Through a dimly lit haze, I see myself in my adult son’s psych ward room, gathering his things into a paper bag so we can check out. I place his clothes, extra pair of shoes, personal items into a grocery sack because the beautiful twilight iridescent duffle bag (mine) that they arrived in seven days prior has now gone missing according to the nursing staff. On the flat wooden rail atop the half wall separating the wash sink from his sleeping area is a tiled, rectangular trivet sort of thing.
“Nick,” I say, “is this yours?”
He looks vacantly and replies flatly, “I made you that for Christmas.”
I recall feeling flustered, and stammered “Oh,” and quickly drop it too into the bag, into darkness, as if I had not seen it, as if it had not just happened, so that the next morning, Christmas morning—for which I’d always gone to great lengths to keep gifts as ‘surprises’ for everyone—could be filled with this ‘surprise’ from Nick. Something to be like the way things used to be, before the world became a foreign land filled with psychiatric medical personnel and psychotropic drugs. Before the world became devoid of my laughing, twinkle-eyed, emotionally intelligent, loving son replaced by a cardboard cutout of his former self. I NEEDED that now! So I made no fuss then, no ‘oh how beautiful,’ just a quick exit into the bag’s black depths.
The next day ‘surprise’ never came, lost in travel to a family gathering four hours away. Three days after Christmas, a return to the psych ward for suicidal ideation. And two days after his release a week later, a car accident (was it purposeful?) that ended his hellish nightmare and began mine.
I can’t remember when after his death the trivet found its way back into the light. I do remember it served as a base for salt and pepper shakers on the kitchen table for a while and later must’ve gotten moved to a back corner of a kitchen counter where it was found months to years later, covered over by time and neglect. Sticky grime marred the once shiny tiny square tiles, hazing over their pastel candy colors.
It was only in the renovation of the kitchen that this artifact from long ago was unearthed, the last physical gift from my son. It made me uneasy for so many reasons. Where it was made to start with—in a psych ward for christ’s sake, by my beloved son! Secondly, his imagined state of mind at the time, replicated by what I judged to be deranged, random placement of the colored tiles. And lastly, the first time I saw it and learned it was a gift for me, in the psych ward, for Christ’s sake, my beloved son!
He never actually had the chance to give it to me, if he would have even thought of it. I never got to exclaim over it, to thank him for it, even though secretly I condemned it for being so infantile when compared to his other intellectual and emotional gifts before our world turned upside down—his jazz profundity, his Spanish fluency, his humor and kindness and wisdom and unconditional love. All I could see was its lack in every possible way.
But having stumbled upon it a third time, I looked curiously at it, turning it this way and that, resisting again the strong urge to throw it away. I moved to the sink, deciding finally to renovate it too. Carefully, I began to wash away the four? five? years of gunk, cautious of the stained red-brown pine border, knowing that if that got wet, it could easily bleed into the while plaster holding the tiles in place. Slowly, I took the tip of a moist dish towel over pink and yellow squares, a larger black one stuck oddly in the corner, and the mint green ones that especially caught my eye. When the task was completed, their mirror finish shone once again, and I leaned it against the dish soap bottle to dry.
A few days later, Barbara, a gifted painter friend with a sharp eye for color and spacial relationships came to visit. She went to get a drink of water and saw the trivet still leaning there.
“Oh Nancy,” she said, “that’s so beautiful, it’s like a small painting. Did you make it?”
What, I thought? I turned to see what she was referring to, and saw the trivet, and then looked back to her, not understanding at first. Her words caught me completely off guard. I saw only warmth in her gray eyes, the appraisal there honest. My heartbeat became a heavy thud. It was as if time stood still, precariously balanced between past and present. Something shifted inside of me, rearranging my inner landscape.
Then, slowly, I started to become aware of the warming late afternoon sunlight streaming across the kitchen sink and the leaning trivet. Time began moving again as understanding flowed through me. I looked up at her, and saw only kindness, and said, “No, Nick did.” Tears flooded my eyes washing away the log that had been stuck there, and a huge burden was lifted from my heart, the gift finally received.
Nancy Halgren, a past contributor to Streetlight, tells us that this Fall she planted over 210 bulbs around her yard and pond, an act of radical creativity. Toward the end of this endeavor, she realized two things as she sat one evening, rereading the planting instructions: 1) Many of the bulbs, because of their size (smaller than a quarter) could have been planted two to a hole, cutting down the number of holes needing to be dug and, 2) she also came to understand why she had ordered so many bulbs—she was creating her own Elysian Fields—blessed fields of the afterlife in Greek mythology, for her children.
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