fixations and the weather
This morning I woke up sick to my stomach. That happens sometimes. Today it feels like the nausea of regret. My brain will fixate on something specific until it makes me sick. This morning, it was over something as stupid as our security cameras. Each night the camera in our son's room would record 12 second clips of his bedtime routine, of my husband and him wrestling or making shadow puppets or pretending to be AT-ATs. After Pete died, I assumed I would always have this arsenal of memories to hang onto, but by the time I went to check, I discovered that they were only stored in the cloud for 14 days. They were all gone. The only one I have saved is a clip from what would have been their last night together. And today, that thought makes me want to puke.
On mornings like this, I tend to wake up to snow. It’s snowing more and more now. Ever since he died, the deeper my emotions go, the wilder the weather gets. It’s so hard not to take it as a sign. I know it’s crazy to believe my dead husband controls the weather, but I’d be lying if I said the thought wasn’t comforting to me. Snowstorms have been following me wherever I go, from MA the weekend we moved out, to upstate NY when we visited for a few days, and now to southern VT. When I am devastated, the weather always seems to react appropriately.
The first night I spent alone, when he was still in the hospital and we all still had hope, the doctors called me in the middle of the night to rob me of it and tell me I should probably say goodbye. There was nothing more they could do. When I managed to fall asleep at 4am, I had a vision of someone pointing to our backdoor security camera. I jolted awake and quickly opened the app to review the footage from overnight. At the exact moments I would have been taking the call from the hospital, there were light flurries outside. Almost indistinguishable to the naked eye. But our camera caught them, when it wouldn’t normally catch such minor movement. It was him, I know it was. It was him saying: “I’m no longer in that hospital bed. I am here, all around you.”
And so now, every time it snows (which has been just about daily in some form since he died, no matter where I am), it feels like it’s him. Some days are small flurries, blink-and-you-miss-it. Other days have been record-breaking nor’easters. Today it is big, fat flakes coming down fast, whipping around in the wind. I haven’t yet learned how to decipher the differences, but I tell myself that they all mean something different. And if some people can believe that he is in heaven, relaxing with our late cat, I can imagine that he is here with me in the snowflakes. He is also here in the ice storms and the rain, and in the spring he’ll be here in the mud on the ground and the flowing springs.