The Things That Shouldn't Hurt

When Ordinary Things Become Doorways to the People We Still Love

 By Lisa Franco Alexander

Yesterday, I went to a Todo a Dollar store here in Panama to pick up a few little things for an upcoming trip.

I was standing at the register when I saw it.

An orange Hot Wheels car.

Nothing extraordinary. Just a tiny toy car displayed at eye level beside the cash register.

And suddenly, tears were running down my face.

“Joshy, look!” I said out loud.

For one second, I almost told the cashier to add it to my purchase.

Then I stopped myself.

Why?

More torture?

What would I do with another reminder of my offspring—a child I love and cannot hold?

I left the store quickly.

On the way to my car, I passed an ice cream stand. The day before, I had been looking through photographs of my granddaughter and me for a video I am making. In one of them, she was happily eating an ice cream cone beside me.

I kept walking.

Then I stopped and turned around.

I bought an ice cream cone and stood there eating it while tears poured down my face.

There is something almost absurd about grief like this.

A Hot Wheels car.

An ice cream cone.

Neither should be capable of bringing a grown woman to her knees.

But complicated loss doesn't always announce itself before it enters the room.

Sometimes it costs a dollar and hangs beside a cash register.

When I got home, I pulled out my suitcases to begin packing for an upcoming trip.

Inside were bubble wrap, vacuum bags and plastic shrinkable bags left from another packing day—the day I packed my belongings and left Cleveland.

Those suitcases had carried pieces of a life I had not wanted to leave.

And there it all was again.

My grandchildren.

My son.

My city.

The fire station where my son worked, close enough that I could walk there.

Another ordinary object had become a doorway.

By then, I was emotionally spent. I lay on my bed for hours reading posts in grandparent alienation and estranged-parent support groups.

Story after story of devastating loss. Parents and grandparents trying to put into words a kind of pain that those who haven't lived it can't possibly fathom.

And mixed among them were comments so cruel that I could barely believe what I was reading.

Unconscionable cruelty directed at people who were already hurting.

I found myself fighting back—hard.

Eventually, I shut it off. I couldn't absorb another person's pain or another cruel word.

I switched to regular Facebook, hoping for something harmless.

Instead, I found The Ohio State University.

I came across a passing reference to the more than century-old Michigan–Ohio rivalry, and it immediately made me smile.

I'm a Buckeye through and through now, but I wasn't always. I became one when my son became one.

Ohio State had already meant so much to Mickey because of his relationship with his grandfather. Then he went to OSU himself and became a star rugby player there.

I was living in Toronto at the time, and I never missed his games. I drove to all of them. For away games, I stayed at the team hotels, which meant more precious time together over dinner, breakfast, laughter and whatever else those trips brought us.

When Mickey was a freshman and had his first away game against Michigan, I messaged his coach, as I always did, asking for the hotel information.

His coach called me.

“We do NOT stay in Michigan. EVER.”

He told me that if their van or bus broke down, they would tow it out of Michigan—and to make sure I filled my gas tank and bought my food, beer, snacks, whatever I needed before I entered Michigan.

That was when this California girl truly learned about The Rivalry.

It was a doubleheader. Mickey's A Team played first, so afterward there were a few hours when we could spend some extra time together while the B Team played.

I told his coach I wanted to drive Mickey around that enormous Michigan campus so we could see it.

Normally?

Absolutely not.

But his coach knew Mickey and me. He knew how close we were and how much every extra second together meant to us.

So he made an exception.

Even some of the other parents smiled and shook their heads with a good-natured That's not fair—while somehow seeming to approve at the same time.

One of Mickey's teammates, who later became godfather to my third grandchild, once said to his father and some of the other dads:

“I'm close to my mom too...but NOBODY is as close as Lisa and Mickey. Nobody.”

That was us.

So there we were, two Buckeyes, actually sightseeing in Michigan.

Well, my rugby-playing son was hungry after his game, so we went into a beautiful sandwich shop for a big, fresh meat sandwich.

There were people in line ahead of us and behind us.

When it was our turn, the three sweet, soft-spoken women behind the counter took one look at our Ohio State clothing.

“Sorry, we're closed.”

They actually put a CLOSED sign on the counter in front of us.

I thought they were joking.

They weren't.

We turned to the people behind us and told them the shop had just closed.

Nobody moved.

As Mickey and I walked toward the door, we heard:

“Next...”

We smiled big.

We loved it.

Yesterday, as my fingers flew across the keyboard telling that story, I was right back there with him—smiling, laughing, reliving every ridiculous, wonderful second of it. I could see us again.

Mickey and me.

Those drives. Those games. Those hotel breakfasts. The laughter. The stories. Those precious extra hours together.

The kind of closeness his teammates and their parents talked about.

The kind his coach understood well enough to break an unwritten Buckeye rule just to give a mother and son a little more time together.

I could feel the joy of being his mom and sharing that part of his life with him.

God, we had fun together.

I smiled through the entire memory.

For those few moments, it was a glorious reminiscence.

It was us again.

“Lisa and Mickey”

Then I hit “send.”

And the memory slammed shut.

There was no Mickey beside me to laugh about it with.

Helplessness set in. My jaw clenched. The muscles in my neck strained as a raw, involuntary sound escaped me—a deep moan from somewhere in my gut.

It wasn't simply crying.

It was the sound of a human being worn down by continuous, unyielding emotional suffering.

Moments earlier, I had been beaming.

