After the big thing, the little things

The bananas have been sitting on the kitchen bench for over a week. She sees them when she rinses her coffee cup, and when she’s making the kids’ lunches on the days she’s working, and she sees them on the days she’s not working. They shrink just a little each day and she wonders if she should do something with them, but she’s not much into banana bread and her mind won’t stretch to more than that.

She gets furious with the toaster. It burnt her toast twice last week, partly because she was distracted and partly because it has a mind of its own that switches back to level 6 when she’s not looking.

And socks. How many feet are in this house? And the way they just expect to be paired up like nothing happened. Seriously!

Because, she’s discovered that after the big thing – the really big thing – come the little things, the mundane things. The MyGov password reset loop. Dealing with the bank. Not knowing how to deal with the bank. The text from a well-meaning friend saying “let me know if you need anything” when she’s already forgotten how to need things. The email reminder that the phone bill is overdue.

The mountain of tiny normal things that didn’t get the memo that her world had changed.

Maybe the little things are a kind of mercy. Something for her brain to busy itself with while the rest of her recalibrates. You can’t solve death, but you can wonder why the kids have suddenly stopped eating bananas. You can’t rewrite the awful bits, but you can yell at the toaster for making anything more than warm bread.

There’s no real point to this. I’m not even sure why I started writing, except that a few weeks ago she said ‘you haven’t written a blog post in ages’. It’s taken me a while to get my thinking straight and my head in the right place.

My thinking is this: if I ever was, I’m no longer convinced by people who respond to loss with wisdom or insight. I’m not convinced that grief makes you wise. It certainly makes you sad and angry and empty and …. The world, in its relentless striving for normalcy, doesn’t stop to accommodate the strange new reality, or the sadness or anger or emptiness or ….

It just keeps serving up the little things: the unmatched socks and toast that’s too brown and overdue phone bills and washing that won’t do itself. As if that’s all there is to be done.

And maybe for now it is.