Grief, Archeology, Walking

Grief lives in so many places.  This post is about two grief enhancers:  the lists and the walking.  

Will was always a bit obsessive-compulsive about lists.  When we would travel, he would make lists of things to see -- that was his job.  When he was a student and then when he was a teacher, he would make lists of topics and lists of texts to study or teach.  Then, sometime in the late 1990s, early Aughts, he started making lists of all the books he read and movies he saw in retirement.  I didn't know he was making these lists. I happened on them as I was digging out the house just before and after his death.

This list-making had useful aspects.  During his retirement in Bend he would make a list every month of what I owed for my half of our living costs -- my half of the house for that month plus groceries, water, heating, etc.  And early on after his move here he created a card catalogue of all the movies he'd recorded off of TBS and then TCM.  But I have no idea what he did with the many lists of books and films.  Did he use them to remind himself of what he'd done?  Seeing these lists has evoked sadness because they remind me of how little I understood him, how little he actually volunteered about his interior life.

Last weekend I found out that grief also lives on a hillside, like a troll under a bridge. I decided to walk downtown for the first time in a couple of years.  I took the path down the big hill at the foot of my block.  We called it, "The Alps."  As I started down it, my chest and stomach started to hurt as I remembered walking down the hill together, then the times when I worried about him making it home and went looking for him, then about how at the funeral my Celebrant mentioned the people who would see him wearing his red coat and walking around town.  These are the mental cowpaths of grief making itself present and known. My grief therapist has warned me about these paths and told me to be aware when my brain seeks the pain that it knows.  So I noticed and went ahead and felt the pain and then told it that I was going to continue on my walk and find a hot dog somewhere down at the Bend Summer Fest.