As I work on my playlist this week I am sitting deep in grief. A woman I have known for 60 years has died. She was important to me. I know my playlist will reflect my sorrow and so it goes. I listen to my music and remember the first grief playlist I ever made. We were on our way to a hockey game when I got the call. My father was dead. The first person I loved who had died and my world went black. We didn’t go the the game. I went into the living room and closed the door and started playing songs on the record player for Tom, for me. It was the only way I could deal with the pain. And here I am 49 years later still using music as a way to heal.
Category: grief
What makes us Remember?
Monday I had a hard time with myself. I say that because I am the only one who can cause me anguish while I hunker down by myself in my comfortable cabin in the woods where the pines and fruit trees blow their pollen with abandon. I wondered why I was so sad that my body ached. Was it the bad dream the night before where I was challenged with tasks I didn’t know how to do as I worked my way towards this new world we are making? Maybe. Then is hit me, what’s the date? Of course it’s about to be April 28th. the day my father died. Even if I don’t want to remember I always do. I used to think it was the brain that helps me remember but I’ve learned that my body holds all my stories.
765 people have died in Washington state due to Covid-19. Very limited testing.
My friend Bonnie
I feel the desire to write about my friend Bonnie who died a couple of days ago. I have not seen Bonnie since around 1995 but up until a few years ago we kept in occasional contact. Her birthday, Christmas, maybe my birthday. Bonnie’s birthday was easy to remember as it is the same day we pay our taxes so those would be the two things on my mind April 15.
I have known Bonnie since I was 16 years old. I think my father Tom met her at some bar she was cocktail waitressing at. Bonnie liked to party and she was sweet and earnest and laughed at the right time. At some points she lived in my father’s house and helped care for the younger kids. She knew my family and our friends and we shared memories from my teenage years. When I left home we became roommates in Marin. We danced our way through San Francisco and ended up moving to Lahaina together in 1973. Lahaina Maui in the early 70’s was young and beautiful like we were and we embraced the island and the island loved us back. It was a time of laughter and love and sand.
Radio Baby
When I was seventeen years old instead of going to school I went to the radio station. My father was a disc jockey and his name is Tom Donahue. The radio station was KMPX in San Francisco in 1967. Up until then I hadn’t hung out with my father when he did radio in AM but the family was aware of Top 40, music hops and concerts as Tom was always was putting on some show. My favorites were the Cow Palace shows he and his partner Bob Mitchell and KYA radio put on in San Francisco in the early 60’s.
At KMPX I was the receptionist, the music librarian, an engineer and then when we moved to KSAN; a disc jockey. And now 50 years later I am a disc jockey once again at my local community radio station and loving it. I didn’t think I ever wanted to be a dj after I “retired” from radio and moved to Maui in 1973 to “work on my tan.” There were enough disc jockeys in the family; my father, my brother Sean Donahue and my step mother Raechel. I wanted to find my own path.
Low Tide
Grief, an unpredictable beast. Just when I think it has gone back to the cave, it crushes me sideways. I’m cleaning houses right now. It is a job. I’m in the bathroom of a comfortable home lived in by two mellow artists. The painter wife has a fabulous collection of large and unusual shells she has displayed on the bathroom counter. I look at them and burst into tears. My mom had a good collection of shells that she treasured. Some of them came from the Shell Shop that she worked at in Lahaina, Maui. She would laugh as she told people she sold “seashells at the seashore”. It was 1980 and we were young, happy and living “da kind”.
After Grace died I thought I was going to move right back to the Big Island so I had a garage sale. I sold Graces’ collection of shells. The shells she had for all those years and loved. I loved them too. I was thinking I was being practical by getting rid of them as it is expensive to ship “stuff” to the islands. “Stuff.” Stuff is a bitch for me, I don’t know when to let go.
The hardest part of grief right now is the loneliness. I have never felt so alone. I have lived by myself for 15 years and have loved it but since my mom died I have never felt so by myself. It is a horrible feeling. I don’t want to feel this way. I hear a voice “well change your attitude then.” I would if it was that easy.
I know it’s not the shells that I’m crying about. It’s the discomfort of life changing, of getting old, of losing the family I once had. Eventually this feeling will change. Not soon enough for this big baby.
