Bright Young Women(27)
About ten women were clustered together in the corner of the living room, on their knees, heads bowed. Praying, I realized, and I felt my shoulders slump with disappointment. My Catholic high school had more or less expelled me.
Hearing us enter, the group broke apart to reveal the leader of their congregation—a woman in a beanbag chair, splaying open the lapels of her blouse to exhibit three thin gashes in her sternum. A black cat perched on the windowsill, licking clean his weapons.
“Nixon is an asshole,” the injured woman told Frances. She had long lemony hair parted down the middle, dark eyebrows, and dark brown eyes, like there was a protest going on inside her about whether or not she was truly a blonde. With her shirt pulled open like that, it was easy to see that she was small-breasted enough to not need a bra.
“There’s Neosporin under the sink in the kitchen,” Frances said. “Everyone, this is Ruth.”
The injured woman quipped, “Welcome to the party, Ruth,” then got up and went into the kitchen. She was tall, with a sporty, windburned quality about her, as though she had just stepped off the slopes after a long run. Like a complete idiot, I thanked her as she walked by. I could hear her low laugh from across the hall.
The other women got settled around the coffee table on floral pillows, chatting animatedly, in surprisingly chipper moods for having recently lost people they loved. A chalkboard on an easel bore a numbered list, the first two items already crossed out.
1. One thing you did that always made me laugh…
2. One thing you did that always made me angry…
Frances gestured for me to find a seat and took her place at the head of the coffee table. Everyone quieted down without needing to be asked.
“I want to briefly reintroduce myself and talk about what it is we do here,” Frances said. The other women glanced over at me and gave me polite, encouraging smiles. “My name is Frances Dunnmeyer, and I started the Complex Grief Group over ten years ago, after my husband died and I found myself feeling like no one else could possibly understand what I was going through. My late husband was not a bad person, but we were not in a good marriage, and the conflicting emotions that came up around his death were difficult to manage, even for me, and I’ve been a licensed therapist for twenty-five years. I started this group to help other women like me, women who are struggling to reconcile mourning the loss of someone you loved, who may have also been someone who hurt you, or treated you poorly, or held you back from realizing your full potential.”
Frances spoke directly to me now. “This is only the third time the group is meeting, so you aren’t far behind in our work. Each session, we concentrate on a prompt.” She indicated the chalkboard behind her. “The goal of the group is to tackle every prompt on the list, one for each week of the year, fifty-two in total. I say that you aren’t far behind in our work, because processing grief is some of the hardest work you’ll ever do. Time does not heal all wounds. Grief is just like a sink full of dirty dishes or a pile of soiled laundry. Grief is a chore you have to do, and it’s a messy one, at that.”
I read the crossed-out prompts with renewed interest. I had been upset to miss the first two weeks, but I had to admit I was relieved that I didn’t need to discuss my answer to the second one with the group. My father, whom I loved more than anything in this world, had made me very angry right before he died.
Then Frances said, “Ruth, I’d like you to answer the first two prompts in a journal entry, and we can discuss them privately over the next few weeks.”
Homework. Great.
The prompt for that evening read: My support system includes… Frances asked the woman to her left to start it off. She had big white teeth and a small, pointy nose, mere slits for nostrils. I found myself feeling concerned for her. How did she breathe through nostrils that narrow? She was already clutching a tissue in her hand as she started to talk about her sister, who had lost a baby in her sixth month of pregnancy and admitted to her recently that she was relieved because it meant she could continue with nursing school unencumbered.
At seventeen weeks, a baby is the size of a turnip. My sister-in-law told me this; personally, I couldn’t care less about pregnancy. The woman with the whittled nostrils had lost a turnip and I had lost my dad, who took me to see the debut of women’s speed skating at the Winter Olympics in Squaw Valley when I was nine. Helga Haase of Germany had won, and she was signing programs after the competition in the parking lot at the same time as the men’s alpine ski racing event, and even though my brother whined and begged and called me a Nazi for wanting to meet her, my father waited with me in the parking lot to get her autograph. This is important to your sister, he had said in that way of his that was authoritative but also persuasive at your most empathetic level. All right, my brother had said, sighing, and then he’d waited without complaint.
I thought I was going to meet women who had lost wonderful, terrible people, not turnips. But then the woman with the claw marks returned to the room with two Band-Aids on her chest and declared, “Your sister is a real piece of work, Margaret.” She plopped back down in the beanbag and continued with effusive familiarity, “You’ve got to stop minimizing your pain in service of her! She lost a fetus, and you lost a three-year-old with special needs who required your undivided attention at all hours. You should not have to deny the magnitude of your loss to make her feel seen.”