kaylee’s log
When you accrue enough years, key events become Day Zero instead of birthdates and that ilk. Or maybe the “First___” events become so numerous that there has to be a top ten list.
Your death in 2020 is a key event that does this.
It is May, 2024 and I am getting re-married in 3 months. The flurry of activity is thick, full of life, and I fill every corner with determined mirth. You quietly stay in the shadows between sleep and wakefulness and you take less and less solid shapes every time I cast my mind towards you.
I am listening to an expert talk about how the mind has 90 seconds to process the emotions triggered by traumatic events. Anything after those 90 seconds is a decision of our mind to perpetuate that thought, that feeling.
The horrid woman on the train from 2020 still wields a kind of power over me. It is one of my lowest points in dignity–one I swear to avoid doing to other people no matter what.
She complained loudly that people should be allowed to sit on seats—bags should not be placed on seats. On paper she and I hold the same views. Except that on that day, the bulky bag beside me on the seat which I had dazedly placed there held your clothes. I had left the Christie Hospital with your clothes, taken the bus to Manchester Piccadilly, and the train to Glossop. Deep in my body was a shut-out voice saying that you were slipping away. A few weeks later this voice would be vindicated. In that dazed state, I could not bear to put the bag of your precious, precious clothes on a train floor. They deserved better. You deserved better. You deserved to keep on living. I could not lose you. The fear was crippling. And this woman was throwing my own standards for train seating in my face. Something broke in me and I could not fight for myself. I slowly put the massive bag and placed it on my lap and stayed like that the whole trip back into Glossop, my legs getting more and more numb. I had nothing with which to fight back, or even look in any direction outside of my glazed eyes thankfully looking out the window so that I didn’t have to look at the people who judged my thoughtlessness and lack of social graces on the train that evening.
“Haply I think on thee—and then my state, like to the lark at break of day arising from sullen earth sings hymns at Heaven’s gate! For thy sweet love remembered, such wealth brings that then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
Friends and whoever is reading this—When you ever feel bereft of dignity, remember that it happens to us all. May you avoid perpetuating that and instead treat strangers with the dignity that all human beings deserve.
Climb this tree 