Today actually started in the middle of the night -- I woke up with the sensation that something bad was about to occur. You know that feeling where your heart starts pounding because there's some imminent threat you can't identify? Pulled me out of a dead sleep. So I lay under the blankets, holding my breath, listening. Then the earth started to roll, as it did during the earthquake last April, and like last time, I froze, even though I should have gotten up to stand in a doorway. It was the strangest sensation, feeling the mattress bucking underneath me and hearing things fall elsewhere in the apartment. Then the rolling stopped, and for the rest of the time before my alarm went off, I was semiconscious, body tensed, waiting for aftershocks.
When I woke up to the radio, though, there was no mention of any tremors (unlike last April, when they were the first item on the news). That's right, I was dreaming the whole time -- a dream of being awake in the here and now when I was actually unconscious in some parallel universe. Disturbing if not plain eerie. So that was an unsettling start to the day.
Things got better once I was up -- I breakfasted, read the news online, worked out, showered, did some reading and figured out what spring classes to register for. Talked to D briefly. I've missed him more than usual in the last week (I think the three-week stretches between visits have been getting tougher since the fall semester hasn't had any big breaks before Thanksgiving). We've been planning what to do while I'm in Seattle. Maybe some house hunting just to explore the market now that the economy has changed so much. Definitely a meeting with an attorney to set up our wills. We should have done this right when we got married, but I was applying to school, and he was looking for a job, and then we were moving me and then moving him and then commuting for two semesters and then cramming five weddings into our summer and now here we are. I know, no excuses. The plan is to start the paperwork over this vacation (we have an appointment in place) and finish it during winter break. Not that we have huge amounts of property to divvy up, but we would like to make sure it goes to the people we want it to go to instead of having the state make those decisions.
It's always a little weird talking about wills and such. The idea that one of us won't always be around is a strange and familiar thing at the same time. We've been apart for so much of our relationship that we're used to functioning without the other person there. But the idea of losing that person for good is still, of course, terrible -- and feared even more, on some levels, because the life we've wanted to begin together hasn't quite begun yet either. Hence the extra urgency to get the wills in place. We've talked about where and how we want to be buried, we know each other's favorite flower. I know it sounds morbid, but it's really not. We've just had enough time apart to know that time together is never long enough, so having all this out in the open kind of gets it settled and out of the way. Which means we can get on with enjoying our lives with each other.
After talking with D, I packed up to head to class. My students had their papers due today, so I knew attendance would be fairly high (part of the reason why I scheduled my teaching observation for today). I wasn't nervous about that, but I was a little worried when only half of the class had shown up by the time we were supposed to start. Almost everyone else got there within five minutes, though, so things looked like they were going to be fine. Then one of my girls arrived but only stuck her head in the doorway as we were getting discussion moving. She beckoned with her hand, asking me to go out into the hall with her.
I knew, before I left my seat, what she was going to tell me. This was the student whose family member was in a car accident not quite three weeks ago. I knew his condition was poor (he was thrown through his windshield when a driver rear-ended him on the highway, the student told me), and I was guessing that, since he hadn't woken up within the first week of the accident, his prognosis wasn't good. But it was still a shock, like getting all the air forcefully evacuated from my lungs, when she told me he was dead. He was her twin.
She handed me her paper at this point. I must have looked bewildered -- I couldn't believe she had come all the way to class just to turn it in (my policy is that written work has to be handed to me in person unless there are extenuating circumstances). I told her I was sorry and that we could talk privately in office hours tomorrow, if she was up to it, to determine what kind of arrangements she would need for the rest of the semester. I asked her if it was okay to give her a hug, and she said yes.
And then I had to go back into my classroom and pretend that everything was fine.
I know I never knew her brother, but the complete and utterly meaningless destruction of his life is the same sort of thing I've feared most for the people in my own life, especially now that they're scattered across the country. I can't say that I know what her loss feels like, but I've imagined it a thousand times over, every time I've left D at the airport, even though I've tried not to let my mind go there. So I wanted to feel sadness for her -- to honor her loss within my physical body, to recognize its weight in the pit of my stomach. But I had to stifle myself, cut the feeling off after my initial reactions (those can't be controlled). Doing that -- even if only temporarily, for the sake of my student's privacy and for the sake of conducting a productive class for fifteen other people -- felt wrong in some way. To be able to shut down instantaneously. Not to allow some molecule of grief to hover in my consciousness. It was almost inhuman. But it was either-or.
So now I'm putting all of that here, just to feel it at last. Enough from the universe, please. Enough for now.
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