Like Sands Through The Hourglass

This is what dinner dreams are made of.

At least for me, anyway. I used to joke that when my girls moved out, all of my dinners would consist of mostly bread and cheese. Turns out, that wasn’t a joke.

My kitchen still smells faintly of freshly baked bread and the loaf is warm underneath my hand as I slice. I make fewer slices these days. It took me a long time to get used to how little food one person actually needs.

As I watch my knife sink satisfyingly into the brie, my mind drifts to what is coming next. The only thing that could ruin a meal as perfect as this. A waft of olive brine mingles in with the yeasty warmth of the bread, and my stomach begins to grumble.

“Oh shush,” I tell it. “Just another minute.” The presentation is almost as fun as the eating.

Perfectly rolled slices of salami make a small barrier between the brine and the luscious bunch of grapes that add the finishing touch to my plate. The wine bottle gulps as I fill my glass slightly past what is probably reasonable.

Settling in on the couch, I give myself a blessed few bites in silence. Allowing the creamy, rich, pungency of the brie to contrast with the juicy, sweet grapes in my mouth. Savoring the cured and salty depths of the salami against the mild, familiar comfort of the fluffy bread.

As a retiree living alone, you wouldn’t think I would crave moments to savor like I do. But I am trapped in a prison of my own design. And these few quiet moments are all I have before I am locked up for the night.

I didn’t mean for this to happen. It all started out innocently enough. Just a little indulgence to unwind from a long day. I guess that’s what all addicts say.

Addiction is a tricky beast. It starts out innocently enough. A drink here, a view there. A smoke, a furtive internet search, a touch, a taste, a glance. An occasion, a way to add a little spice and variance to the mind-numbingly sameness of the day to day. Then it becomes a little more. “Why can’t everyday be an occasion?”, you think. “I’m alive, I am well, I only have this one life! I may as well enjoy every bit of it while I can!” Until you lose control. And what once was an intentional choice you made on occasion to remind yourself that you are alive is the only thing that is now keeping you alive.

Most addicts don’t need to continue their addiction to keep others alive. But I do.

I really don’t even know how it happened. Slowly, over time, like most things, I guess. Once I retired, things began to happen more quickly, mostly because I had more time to give up. I’m an old lady, living alone, far from my children and grandchildren. What else was there to do?

I’ve been captivated by story since before I can remember. My mother used to love to tell stories about how I would sit my room for an hour or more as a baby, just looking at my books. By 4 years old, I had taught myself to read.

While the written word was my first love, my obsession with story didn’t stop there. Radio shows. Whispered adult conversations while the children played. Movies. I loved it all and could never get enough.

Eventually, my family got a TV.

As a voracious reader, TV felt to like an astounding way to bring stories from imagination into the realm of real life. While I never stopped reading, in time, TV sort of became my stories. Quite literally so once televised soap operas began to pop up everywhere.

In the early days, when I was still working 3 days a week, I would pop home on my lunch hour and set my VCR to record the episode. Dennis and I would watch the recordings together; often discussing the happenings in the show, gossiping about the characters, and making predictions about what would happen next. It was a simple way for us to connect.

When he passed, my stories often felt like the only connection I had left with anyone real at all. I know that sounds silly. He was gone, with or without the show, and despite the physical distance my family was just a phone call away. But in those early evenings, I still felt so alone.

When the depths of my loneliness became too much, I had a living room full of memories and friends in the flip of a switch. That’s how things felt at first, anyway. Before things started to shift and change.

I know how this sounds. I sound like a lonely and demented old lady who is too far gone to notice that her mind is slipping. But this isn’t that. And I can prove it to you.

The sharp sizzle and pop noise of raw meat hitting a hot pan fill the room like surround sound as I prepare our dinner. Pork chops, baked potatoes, and salad. It’s a simple meal, but most are these days. I used to believe that when our phase of deep parenting was over, I would have the energy to make elaborate meals full of exotic flavors. But the thing about your children getting older is that, you are also getting older. I like aging. I enjoy the wisdom, perspective, and surety it brings to my life. But aging is not known for bringing with it an abundance of energy. Dennis and I are no exception.

And while our evenings may lack the abundance of noise, joy, and chaos that a house full of children used to bring us, even a few short months ago, our days are still filled with work that takes every last bit of energy we can muster. Dennis thinks I don’t notice, but I can see the toll his job is beginning to take on him physically. The larger pork chop and potato are for him.

The oven sounds as I flip the pork chops and the ambient white noise of cooking begins anew. I move quickly, removing the potatoes from the oven and setting them aside to cool as I prepare the bagged salad. I aim to get dinner prepared and plate before he walks through the door. Not because this is expected of me, it’s not. Simply because I wrecked after a long day of being an introvert in an extrovert’s job. i want just a moment to be quiet. To sink in to a moment where nothing is being asked me.

Outside, I hear a car door shut. It looks like I missed the mark tonight.

“Hello dear!”

This has been his evening greeting to me every night for the last 38 years.

I look over to smile at him. Grease smears his work clothes and I get a whiff of the now familiar acrid scent of hot metal and oil.

“How was your day?”

“Good, my dear, good.” This is his usual response as he shuffles off to shower and change out of his work clothes.

