Author Archives: christine oddy shandel

I was alone when I got it. My brother, at my mother’s house, had made a discovery that shocked and horrified him. He texted us, his three sisters, immediately.
“You guys. My God. At mom’s. She’s putting butter on her peanut butter sandwich. Butter and peanut butter. Jesus.”
How my brother did not know she does this escapes me. It was a standard kitchen play of Mom’s, and one I had learned to evade before my double-digit birthday. Moreover, it was our Dad’s absolute favourite, an afterwork treat that bridged an office life of litigious clients, and home life bursting with maniacal children. My sisters and I launched a firestorm of wisecracks in reply, tiny missives ripe with snarky foolishness, and buoyed up by how much we all like each other. Our unruly affection ricocheted between us for a while until someone had to go.
Smiling, I put my phone down on the bedside table of my darkened room. An image of my Dad eating one of those PB &B sandwiches came to me, and for a moment I could see his sweet, gentle face looking back at me. Suddenly, alone in my room, I couldn’t breathe. The air had been snatched from my lungs as surely as if I was in the final throes of drowning. His absence was as painful and as wrong as it had ever been. The ways I still want him yawned in front of me as I curled onto my side, my body a comma between the time with him, and now. I hugged myself close and wept. Wept for him and for me; for the missed beauty and the missed conversations. Wept for my mom, and my siblings, for my children who ask if he would have liked them. I wept that there is a Death, dammit, and that still, still with all the fierce minds and valiant hearts that have contemplated that hoary old Bitch, still we don’t know what it is. Not really. And I wonder, is this where we meet most truly? Perhaps it is in this landscape of loss that we at last connect, speaking the language of isolation and loss in our most human voice.
My father died just shy of twenty years ago, and today is no kind of anniversary or special day. It’s just a day I remembered how he liked his peanut butter sandwiches. I sit with it awhile, this hurt, and I have no words of solace or advice. In a minute I’ll go downstairs and make a cup of tea. Decaf, because who can have caffeine after noon any more? And I’ll feel better soon, I know from experience. I won’t get over it, but I’ll get out from under it.