Weddings and Other Sacred Events

My sister’s wedding was beautiful, spiritual, and full of love and hope much like my two must have been. I remember the first one fondly and have for some time. Even when things were the worst between us, I never hated any of the memories of him or of what we did. But the second, the one closest to heart, is also the most painful to remember. I find myself loathing those memories as they pop up. And I don’t want to. I want them to remain, as they are, sweet and pristine and full of the laughing and fun that filled that second time around. Like the fact we almost got run over by a train on the way back from picking up the flowers because he was so nervous to be married. It was the second time around for both of us and the wedding was exactly what each of us wanted. Small. Simple. Beautiful. But we acted as a couple that had not been around the block. Perhaps marriage does that to you. Makes you sweet and innocent again. I want that memory to be forever wonderful. Protected under a glass done. The taste of the cake with its raspberry crème filling, the vows he said to me, his voice strong in spite of being so nervous his hands were shaking. The cigar he and my mother shared.

But it is difficult not to color the distant past with the recent past. Perhaps it is because of the way things happened. How he chose to implode so rapidly and without warning. Removing himself from our lives so utterly that the void was as vast as an ocean. Didn’t he understand that an implosion of that magnitude warranted an equal and opposite explosion in my life. Something had to fill the void and what did was pain and sadness, loneliness beyond anything ever felt and all the while him, running and laughing as if it were his wedding night. Spending on fancy places to stay, good things to eat, going to those places with her that I had always wanted to go. The crash and reverberation was so fast and large that I felt as if I would never recover.

Things are still exploding, expanding to fill that void. This hole that he left threatens to chew up all of the good memories, falling into it like a sinkhole, flowing to the bottom to collect and drown in each other as if it is only the hole that is important anymore. Is it the same for him? Has this disaster touched him, made him see that this was not the right way to do things? Is it stupid of me to think that someday he will face me in person and explain himself?

I think to some of our recent correspondences where he asks for a trade of equipment he thinks I might still have (stuff, I have to write here, that he left behind and told me on several occasions was my replacement for what he did and for him). It was true, he did have something I wanted and I wanted to give him everything I had left even the hole in my heart and the burring memories of our good times. But when it came down to money I knew I was lost. I thought about all of the money I have spent over the past few months to clean up the mess he has left. I got too tired to continue the talk and stopped. I came up with things like; well I am paying 126 a month to keep you in health insurance because I wanted to make sure you were OK. The lack of appreciation for that is deafening in its silence. I don’t want it to get petty because it so easily can. I want to hold onto the memories that were good and remember him as we were and as we loved and push the thing that he did aside, bury and burn it as I have the person he is now so that it won’t negatively affect me for the rest of my life. He is still a person, not dead, still out there being somewhat who I thought he was, but he is not my person, he is not my husband or friend. He belongs only to himself, not even to that other woman who helped him in his implosion, not to the other woman who claimed to love me and wrote me love notes, the one I was desperate to be friends with not realizing that for her, friendship was just a disguise like a Halloween mask warn at Easter.

I took pictures at my sister’s wedding. Smiling faces, tear streaked cheeks. Hands held across emotions. People bathed in and held together by the feelings that weddings bring up. There were some there like me. Happy for the couple but tinged with sadness at their own misfortune. None of us can help but feel that. My own mother, I could see, missed my dad at that moment. Looking across the isle at the mother and father of the groom, able to be next to each other at this event she had to attend alone. If my father were still alive I would not talk to him about what had happened to me. He would hear what happened and be sad and angry in the only way a Norwegian farmer can be, with silence. We wouldn’t discuss it, instead he would tell me stories and say odd things and be more himself then himself to make me feel better. Some of that connection between us had been lost over the years that I was away from home. He had grown closer to my sister, the one he knew would stay, but my father and I were so alike it was impossible for us not to communicate our feelings to each other, even if it wasn’t through words.

I talk to him still. I think of him many mornings, as I get up early to write, knowing he was his best self early in the morning when the sun started to color the eastern edge of our land. Even in his later years, living in town, napping often, the bones and blood refusing to spring awake as they once did when he was young, He was more himself at six in the morning then at any other time of day. I should have called him more, visited more often, made more time to just be with him. The last occasion I spent time alone with him was my first wedding, which is now so many years ago I have a hared time believing it. I had friends staying out at the farm and he wanted to take a ride out there. I was busy with wedding preparation but for some reason I decided to go.

We started off from the house in town, not taking the road over the big hill the one that gives you a panoramic view of my hometown from the top, but going straight. It was my favorite way, more windy with a little bridge and a tree, but we did not turn at the regular turn, instead we kept going straight past McCully’s place and truing down the section line that held the dam where we fished for bullheads a few times. I am not sure why we stopped there. Maybe Dad just wanted to be with me at a place he knew I liked. Where he remembered me as a girl, where I was dependent on him to get the fish of the hook. It took me years to realize that no one can really see into your heart unless you let them and on that day, my dad was open. His heart was full of love for his family and for the love he knew we would have in our lives.

But he was sad too, he was wiser then I knew. I feel like he predicted that I would have a dramatic life and he took me to that fishing hole to remind me that there are safe places in the world and in ourselves that only we know and that sometime we would need to go there weather we were happy or sad. I hope the outcome for my sister is much more the conventional long and happy life with a loving and devoted partner then mine has been. I feel more akin to one of the odd cases people have in their families. The crazy auth Ethel to whom something happened and the children of the children of the siblings of aunt Ethel forever wonder how she got the moniker “crazy” and what the stories were the surrounded her life.

My soon to be second ex-husband asked me to stop writing about him or at the very least not sharing that writing, but I feel like this is the only way I will not become that crazy aunt Ethel. The one who dies in some far off place, alone with no children to tell her story. The family gets pieces of her. Her three cats need a home now; her sparkly red Dorothy shoes need to go to Good Will. Her hundreds of wigs sent somewhere for children to play dress up with. But none of the stories of those things will ever be told because Ethel, because I, did not have anyone to tell them. My cats all have names and personalities. My Dorothy shoes are beautiful and make me feel like I walk on air even though they hurt like hell. My wigs turn me into a different person each with a distinct personality. The stories of why I have those are mixed up with and because of the story of him. I can’t extract that form me. Not now and perhaps not ever. This is the explosion that is filling the implosion. My dad knew this then, at that spot and I know this now.

For the rest of my life, weather it be a car ride, a funeral, a wedding, a concert, I will have memories of him and they will make me feel and I must write them or I will forget and they will forget and everything will become nothing instead of becoming one of those sacred events that marks each of our lives.