The Squirrel's Heart Beat
Everything is so sad
I cry a lot lately. A lot of other people might say the same thing.
I am so tired. The world is so sad.
There's a passage in George Eliot's masterpiece, Middlemarch, about this.
“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence."
I've started to hear a dull roar as I drift through the third month of this neverending Sunday, a Sunday like my childhood, when everything was closed (my family did not go to church). I've started to hear the 300 bpm thumping of the squirrel's heartbeat, a sound like panic seeping into the fringes of the mind.
I sat behind the wheel of my car in the grocery store parking lot and thought: my favourite places to go, what if they go out of business before this is all over? My parents are old and getting older; they can go on trips and do things now, but what if this robs them of the last year or two when that’s the case? When will we have concerts and plays, real ones, not unsatisfactory livestreams? When will I next kiss a handsome stranger on a crowded dance floor? When will I see my friends who live on the other sides of borders?
The roar on the other side of silence. Today, the roar sounds like a question: If the things that give my life pleasure and meaning are taken away, if they're not coming back, what's the point of going on?
So I sat, parked. I didn't get out of my car and go line up to eventually be let inside the supermarket, to treat the other humans in there not as members of my community but as biohazards to be avoided. Instead I sat in my car and I cried.
I cry a lot. I always have, even before this.
All children cry. They cry out of surprise, shock, confusion, frustration, and as a manipulative ploy for attention or sympathy.
I remember a few tantrums I threw as a very small child, embarrassing to relate here, because they were all, in some way, about not getting my way and trying to brute force the issue (to my parents' credit, this tactic never worked).
But I also remember the first time I wept, which is different from childish scream-crying.
I was eight, and my grandfather was in the hospital, in a small city about 150 km away. He used to chew tobacco and he had mouth cancer. I don't remember the course of his illness well; I was, again, only eight.
I didn't particularly like my grandfather. I found old men scary, as a child. They seemed unapproachable, unsympathetic. Their thick accents were difficult for me to understand, even though, in theory, it should have been my accent too (by my generation our voices were significantly Canadianized).
He was in the hospital but I thought he was getting better.
I usually came home from school for lunch. One day, sitting at the kitchen table, bowl of neon orange Kraft Dinner in front of me, mom and dad told me and my brother that Poppy Collins had passed away.
I remember absorbing the information in a detached way, like, my initial thought was 'this does not affect me much.' But then — and this was a surprise — I got quiet, and after thirty seconds or so I started to cry. Not tantrum crying. Not skinned knee crying. Quiet, eyes downcast, big fat tears rolling down.
My parents said it was OK to cry, because it was a sad thing.
I'm crying again as I write this memory. I feel so bad that I never really knew my grandfather, that I was scared of him and held him at a snobbish distance. He was a remarkable man, I've learned in the years since. A trickster who could breathe fire. He could have taught me so much. He deserved the love of his grandchildren and I didn't show it to him.
It seems like a cosmic injustice that any of us must die, let alone that all of us must die. Our lives are the butt of a cruel joke. We are given this glory of existence, this chance to love and be loved and to make things and to take pleasure in things, and then it all ends. You will have a final farewell — or an abrupt, unexpected parting — with every person you love or will love. Everything you make or build is a sandcastle at the low tide mark.
The element of tragedy that lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.
A boy crying when told his grandfather has died — nothing shameful about that.
But when I think of the other times I've wept, I recoil a little bit. It seems so undignified. To lose composure. To walk out of a particularly good staging of Madame Butterfly sobbing so hard you can't speak coherently to your husband. It seems foolish. Other people find this ease of emotional expression charming. They know I cry easy and they admire me for it. I understand what they mean.
But really, now. Sometimes it's just too much.
My first proper boyfriend. After some adolescent misadventures, I more or less sat on the sidelines of sex and romance for the first half of my 20s. But then, when I was 25, I started chatting with an American grad student at our local university. We saw each other for about a month, and I knew he was into me. He'd never had a proper boyfriend before, either.
I didn't want to let myself be vulnerable. But he was so funny. So goofy. Handsome. Nice muscly arms. Warm body. So, after about a month of coffees and dinners… he asked if he could kiss me, and I said yes.
Something about kissing a man for the first time makes fireworks go off in my brain. And this was my first kiss in five years, my first kiss as an adult person, really.
So of course I loved him. I had so much love to give, and I'd been holding it back, waiting for the right person, and I thought he had finally arrived.
He broke up with me four months later, because he was moving back to the USA in April and he thought it would be easier to break up now instead of then.
For weeks, I woke up every morning, listened to sad music — Nina Simone was a favourite — and wept until I had a mild headache. I wandered local supermarkets with glistening eyes. I went for midnight walks with tear-stained cheeks.
How pathetic!
Oh, but I did love him. And really, if an eight year old boy can weep for his grandfather, can't a 20-something repressed nerd weep after discovering he built his house on sand?
As I get older, I feel it gets easier and easier for my tears to start flowing. Tragedies that happen to strangers, easily ignored during my callous youth, stab my heart now. A restaurant or small store going out of business — oh, I feel a dart of concern for the owners, I think of their failed dream. It seems so unfair that things that are loved, that are wanted, can still be allowed to fail.
Maybe it's because I get closer and closer to death. My own death, the death of my family, my friends, my role models, my heroes. The longer you live the more death clings to you. Death accrues, like dust on a window. The longer I live the more I learn that life is not fair, nor is it kind, nor is it particularly long.
I co-wrote my mother-in-law's eulogy with my father-in-law and delivered it myself, because he knew he wouldn't be able to make it through. Somehow I didn't break, even though I've started to cry right now, at the memory of it.
I inherited from my mother the ability to compartmentalize. If there's a thing that needs doing, you put your feelings to one side, you do the thing, and then when that's done you go ahead and have your feelings.
It's a short term strategy. It's for emergencies. It is not a permanent state of being.
The situation we are all living through now makes me want to compartmentalize. Put my feelings to one side and go about the business of living. When this is all over, then I can go ahead and have those feelings.
But I don't know when this will be over. There's no visible finish line. The work of mourning feels endless, like the losses will just pile up and pile up. I can't put it to one side. But I can't have a cry and feel better about it, because it's still there. The wound is still bleeding, the patient is still declining, the transfusion isn't working. People are dying and those of us left behind are seeing whatever our lives used to be wither. I liked my life. I miss it. In the dark moments, I don't think I'll be getting it back.
And now I'm crying again.
The roar on the other side of silence, hearing the grass grow, hearing the squirrel's heart beat… did George Eliot have to pick an animal as comical as a squirrel? The first time I read Middlemarch, I knew that passage would be one of those — those snippits of great literature that you carry with you for the rest of your life as distillations of your personality, your worldview.
A squirrel, though? Doesn't that rob the quotation of some of its dignity? Well, maybe. But maybe a squirrel is just the right choice. It should be faintly ridiculous. The godlike narrator of Middlemarch might think of us poor muddling humans as squirrels, anxious, self-interested, quarrelsome, and yet, somehow, adorable. Small unimportant animals quickened and then stilled, literally unable to see the grand structure of life, of which each silly little squirrel is only the smallest part. Unable to see it because that massive knowledge would crush a squirrel. Just as it would crush a human.
As it is, the quickest of us walk about well-wadded with stupidity.
