lot of pain, and I really took it out on Facebook last week on Lisa’s birthday. I was mad to see that there were people who didn’t know that she is dead. They wished her the blithe Facebook happy birthday and moved on with their day. They can still be ignorant and blissful. I got so angry at them for that. I’m still angry. Oh, how I wish I could go back to the moment before I got that horrible phone call, when everything was okay. These “friends” of Lisa’s who did not bother to click through to her Facebook page? They are still in that belief that everything is okay.

Screw them and screw Facebook.

Sigh. I know that is not fair. Facebook is just another tool that enables people to feel connected without actually picking up the phone or buying a birthday card and putting it in the mail. I know that I just wanted those people to hurt because I am hurting. When it was brought to my attention, I felt sorry.

I realize that sharing our innermost feelings on the internet can get pretty awkward. I open myself up to criticism and ridicule, and that is okay for me because I don’t actually care about those things. Especially now. But when I hurt someone’s feelings, I do care. For the past six weeks I have cared less, but I’m still me, so I do care.

I also realize that after a while these posts are going to make my blog less popular. And guess what – I stopped caring about that a long time ago. People with their blinky little cute blogs that get a lot of traffic would probably keep their grief thoughts off the internet.  But this blog has never been about getting more traffic or even keeping the traffic level steady.  It’s about what’s in my heart whether that is interesting to anyone or not.

You, and you? You’re still here. I am grateful for you. Thanks for reading, but I totally get it if you click away until you see me posting about poop and boogers again. I suppose I will keep writing here even when the statcounter says “0” but that probably won’t happen because I have a post about Suze Orman that gets daily hits from Google and Bing.

And I am grateful to Lisa’s friend Kathryn for bringing cupcakes to our little “celebration.” Grief Cupcakes totally hit the spot.