RIP Red Chair

A Brief Eulogy

Eight years ago, I wrote this little blog post for Segullah:

How it Feels to See Her Sit in That Chair

I used to live in Cleveland. My husband was attending dental school and I was careening between my job at the university and writing my thesis and growing a baby. I would ride bus #3 downtown twice a week to attend class, feeling heavy and stretched: my body growing and my heart pulling at the edges too.

One afternoon in October, I got off the bus after class. It was cold, my coat barely zipped, and it was snowing, thick heavy snow of winter — the leaves hadn’t even had a chance to fall. It was already several inches deep on the sidewalks and growing heavier.

As I got closer to home, I could see my husband sitting on the front porch in his scrubs, smiling and waving at me. I walked faster, the snowflakes falling on my hair and gathering along the zipper of my coat. We lived in Little Italy and the air always smelled like pizza, even in a blizzard.

When I got to the porch, he stood up, “Happy birthday!” he said, grinning. That real grin, the one I didn’t see much since he started spending hours hunched over fake teeth and saying words like occlusion and periodontal disease.

He pointed to two camp chairs sitting on the porch – one red and one gold. “Your present,” he said, “From REI!”

I smiled. What a splurge! The things we could do with those chairs!

We could use them for birding or fireworks or camping. I sat down in the red chair, my ripe belly pressing onto my legs. He handed me a mug of hot chocolate and reached to hold my hand and we sat in the snow as it fell on our knees.

Now I am an ex-wife with an ex-husband. It puts me commuting to a career I never thought I would have; stuffs me solitary into an empty pew every other Sunday; leaves me all alone at school concerts and parent-teacher conferences and piano recitals.

Last Saturday I pulled up to my daughter’s soccer game — she is light and energy and braids. I watched her run toward her team, all in neon orange, while I walked to the field and pulled out my chair.

The camp chair. The red one.

I sat down tucking a blanket over me: it was snowing – the tiny, angry snow of spring.

The game kicked off and I saw my little girl wave to someone on the sidelines. I turned to see her stepmom — the new wife of my ex-husband. Someone a little younger, a little more energetic, a little taller. She pulled out a camp chair – the other camp chair, the gold one. The one my then-husband gave to me. On my birthday. When it was snowing.

The new wife is pregnant and when she sat in the chair her belly rested on her legs. “Go, Vivi,” she called – yelling the nickname that I whispered when my daughter was inside me. “We’ll name her Violet, but we can call her Vivi,” I had said to her dad. “It’s perfect,” he said. And it was.

I shivered: in that moment it felt like snow and pizza and whispers and loneliness. That’s how it felt to see her sit in that chair.

Rereading that piece, I still feel that moment, like ice on my tongue. The sharpness of grief still taking space inside of me.

No one really preps you for what it’s like to lose an imagined future.

It’s these expectations, baked into us, that transform ordinary things like soccer games into great gashes of emotion that we can barely contain or understand.

I had built a future in my mind for me and my husband and our two kids: it was full of hikes and burned hot dogs and homework around the kitchen table and inside jokes and sitting on the porch and games of Boggle.

It didn’t happen.

But, the arc of life is long, and not all dreams died on that soccer field.

Over these eight years, I’ve built a career, made a home for my kids, found new dreams. Resurrected old ones.

I’ve become someone.

And this weekend, that someone loaded up the 2001 4Runner and took a load to the dump, tossing the red chair on top.

It was broken beyond repair from many years of happy sideline sitting. I saw my son find his groove in ultimate frisbee from that chair, saw my daughter play basketball, sat along the banks of rivers, propped myself up on the back porch. The red chair, turns out, was still a gift — even if it wasn’t always easy to see.

Goodbye, Red Chair.

I hope a squirrel keeps nuts in your drink holders and pulls threads for a nest. I hope your red reminds someone of a cardinal settling into a tree. I hope that you can fall to pieces, gently, turning back into earth, into a sigh, into the breath of someone else’s dream.

The red chair in a dumpster. RIP.