Joy and Pain

I’m going to create a journal that has JOY on one side and PAIN on the other, and then I could just make a list.

While I was in Arizona for this past visit with Tin, our cat, Lord Chill – Chilly, Chilly Willy Ding Dong, the chillest dude on the planet – went missing. I got home with my heart in my throat wondering and worried. Then as I was checking Wild Thing for my maiden voyage, the battery seemed dead. My friend, Craig came over to take a look at it. He took the battery to the shop to charge overnight so that I could leave the next morning.

While he was gone, my neighbor called, she had found Lord Chill under her house, dead.

From Friday to Thursday, I had kept hope alive that Chilly would make his way back. That he would curl up on the back of the couch with his paw brushing my neck and then would follow me into the bedroom and curl up behind my knees while I slept. I pictured Chilly as he and my youngest dog, Olly, would run through the house and play their game of dog and cat. But on Thursday, I went to bed bereft of one good memory – instead, I held grief like a stone in my chest.

There was only one person I wanted to call – my mother.

On a parent coaching call, we talked about research that shows a mother’s voice is like dopamine. If a baby is fussy, a mother could just speak to them from across the room and the sound of her voice would soothe. But as that same child crosses the 13-year-old threshold, a mother’s voice has no effect. As in ZERO. As a matter of fact, a stranger will light up the dopamine in a teenager’s brain 100% more than a mother’s voice. This is a built-in aid to individuate and separate for the teen.

But I’m here to say that my mom died when I was 50, and I still longed to hear her voice on the other end of the phone. She would have felt the loss of a beloved cat and cried with me. So perhaps, there comes a time where that voice does become soothing again. Perhaps, it is only the memory of my mom’s voice from childhood that gets activated when I am trying to self-soothe.

After I hung up with my neighbor, I called my friend and other neighbor, Terry. He came over and crawled under Jenny’s house as I sat splayed legs in her driveway balling like a house on fire. Terry wrapped Chilly’s body and dug a grave by the LOVE sign. I said a few words about a cat, whose owners didn’t want him, and Tin and I, who were mourning our other cat (Little Harry) who we had loved so much and didn’t want another cat, and how that is how we met Chilly – he needed us and we needed him and we came to be a family and how much love Chilly had brought out of us during our time of grief – it’s amazing how much you are capable of loving after losing.

That evening, during Lava Lounge, friends came to celebrate and dance with me for my impending birthday, and Terry brought over a cake he had made for me – a praline lasagna gluten free yumness. Last year, his wife, Donnell had made my gluten free cake. How well I am loved is never subject for debate.

The next morning, with a stone in my heart, I backed up my car and put the hitch on Wild Thing and my friend, Kim and I drove away honking the horn, determined to have a good time. It was my 66th birthday, and my bucket list of owning a camper and heading to the woods had become a reality after all. We went to Oak Mountain State Park in Pelham, AL, about four and a half hours on the road as we moved into hills with lush foliage lining the highway.

The weather called for rain every day. And rain it did. We had just set up camp and were getting ready to go explore when the downpour came, and didn’t stop. Kim braced herself to grill our dinner with a huge umbrella I had brought mostly for sun shelter. In our camper, we had our food, our books, our light, and our laughter and the rain didn’t bother us one bit.

Like gals are want to do on any trip together, Kim and I talked. We hiked and got lost on a small trail – like seven miles lost and talked. My geographical disability was well known but Kim had hid hers. We walked in silence. We sat on a log and meditated to Tiger Singleton. We walked and talked. My niece and her wife who lives 20 minutes away hiked in to get us because there was no coming out where it wouldn’t take a 12-mile hike. It was all marvelous.

In the coziness of the next downpour, Kim and I ate another dinner grilled by Kim in the rain, and we talked about our hearts. Kim shared more details of a heartbreak while I shared a heart’s desire with her. And when our sated, content, and happy hearts were full, and we leaned into the evening’s slumber. My phone dinged. It was a text from a person I have opened myself too – been vulnerable with – and the message sent quietly closed a door in my heart. Kim was incensed, while I was okay.

We drove home on Sunday. We both sang the words to every song on my playlists. Kim has a beautiful singing voice — me, not so much (well, truthfully, not at all). But what I love about Kim is that she doesn’t mind me singing full throttle along with her.

The next morning, I got up to write in my blog. I had feelings pouring out of me, energizing myself out of the slippery slope to numbness, and I felt secure enough to sit inside all the feels – the grief of having lost Chilly, the sadness that Tin was having a rough week and didn’t want to talk to me after I left, the joy of having a successful maiden voyage with Wild Thing, the pain of a connection to someone else narrowing, the joy of having backed the camper up all by myself (confidently), and as I sat at my desk to write, I found out someone had bought my url – dangermond.org – that I have owned for over two decades.

As I wrestled all morning with trying to recover my domain (isn’t there a metaphor in this statement?), I realized how okay I was with all of this. I grieved losing Chilly who had brought so much love, and I was so happy to have had Chilly in my life for seven of his 13 years. I was disappointed that someone I had let myself be vulnerable with had sent a text message to me that made me sad. I had spent two decades laying myself vulnerable under a domain of a last name that is not even mine – it was a name I married into – and kept – and now will be migrating dangermond.org over to racheldangermond.com. And hey, I’m okay with this.

I’m following my own Route 66, a journey that has taken me over hills and down holllers, that has stretched from heartache to belly laughs, and at the end of the day on my 66th birthday – May 2, 1959, I marvel at my life. There is a certain joy in knowing there are those people and those places that still light a fire in me even while a hard rain falls.

Remember when you first found love how you felt so good
Kind that last forever more so you thought it would
Suddenly the things you see got you hurt so bad, so bad
How come the things that makes us happy makes us sad?
It seems to me

Joy and pain are like sunshine and rain
Joy and pain are like sunshine and rain, woo

Love can be bitter, love can be sweet
Sometimes devotion, and sometimes deceit
The ones that you care for give you so much pain
Oh, but it’s alright, they’re both one in the same

~Frankie Beverly and Maze