Above and Below

The Dining Room Table

At the beginning of covid, I had started making some “free” drawings that looked like a jumbled heap of stuff on top of some sort of enclosure. It was a while before I made the connection to our dining room table and the mess on it. 

Our dining room table is probably the nicest piece of furniture we own. I got it from a friend when our son was an infant. I dreamt of it being the hearth of our household – the table around which we would share meals as a threesome, sit together and do our respective work, hold family and friend celebrations.

I always prided myself on having a clean table. Except when we were using it, I kept it free of dishes, papers, books, crumbs, and other things. Through the years, while I was working and sharing in the raising of our son, I somehow continued to keep that table clean, even when all of the beds went unmade and there were baskets of laundry lying around. 

Around three years ago, a decade after my husband’s Parkinson’s diagnosis, I began to notice some slippage. Slowly over the years, Hal had begun to use the table as – in addition to a place to eat – his office, his library, a place to do crossword puzzles, manage his pills, watch TV, and so on. And the stuff had begun to creep onto it permanently. Baskets of pills, his mug of water with a straw, his juice container, his laptop computer and charger, the bell I’ve placed there for him to use if he needs to get my attention and has forgotten his phone somewhere, his magazines, books, piles of papers, numerous TV remotes, and so on.

This table where we used to hold celebrations is now the place where we are slowly processing the enormity of the change in our lives, the difficulty of living with disability. So, I guess it is appropriate that it is more than a bit messy, and that it has become the focus for my grief. 

In thinking about the state of the world (and the grief beneath our anger, confusion, and frustration), it gave me some insight into my own situation. That is, the grief we are feeling – whether it is about the world or our own personal lives – often needs to be cut off from our daily awareness in order for us to function. But it ultimately has to be looked at if we are going to survive.

For me, there is the clutter on (or above) the surface of our dining room table, and then there is the stuff below. So these are my attempts to draw the “below.”