Sunday, November 05, 2017

Chasing a Squirrel as a Pathway to Grieving

Friday evening, while watching a video purporting to show clips of UFO aliens caught on tape in my darkened apartment, someone knocked on my door.  
“Can you help me?”  It was a neighbor of mine.  A short Asian woman with long blonde hair that had moved in a couple months ago.  “There’s a creature in my apartment.”  
“Creature?”  I could hear the video still playing.  The narrator describing a creepy security camera video that someone claimed showing a strange “creature” with a bulbous head and large black eyes peeking into their backyard in some unpopulated rural setting.  “What sort of ‘creature’?”  
“I don’t know.  I came home.  The water was running in my faucet.  I can hear it moving around.  Can you help me?”  The last was said with a plaintive whine.  She bounced up and down on the balls of her feet.  
“Hold on…”  I went to turn off the video.  It kept using the term, “creature” in its narration and it wasn’t helping me focus.  My mood was jangled to begin with.  It had become that way when I received a call from my parents telling me the eldest of my two younger sisters, Virginia, had died after a five year fight with cancer.  I had left work early, bought a bottle of wine, which I had consumed with my lunch, and lay on the couch feeling numb until I dozed off.  I had woken up just a few moments ago, thinking I should post something about my sister and ended up surfing my way to videos showing gray aliens sneaking around backyards or being interrogated by one government agency or another.  
“You said you didn’t see it, this ‘creature’?”  I knew the apartment she lived in was a studio.  One main room, with a small kitchen and bathroom.  Whatever it was would have to be on the small size to be there and go unseen.  
“I think I heard it.  But…  Can you help me?”  
“Sure.  Let me get on my shoes.”  
A few moments later, tennis shoes on, I was standing inside the threshold of her apartment.  She had walked further inside, toward the kitchen, explaining again how she came home to find the water running, when the comforter thrown across the bed started to move.  
“Oh my God!  There it is!  There it is!”  
A second later, a squirrel poked its furry head from under the blanket.  I had figured it that this is what it had to be.  The building I live in have vents to the roof, and if the screens covering their openings get loose, squirrels can crawl down into your apartment looking for whatever they come looking for.  It had happened to me once, which had created a very interesting afternoon for me and my cat, Tybalt.  
Before I could explain any of this, the squirrel darted across the bed and toward the kitchen.  This was in my neighbor’s direction as well, which started her screaming and jumping up and down.  
“Yeeeahh!  Yeeeahh!  Ohmygod!  Ohmygod!”  
She ran past me out the door.  The squirrel ran past her into the kitchen.  
“It’s Ok, it’s Ok…”  She was already out the door.  “I’ll see what I can do.  Just…  Stand there…  Hold the screen door open.  I’ll try to chase it out.”  
“Oh-kay…”  Something in her voice made it sound like she thought this was a dubious plan, but she complied. 
“Ok, Rocky…”  I called out to the squirrel as I headed into the kitchen.  “Let’s get you back in your tree.”  
The squirrel was up on the counter.  He was looking at me.  He didn’t look too afraid.  The squirrel in my apartment had rushed around hysterically, climbing up shelves, jumping from the couch, while my cat made confused and excited calls.  Maybe it was the lack of a cat, or that he’d lived in the area for a while and was used to humans being around, but he just looked at me at first, shifting back and forth on his paws.  
“This way…”  I grabbed a cutting board from off the counter.  “Back outside…”  
He didn’t listen.  He darted one way, then another, then jumped behind the stove in the corner.  
Great.  I pulled the stove out and could his tail sticking out from underneath it.  I pulled it out some more, to have him look up at me with a, “Hey, I was hiding there,” sort of look.  
I poked my head at my neighbor.  “Excuse me, uh…  What was your name?”
“Ani.”  
“Ani, do you have a broom or mop or something?”  I wanted something long to reach down and flush the squirrel from under the stove.  
“I’ve got a vacuum cleaner!”  
Before I could explain why I wanted the broom, Ani grabbed something out of her closet.  It was an industrial looking hand-held vacuum, with a clear catch tray.  Battery operated.  It had a long tube connected to it, making it look like it had a long snout, though it wasn’t long enough to reach down to the squirrel.  
But it did make a noise, as I found out when I pulled the trigger.  I adapted my plan and went back into the kitchen.  
It was about this time that I guess you could say I started waking up.  This was, while odd, somewhat fun.  And it was real.  A strange but real problem to have.  A squirrel stuck in an apartment.  Something that could be solved.  Fixed.  
When my Mom had called me earlier that day, saying, “Virginia died this morning,” my first thought was, “Who is that?”  Not my sister.  Someone else.  A family friend or acquaintance with the same name.  As my mother when through the details she had, I only slowly made the connection to my sister.  The person she had gone to North Carolina, along with my Dad, to be with and comfort as she entered her sixth, last-ditch, round of chemotherapy.  It wasn’t until I told someone at work that my sister had died, and I suddenly started crying, that a modicum of reality, the sense that it really had happened, hit me.  
It was like watching those alien videos, the feeling I’d been soaking in.  You saw it.  You heard what people said.  But, did you believe it?  I think that’s why I kept watching them after I got off the couch in my stupor.  They fit my frame of mind perfectly.  
Back in the kitchen, I looked behind the stove and spotted little Rocky.  I reached down with the handheld vacuum and pulled the trigger.  Rocky scurried under the stove.  I reached down further, though not too far.  The image of little Rocky getting sucked into the vacuum held me back.  I wanted him out, not harmed.  I pulled the trigger to make the vacuum growl again.  
Rocky ran out.  I stepped back, but too fast.  I blocked his way to the kitchen door.  He darted behind a standing set of shelves on wheels.  I reached back with vacuum.  It was probably like some big growling dog to his ears.  He knocked over a can of non-stick cooking spray.  He push out a box of breakfast cereal.  
Finally, he jumped out.  He got on his hind legs, front paws spread wide, and jumped up and down at me.  Was he threatening me?  Was he going to jump up my pants leg and climb up to my face to get me? 
In the end, I think it was his way of saying, “I surrender, I give up!”  I stopped pulling the vacuum’s trigger.  He stopped jumping up and down, turned and ran into the studio’s main room. 
“Yeeeahh!  Yeeeahh!  Ohmygod!  Ohmygod!”
“Just let him go!”  I envisioned her closing the screen to keep Rocky away from her, and thereby keeping him in and making me start all over again.  But she didn’t.  I entered the room in time to see Rocky running past her and the open screen door and down the upper floor walkway.  
“Thank you, thank you so much!”  
I told Ani it was no problem.  I handed her vacuum back to her.  I pushed her stove back into place.  I picked up the items Rocky had knocked off her shelf.  I suggested she call the landlord and ask them to check the screen on the vent’s opening on the roof.  I kept saying, “No problem” and “You’re welcome” to her continuing “Thank you’s.”  I headed back to my apartment.  
Before I went back inside, I noticed that I had fun doing that.  I also noticed my funk was gone.  The numbness had dissipated.  That I was thinking clearly.  
And I knew, with certainty, that my sister was gone.  And I became very sad.  Really sad.  But it was an honest sadness.  A tangible grief.  A feeling I could go through completely.  One I could deal with.

I went back into my apartment then.  To call my family.  Tell them I loved them.  Talk about my sister, and find out what we would be doing to remember her and celebrate her life.    

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