Let me set the scene…
I’m sitting on a bench outside of a wine bar in St. Helena, CA. Sometimes I just like to sit — no phone, no distractions… Just being still while everything else is moving around me gives me such a calming rush (if that makes any sense!)
There’s a jewelry store next to the wine bar and a woman walks out. She’s wearing plum-colored jeans and a thick charcoal-colored leather jacket. She seems like she might be in her 60’s and she’s got on hip sunglasses and she wears her silvery shoulder-length hair with lots of big, bouncy curls. My first impression is: “Gosh. She’s a handsome woman.”
I expect this woman to just walk passed me on the bench, but instead, I watch as she makes a direct bee-line for me, and before she even reaches me on the bench, she’s already engaged in a full-on conversation with me!
“You must think I’m crazy for wearing this jacket,” she says as she makes her way toward me.
I had noticed the coat, but it didn’t really register yet that a leather coat when it’s still close to 90 degrees outside would make a person “crazy.” But as the woman started into this amazing stream of verbalized thoughts — that didn’t seem to require any contributions from me to keep them flowing — the word “crazy” floated through my mind, but it had nothing to do with the jacket she was wearing.
One of my absolute favorite writing descriptions from journalism school came to mind as this woman continued to talk. This professor taught us that too many details and a lack of clarity in your writing would force people to feel like you were asking them to take a “sip out of a firehose.” As this woman proceeded to tell me all about her jacket and the day she was having, I felt the nozzle of her firehose widening as she hit me with more details than I could possibly swallow even if I was gulping instead of sipping!
Very little was required of me during this exchange — just my presence. The woman was oddly adorable in her delivery, and while I did keep wondering if she was growing hot in her leather coat, she didn’t seem to be aware of anything outside of her stream of thoughts. She covered a lot of ground…
Including the fact that she was grieving the death of her husband.
As soon as that detail surfaced in the deluge of thoughts she was pouring out to me, I fully understood the situation, and so I shifted my hips around on the slotted wooden bench, which was the only signal she needed to sit down next to me for a while.
It’s funny how sometimes only a stranger can help you cull your honesty. I have friends and family that I know I can be transparently open and honest with, but I’ve had moments in my life — especially when I was grieving — where I could only admit things to a stranger that I couldn’t even admit to myself.
Right after my mom passed away, things were very busy for me. My sister was pregnant with her first child, and my dad was struggling with a sudden kind of loss and loneliness he could hardly comprehend. So I was doing my best to fill the void for my sister and my dad — and so my grieving had to wait. My mom had asked me to watch over two of her favorite people while they started to grieve, and I took that request so seriously and as a true honor.
But one evening, about four months after my mother passed away, I was in the check-out line at the grocery store. I remember I was buying a carrot cake to take to a friend’s house. (This carrot cake was amazing — even though if you’ve been following my blog, if I were buying a cake for myself, it would’ve been a chocolate peanut butter cake all the way!)
After the person ahead of me paid and collected all of her groceries, it was just me and the check-out girl. No one was in line behind me, and the grocery store seemed oddly quiet. The conveyor-belt scooted my carrot cake up to the scanner, and that’s when I broke. I couldn’t hold in the tears anymore, and without warning or permission, I started to ugly-cry.
The check-out girl was probably my age at that time — which was mid-twenties — and I have this vivid image of her burned into my mind. She had a round face, and her hair was long and stringy. She needed her roots done very badly, but there was something so incredibly honest and open about the girl who was about to scan my carrot cake purchase.
I remember looking up at her with tear-filled eyes and just blurting out, “My mom died…”
The girl just looked at me with a pained stare, and she cocked her head to the side but said nothing. Then she reached down under the counter and pulled out a little pack of tissues — as if she had that pack stashed there just in case someone like me came along and started crying right in front of her. I took a tissue from the pack and dried my eyes. I’m sure I probably thanked her, and then I gave her the money for the cake and quickly left the store.
That moment happened nineteen years ago, but I still remember every part of that exchange as if it happened yesterday. It was absolutely cathartic, and I think it has stayed with me all of these years because, with that stranger, I was brutally honest with myself about how deeply the loss of my mother was hurting me in that moment. I wasn’t trying to protect anyone by hiding my feelings, and I wasn’t seeking words of comfort from someone who knows me. I was just pushing out my feelings, and all I needed was someone to catch them for me.
Nothing more…
That moment seems to always hover close to my awareness, but it nearly overwhelmed me with compassion as this leather-coat wearing widow started spilling her heart out to me on a wooden bench in the middle of Wine Country. I think knew all she needed was for a stranger to catch some of her grief so it wouldn’t fall away without notice.
In my experience, there’s something sacred about letting go of feelings about a person who has passed — it’s almost like you worry if you grieve a memory, it might leave you for good. So having someone there to catch the grief-wrapped memory without adding anything to it helps somehow.
Eventually, I had to leave this woman — Lou was picking me up and we had dinner plans. But I felt so many thoughts and feelings swirling in me after that very strange exchange. I never even caught this woman’s name. But I caught the name of her late husband…