To an outsider, this may seem like the interactions of an estranged couple. I can assure you it is not. We are complacent. But we are also tired, so very tired.

I plate the pork chops, dress the potatoes, and serve our salads. Everything is arrives at the table just as Dennis reappears from his shower.

“It looks delightful, dear.” Another one of his habitual responses, but a genuine compliment nonetheless.

We move to sit at the table but the thought of making small talk or sitting in silence is just more than I can handle this evening. I want a distraction. We both need a distraction. “Let’s shake things up, maybe sit in the living room instead?” I blurt. Relief washes over his face. Some days you just need a big fluffy chair to wrap around you while unwind.

Powering on the TV, Dennis flips through the channels. Each 2 second snippet of sound blending together to create an odd cacophony of spoken word and music. Finally, he lands on something that doesn’t appear to be the news or a game show and stops. “How does this look?”, he says around a mouthful of pork and potatoes. “Perfect,” I respond, “something to get lost in.”

Without us even realizing it, our plates are empty and an hour has passed. A small flash flickers across the screen as I turn the TV off. “That, was captivating.” I say by way of breaking the silence. “Agreed. It’s got me thinking, if I am ever on life-support in a coma, I want you to know it’s okay to pull the plug.” “Well, let’s hope that never happens,” I counter as we gather our plates and head to clean up the kitchen. “What I really just cannot believe is the way that Hope character didn’t even question that kiss!” “I know. My dear, if we ever found ourselves in a similar situation I…”

And suddenly, we had enough energy to talk all night. Chatting and gossiping our way through dishes, around toothbrushes, and through closed shower doors. I remember laughing as we fell asleep on that night. “Let’s do this every night.” Dennis sighed as he drifted off. “Agreed.”

Eating, watching, and talking becomes our new nightly ritual. It felt like a new way to connect. Eventually, we both retire. At first nothing really changes, but as the days of nothing new stretch out before us, we become even further enmeshed in the story of the characters playing out on-screen.

It wasn’t long before we both found our social lives again. Once we did, it did remove some of the obsession we had for the show, but looking back, it never returned to a normal level. Everyone knew that evening plans were always a no for us. We had our story to watch. Then something odd began to happen.

New characters on the show would have similar names to the new friends we were making, When Mary’s husband, Don, had a knee replacement, a character in our show had knee surgery just a few weeks later. (Only he didn’t recover and lost his ability to walk, it is a soap opera you know). When our daughter announces that she is having a baby, the main character’s daughter does the same.

At first, these just seemed like fun little coincidences that we would laugh about later. But as time went on, these “coincidences” become more closely timed to our real life. Instead of these chance mirrors happening a few weeks after their real life occurrence, it’s down to mere days. Our grandchild was born, two days later, the grandchild on the show was was born. We attend a fundraising event, a few nights later the entire episode is centered around a fundraising event.

We both felt that thins way more than a little weird, but we had no idea what was happening. We figured, you buy a Ford, suddenly you see Fords everywhere. A mere trick of our minds. Until, the show stopped mirroring our life and began predicting it instead. It started small, just like the mirroring. If there was car trouble on the show, I would have car trouble in the next day or two. If someone was rushed to the ER, one of our friends had a minor medical emergency. Then the stakes got higher.

When the main character in the show got terminally ill, Dennis was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Every new development on the show ushered in a new development in Dennis’s illness. What had once been a way for us to connect, had become a way for us to try to predict how much time we had left together. As Dennis progressed into a downward spiral, watching seemed to be the only normal thing we had to hang on to.

But late stage illness doesn’t always allow clinging to precious routines and schedules. On the night that we felt far too strung out (physically and emotionally) to watch. Dennis passed. and that’s when I knew.

There was, there is, more than serendipity at play.

It’s been 5 years now and I still don’t dare skip a single run of my story. It is as much a part of my routine as drinking water or brushing my teeth. It’s essential. It keeps me connected to Dennis and keeps my social circle running. It kept me running in those early and dark days of being alone.

Yesterday, I went to the library to meet some ladies for our weekly knitting circle. As evening drew near, some of my friends decided to go out to dinner.

“Grace, would you like to come?”, said my dear friend, Dorothy.

“Thank you, but I can’t.”

“Still watching your stories, huh?”

“Yep, old dogs and new tricks, you know.”

“You know, it’s just occurred to me that I’ve never asked you what it’s called.”

I gaze into my friend’s sweet and smiling eyes and answer. As the words form on my lips, a feeling of sick washes over me, like I’m telling a secret I promised not tell.

Still smiling, she says, “Huh, I’ve never heard of that one.”

As it turns out, none of the ladies had. This did nothing to soothe my sense of unease.

When I arrived home, I couldn’t stop thinking about how no one seemed to have ever heard of the show that has quite literally shaped the last several years of my life. The way the show has gripped, no, trapped, me into a tangled web of codependency, addiction, and imprisonment.

My mind bubbles with the implications as I sat down with my dinner and clicked on the TV. Just as I begin to think of telling someone, anyone, this story in the hopes of breaking free, one of the characters quipped from my TV…“and this is what dinner dreams are made of!”