I remember my friend Zach telling me that he didn’t really remember anything that happened the year after his mom died. Grief hits hard and in strange ways.
I did remember what happened the year after my dad died in 2020.
I did remember what happened the months after my mom had a massive stroke in 2021.
I didn’t drift away from memory, I drifted away from other people.
Away, distant from my friends and family. I became unreachable, unavailable. I went into a massive state of withdrawal and social overwhelm. I couldn’t answer texts, I still haven’t answered emails, and social media became terrifying, so I stopped participating in it pretty much altogether.
My internal world felt safer than the scary external world where people I love really do die and are gone forever.
My internal world felt safer, but it isn’t safer. I know that.
I love my friends, I love my family. My life is bleh without them. I need them to keep me from feeling like a ghost. To remind me that I’m real.
When Alex and I lived in Chicago, we trained in Karate at Thousand Waves Martial Arts & Self Defense. We initially joined the dojo as a way to get fun exercise, but the students and teachers at Thousand Waves also became great friends over the three years we trained there.
Alex receiving his blue belt, Michelle peeking out from the end of the line.
After belt tests such as the one pictured above, we’d go out for dinner with our fellow testers. We were in our early twenties and full of energy, so along with our beers and burgers and fries, we’d order shots to match the color of the belts we’d just received. I seem to remember that apple pucker, drambuie, and sambuca all played somewhere into the mix, but to get the correct listing one would have to ask our friend Lynne, who, as a former bartender, kept a mental tab on who should order what.
Me, Alex and other TW friends performing at the annual “Art with Heart” school benefit. Not the Break-a-Thon, sure, but still looking tough.
Our karate school, which was a nonprofit, held a few annual benefits, one of which was a Break-a-Thon. We raised pledges based on the breaks we were trying to do. Different breaks offer different difficulty levels: one board with a front kick is fairly easy, eight concrete slabs with a hammer fist is somewhat harder, one board thrown midair and broken with a jump kick offers a different challenge. I don’t remember which breaks we did, nothing too flashy. But board breaking was part of our practice and something we did regularly.
So when it came time to plan our wedding, I realized I could incorporate our love of chopping things in half with our hands with the cake cutting ceremony. We would karate chop our wedding cake. My brother made us styrofoam dummy cakes covered in fondant and frosting. He and his wife, who, of course, both also had martial arts experience, held the cakes for us. It looked like this:
Ferocity in satin and a suit.And then, we lived happily ever after.
What a crowd-pleaser. And so much better than the kissy face cake feeding, I thought.
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So, that’s the end of this blog post. It felt a little uneven perhaps–it included details that didn’t come into play in the end…but you know? I’m really just going for a little snapshot of my life, and I think I’ve accomplished that.
Michelle Folk Johnson 