Now I felt lifeless. Hopeless.

Because this is one of the cruelest contradictions of estrangement:

Sometimes the merriest of memories become instruments of torture.

Not because they were painful.

Because they were beautiful.

Because the love was real.

Because the closeness was real.

Because the life you are grieving was once so very, very real.

The happiest memories can hurt the most.

After the tears stopped, my resilience set in.

I sat at my desk, lifted my head, and let my creative writing become my battlefield.

Nothing seemed to land on my screen properly. I kept trying, determined to push through the frustration, until anger finally overwhelmed me.

Finally, I gave up—and for a moment resembled the “quitter” I have never been.

So I surrendered the battlefield, turned on the television, and tried to lose myself in football.

The Raiders were playing the 49ers.

Of course they were.

Another doorway.

I grew up in California, where Raiders versus 49ers was never just another football game in our family. Half of us wore silver and black. The other half wore red and gold. Whenever those two teams met, parents, siblings, uncles and cousins could be separated by hundreds or thousands of miles and somehow still end up together inside the same game.

And my offspring were woven through all of it.

Mickey had been a Raiders fan since he was a little boy. He and I traveled far and wide to watch our Raiders play. We watched them on television together. Then my grandchildren became Raiders fans too.

Football wasn't distracting me from my family.

It had just brought my family into the room.

And something inside me gave way.

The tears came violently now—heavy, heaving sobs that folded my body beneath their weight.

I cried for Mickey.

I cried for my grandchildren.

I cried for the family that Raiders versus 49ers had somehow gathered into one room again, while I sat there without them.

“I can't do this,” I said aloud.

“I can't do this anymore.”

I wasn't talking about football.

I was talking about surviving a day in which every place I turned seemed to contain someone I loved but could no longer reach.

I cried.

And I cried.

My sister, only twenty-two months older than me, has known me nearly every day of my life.

After the estrangement, she would call to check on me, bewildered by what she was witnessing.

“I don't remember you crying your entire life—not since you were a baby. You are the toughest person I know. And now, every time I talk to you, you're crying.”

Neither of us recognized this version of me.

That is what this kind of pain can do to a human being.

And still, the day wasn't finished with me.

I couldn't watch football.

I couldn't look at a toy car.

I couldn't eat ice cream.

I couldn't open a suitcase.

I couldn't tell a funny story about Ohio State.

Everything seemed to lead back to them.

That night, there was extraordinary lightning over Panama. The sky flashed over the mountains behind the house and over the ocean on the other side.

Earlier that day, I had found two feathers in two different places at two different times of day.

I wondered about them.

I wondered about everything.

And then I slept.

For the first time in longer than I can remember, I dreamed vividly of my son.

Not the little boy I raised.

The man he is today.

I was somewhere with other authors, researching and writing about alienation and estrangement, when someone said:

“Lisa, someone is here for you.”

I turned.

There he was.

I gasped and stood up.

And my son walked directly to me and wrapped his arms around me.

He squeezed me exactly the way he used to whenever I drove to Ohio State to watch him play rugby.

In the dream, I could feel him.

His strong arms.

His warm face against mine.

And somewhere inside all of it came four words:

“Never say never, Papa.”

They are words from An American Tail; the first movie I ever took my son to see in a theater.

He was born the year it came out.

Years later, I watched that same movie beneath blanket forts with my grandchildren. They knew it as their daddy's favorite childhood movie.

My granddaughter cried when the separated family looked toward the same moon.

My grandson cried when Fievel was finally reunited with his father and said those words:

“Never say never, Papa.”

Just as his father had cried decades before him.

For years, the moon had been part of our family language. Whenever my son and I had to be apart when he was little, we chose a time to look at it together.

Same moon.

Different places.

Still connected.

I woke from the dream with my heart pounding and went outside looking for it.

The moon wasn't there.

Eventually, I went back to sleep.

This morning, despite everything else I should have been doing, I began making bread.

My fists pushed down into the dough.

And suddenly I could see another pair of hands.

Joshy's.

Little hands kneading bread beside mine.

And I cried again.

This is the part of estrangement and ambiguous loss that can be so difficult to explain.

The people we love aren't contained inside photographs or anniversaries.

They live in our nervous systems.

Our traditions.

Our football teams.

Our recipes.

Our songs.

Our cities.

Our movies.

Our suitcases.

They live inside things that once seemed completely ordinary.

And sometimes the question isn't:

Why can't you move on?

The question is:

How do you move through a world filled with evidence that you loved someone with your whole life?

I don't know what my dream meant.

I don't know whether the feathers meant anything.

I don't know why those particular memories arrived together on that particular night.

I only know that for a few extraordinary moments, I held my son again.

And when I woke, the separation was still real.

But so was the love.

Maybe that is one of the hardest truths of complicated loss:

Love does not disappear simply because someone does.

Today, I will pack my suitcase.

I will get ready for my trip.

I will step onto an airplane and continue living the life that is still here waiting for me.

And somewhere inside that suitcase will be the memory of another one.

Somewhere inside my hands will be Joshy's little hands kneading bread.

Somewhere inside an ice cream cone will be my granddaughter's smile.

Somewhere inside a Raiders game will be my son sitting beside me.

And somewhere, whether I can see it tonight or not, there will still be a moon.

I don't know what comes next.

But perhaps the little mouse who made my son cry all those years ago left me with the only words I need today:

Never say never.

Lisa Franco Alexander

Heart's Renewal