A Fingernail Fable 12/8/13

Friday morning hurry-up.  All my fault, because I just didn't want to get out of bed.  Have you ever been there?  Life is happening outside your bedroom, outside your house, people are driving, drinking coffee, already having meetings......and your bed is just so warm and cozy that it's an actual argument with yourself to throw back the covers and stand up.  We've all been there, I guess.  When I do that, I can adjust the getting ready and still make it to work on time, but I still hurry.  So during the hurry-up, I bent a fingernail backward trying to fasten my seat belt.  A small reminder to slow down, it's all going to be there, whether I hurry to fasten the belt or do it at normal speed!  Smoothing down the fingernail, I drove to work.  The school was still there.

I'm not used to having any sort of long fingernails.  A combination of weak nails and piano playing has always left me without nails as an accessory.  Except for the few years of fake nails, they have always just been short and.... there.  In the past eight months, they're stronger.  They grow.  I have to cut them and file them down.  It's very strange to me - did a chemical change happen in my body when I entered grief? Or was it due to happen anyway?  I don't know, but I do know that these knives that extend from my fingertips - and the care they require - is a new sensation.

Later Friday evening, the same backward-bent nail caught on something.  You know, that sensation when it brushes cloth and you feel that little drag?  I took a look.  There was a cut in the middle of the tip.  Not a big one, but like some tiny scissors just made one cut.  I went to the place where I now keep the clippers and newly-acquired file, trimmed it and filed it smooth.  It lost a little length, but it's still there.  I suppose that was the price of decorating the tree.  As Saturday came and went, more nails lost their way to the housework/decoration activities.  They were shorter, but they were still there.

Today, Sunday, makes eight months since he's been gone.  I don't really put much stock in anniversaries, but having made this portion of the grief journey personally, I see a truth.  I slowly file away my old life.  It's still there, it's just shorter.  I can buy the low-fat eggnog now, there's nobody left to complain about it.  When it's just me home, I have music playing.  When it was just us, it was always the television.  Still the same machine, just different.  When a situation changes, I adapt.  Humans adapt.  The situation is still there, but we carry on and find ways to make it. 

Adaptation isn't easy.  Sometimes it even hurts!  I took all the lights off the fifty-foot long stair garland yesterday.  Those lights have been wound around that garland for so many years that they were caught in the little wires in certain places.  As I separated the lights from the thin little wire inside the garland, I felt the thin wire slice right under my fingernail.  OUCH!  Who says decorating for Christmas is fun!  After I finished the garland experience, (a new garland is now required....) I checked the fingernail damage.  Sure enough, trim it, file it, it's still there.  Only I think the cut might leave a little scar.  And so it goes - the old life is still there, it's just been adapted, filed away, had its shape changed......with a few scars to show for the hurt along the way.