You Can Put Socks on a Spider

In memory of G.Q.

“I’ve gotta admit that I’ve really been my mother’s son today,” I said to kick off my therapy session the other afternoon.

It was one of those days when I didn’t think I could be angrier at the world that my girlfriend was dead and would never come back—somehow topping my last rage bender, whenever it was—as I funneled my hate toward my auto insurance representative. He’d warned me that after the first six months of my new policy elapsed, I would be charged an additional ten-dollar fee unless I downloaded the company’s app. The time had come when the increase would take effect, so I made the logical case that I literally do not use apps—skipping the fact that I do use one, Slack, because I must in case of weeknight and/or weekend work emergencies—but he nonetheless refused to budge.

My subsequent argument was simple: a multibillion-dollar company thinks mining my data is worth more than the ten-dollar credit they’re willing to give me, a cynical ploy I wouldn’t entertain, asking Andy how he’d handle my situation if I was a senior citizen who didn’t own a cell phone. “You’d have to pay the extra ten dollars,” he said. When he followed it up by cutting me off and saying he respected my principles, a condescending retort that had me seeing more red than Mark Rothko, I did what my mother would do: pounded my chest with prideful fists and emailed his boss a thoughtful, restrained several paragraph missive about the situation along with a postscript concerning my confusion that the company couldn’t simply charge me the increased rate and reimburse me afterward.

“What’s your relationship with anger?” my therapist asked.

“I associate it with both my parents,” I told her. “There are these echoes of anger. My father was yelling at my stepbrothers when he wasn’t mad about being woken up from a nap. And my mother had episodes all the time, of course. Once, she did her thing where she attacked the dishwasher while grinding her teeth and screaming. Sue actually witnessed it and said she couldn’t believe I’d turned out the way I had after I explained that similar moments were childhood staples. It’s the same reason why I hate curtains. I see them and think of fighting with my mother.”

“You do talk like a writer,” she said to lift my spirits. “That phrase ‘echoes of anger’….”

“I know millions, billions of people before me have lost the person they loved more than anything in this world, and I know millions or billions more will also experience it, well, depending on how this shit world keeps going,” I said. “But it doesn’t change the fact that it happened to me, and it fucking pisses me off all the fucking time.”

“I know,” she said in her caring way. “The important thing is you avoid inertia.”

“Yeah. Still going to work and exercising and getting out with friends. It’s just a feeling that will probably never stop haunting my memory.”

Then I sidebarred to tell her about my tenth-grade history teacher, Mr. Quinlan, a thin, bespectacled man with a magisterial command of his classroom who died recently. He was charismatic, he was kind, and he enjoyed talking with his arms crossed as he tightly secured his hands inside his armpits similar to Molly Shannon’s Saturday Night Live character. Strangely enough, he was the guy I thought of often when Sue died. In between his ridiculous, almost implausible stories about quirky townspeople he’d befriended and films he screened us to help find certain historical periods more engaging, I can still recall the day he inexplicably got sidetracked and discussed how his wife had died. While the story may have been embellished to some degree, he spoke about carrying a gun in his jacket as he paced around the perimeter of the hospital where cancer was annihilating her. He was so filled with hostility that night that he said he wanted to kill anyone who looked at him funny, incensed that they got to keep living while she did not. As a fourteen-year-old boy, I didn’t know the first thing about true love, but something about the man’s candor and passionate storytelling bore itself into my brain forever. I loved the guy in the same way I loved any admirable father figure I encountered after my dad died, unaware the man’s burden would one day be my own.

“He got sick and retired during my senior year,” I said to my therapist. “Yet I ran into him one more time a few years later. He was alone exiting the church after one of my best friends got married. As he walked by, he stopped in place, looked at me, smiled, and said, ‘You know, I never forget a pretty face, but in your case, I’ll make an exception.’ I was dying laughing as he shook my hand and said, ‘How ya doin’, Big Guy?’”

I didn’t attend his wake because wakes and I don’t get along well although I dined with his best friend recently, a man who dates—or whatever the right term is for widowed septuagenarians—my tenth-grade English teacher, a woman with whom I share breakfast every few months. They both have carried on following the deaths of their respective spouses, their commitment to attending college basketball games and plays together something I find admirable and adorable, a testament to beating inertia and embracing the friendship they’ve maintained for sixty-ish years. They’ve had more time to adjust than I have, to let whatever fury-filled fires that may have burned in their hearts soften into lambent embers. To feel less intensely isn’t a sign that you don’t care enough, it’s proof that you worked through it and found a modicum of tranquility, quiescence that can feel elusive, or perhaps inchoate, with those angry echoes clanging around. I can keep being mad at the world that I can’t bring Sue back, or I can admit that I have a better chance of knitting socks for a spider. They’re both nonsensical. Only one is technically possible. The day will come when imaginative pragmatism always wins. I hope it’s tomorrow. Or soon.

A breakfast date awaits Russ and Laura and me in a couple months, a morning when I will inevitably eat eggs benedict while they split a meal like two (love) birds. Maybe seeing my old teacher’s best buddy can function as a goal to monitor my rage odometer in the interim, to be grateful that I’ve yet to consider murdering a stranger, or at least not done so while a murdering utensil was on hand. For now, I should instead focus on something more significant. Like how I’d pay ten dollars to use the Quinlapp, a technological miracle capable of transforming my self-pity into a reminder that the man who taught me how real grief can be is now gone, his own battle surviving her absence for as long as he could, the most assiduous thing any griever can do, finally vanquished, an inspiration to anyone who tends to get stuck holding the world to its worst.