Spring
Spring is slowly arriving in the Pacific Northwest. Tulips, daffodils and now some poppies have been spotted. The fruit trees put on their Easter finery and color has replaced grey. I sit and watch the hummingbirds consume mass quantities from the feeder and act like kids on a sugar high, chasing each other, dive bombing, never seeming to stop having fun. Sometimes I think I would like to come back as a bird. I would love to fly high, gliding with the wind. The ocean of my mind is calm right now and I tiptoe around grateful for the peace. I feel lucky that I have spring to remind me of new beginnings, how so much is possible. I know the queen mum is at peace and as I breathe into this moment, so am I.
Here’s my application
I just turned 65 years old and I am looking for a job. I applied for unemployment but they are giving me grief. I hate bureaucracy. I don’t like being told what to do. So I have to sign these papers agreeing that I am ready and willing and able to work right now. I need to be able to lift 50lbs and stand or sit for eight hours and always have a smile on my face. They don’t mention if I am allowed to cry while I’m smiling. I still cry a lot, I never know when it is going to happen. It reminds me of the weather here in the Pacific Northwest, one moment it’s sunny the next cloudy and overcast. Just like me.
Tuesday
I am working on getting rid of stuff that belonged to the queen mum today. It always makes me emotional and today angry. I believe what happened at the nursing home has traumatized me, and I still wear my grief like a second skin. Today I am looking through the stuff that was in her desk. Everything we could never find so we bought another was in that drawer. Now I have 4 staplers, 3 measuring tapes, 6 pairs of scissors and more pens that I want to count, and push pins and rubber bands and on and on it goes. I have had a couple of people give me suggestions on getting a job. Like I don’t know to look in the newspaper, I hate it when someones suggests the obvious to me. In my heart I know these suggestions come from a place of love and yet it makes me mad because neither one of them has worked a low paying job in forty years. They have no idea what it is like being an itinerant worker these days. I was so surprised how cruel women can be in the workplace. I still have no idea why they didn’t like me and decided to make my working life miserable, no sisterhood working there. And don’t get me started about ageism in the workplace. I see another box to go through, it looks like kitchen stuff, oh good just want I need another potato peeler.
CHANGE
I slept last night. Deep, natural, body relaxing sleep, the first good sleep in forty-five days; that’s when she fell. When the queen mum was still with us I always slept with one ear listening for the phone. I did that for six years. I would wake up in the middle of a dream and think, where is the cell phone? Jumping up to make sure it was somewhere close so I could hear it and if I couldn’t find it, that meant I left it in the car. Trying not to fully wake up while I’m doing this or I may never get back to sleep. I never had kids but I imagine once you do that you learn to sleep like I did, always on alert. After I got the queen mum Lifeline I felt a little better because if for some reason they couldn’t reach me she was to go to the ER. Though I did have to condition her to this idea. Once she fell three times in the living room on soft carpet hitting soft couch or soft chair. “Are you sure you are okay Miss Grace, I think I’ll call your daughter just to let her know what’s going on.” I was her “Big Brother”. I don’t have to worry about that anymore, I could leave my cell phone in the car all night if I wanted to, or not even answer it. It feels good, but it also felt good having someone to care about.
I got attitude
My petite estate sale is tomorrow, and I’m okay ready. A so called friend who I have never really had any dealings with except having to go to her husbands boring birthday parties because he is an old friend of my mom Grace and her then husband Rolly called up and offered to help with the sale about three days ago. I called right back and said yes please because I have pretty much given up buying stuff and had no idea how to price ( I have a give it away mentality, which when you are broke is maybe, why you are broke}. So she doesn’t show up the first day she said she might and the second day she calls to say she thinks she is sick and doesn’t want to infect ( so Port Townsend considerate) and then goes on to say she doesn’t price stuff, just waits to somebody asks and then you know makes a party of it and has fun trying to get them to pay a good price. it’s around this point as I listen to the message I hang up as yeah that is how I feel right now, let’s party with my dead mothers’ stuff. So then she calls back and says I just realized what I said to you, I’m so sorry. Guess what? I’m busy and you aint’ helping so goodbye. I had made a sign for the estate sale that said “Make me an offer but don’t offend me. I have attitude.” When I showed it to a real friend who did help she said “that might be a little off putting”. I felt I had toned it down, my original sign was: Make me an offer, but don’t offend me. I’m not in the mood to suffer fools.
The Buzzy Donahue Show 