When it rains, it pours: Unpacking pests, grief, & the freezer compartment

“THIS IS JUST TO SAY, DO NOT BE ALARMED BY THE STUFFED BEAR/TOY IN THE FREEZER”

This is how my message to my suitemates began on a Tuesday morning, mid-October.

“I wasn’t sure where that message was going initially,” my suitemate said. At the time, my 4 a.m. mind reasoned that if my suitemates were to notice anything amiss, the first sign of trouble would be Millie—wrapped in Ziploc and stuffed in the freezer compartment, alongside a pack of edamame and Ben & Jerry’s.

A few hours before, I sat down on my rug to study for a midterm, only to discover a growing number of bumps all over my body. Carpet beetle dermatitis. Unlike bed bugs, carpet beetles do not bite. Instead, the small hairs on their backs trigger an allergic reaction of brachiating urticaria—small red hives trailing across the skin.

I panicked. I rolled up the rug and tossed it out of the suite. I grabbed my laundry detergent and began washing everything: towels, pillows, clothes, curtains, etc. I ran every laundry machine in my dorm’s first floor. I never got around to sleeping or studying for my exam. Instead, I watched the cycles in the washing machine turn themselves over and over again. I emptied drawers and compartments, pulled down organized shelves, stripped the bedsheets, and pried open a carefully built life. But in retrospect, the dismantling began weeks before.

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It was a Thursday when I messaged my mother on my way to work. It was one of those perfect weather days at the start of fall, before daylight savings ended and when the early evenings were still bright.

I am crying. Sorry. Your grandfather died about 1.5 hours ago. 

I paused mid-step, staring at the text message from my mother, but eventually continued to work. I set up my team for their assignments, and half-way through, excused myself for 15 minutes to go back to my dorm and change into black clothes. That night, work continued until 3 a.m. before I went home for the night. Collapsing on my bed, I was too tired to even think about crying.

Were you close? Is the question that everyone asks.

No, I say. He lived in Manila. So, we didn’t see each other very often, except when we traveled.

They nod, as if the geographical distance makes it better. But in my mind, I see him dancing with my sister on Christmas morning. I see him seated at the furthest table at family dum-sum. I hear him speaking to me in Hokkien, convinced that if I just repeated after him, I would understand right then and there—as if speaking a few words could bridge that distance. But he was wrong. The problem wasn’t translating between Chinese and English, it was translating different understandings of gender roles, heritage, and “respect.” That is a distance larger than the ocean between San Francisco and Manila.

When I met with my liberal arts advisor at the end of the week, she told me to take a step back. Grief will demand space, she said. If you do not give it that, it will find you. But between a homework packet for phonetics, a midterm for foreign relations, and reports for my seminar, I couldn’t find the space. I wore black until the cremation; but when that week ended, I folded up my dark clothes, put together my memories of my grandfather, and packed them both neatly away.

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Millie—a stuffed bear named after the Barnard College mascot—ended up in the freezer because there is no protocol for stuffed toys in carpet beetle infestations. According to online forums, the next best thing to do for objects that cannot be chucked into one-setting, college-provided, washing machines is to wrap them in plastic and freeze them. With my room stripped bare, I moved into the living room couch and Millie moved into the freezer compartment. In the morning, I headed to my phonetics midterm with no sleep and no studying—smelling of detergent and Clorox.

But Facilities did not call in a pest inspector as I requested, instead, offloading the problem to Residence & Housing. By the time I learned and called Residence & Housing, they had closed early for the day. Outside the Student Center, I began crying. Half of my everything was sitting in laundry dryers because I had nowhere to put them. I had been awake for over 36 hours, wanting to shower and sleep, but unable to without clothes and a bed. Hives had spread across my skin so that my body looked like a topographical map. I hadn’t eaten either, and I had a midterm paper due the next morning that I hadn’t started. I didn’t know how to grieve for my grandfather, but I could cry over beetles. It just made me cry harder.

My mother always said, that in our family, when it rains, it pours. Our problems don’t arrive when it’s convenient; they stack on top of each other. When I pulled apart my room, I tore open everything with it—my organized midterm study plans, my secured privacy, my carefully packaged grief. But you learn to walk through the downpour, and if it gets too much—you swim. How to swim: 1. List the facts. 2. Discern a problem from a situation. 3. Prioritize problem-solving. 4. Then go do those things. Because that is what we do—I could hear my mother saying. We compartmentalize, organize, and keep going. Eventually, I picked myself up. I called a friend to help me gather my laundry from the various machines in the hall, and collect my belongings into trash bags. I picked up dinner and asked my friend if they could get some Raid for carpet beetles on their Target run, before continuing to clean out my room. At around 12am, I began writing my midterm and my second all-nighter in a row.

“Are you okay?” My suitemate asked, the next day.

I sighed. “I’m sorry about the mess—” I gestured to our living room, which I had taken over.

My suitemate shook her head, “No, I’m just sorry this happened to you.” By the time that the Director of Residence Life returned my panicked email, I was running on 10 hours of sleep over 72 hours. He scheduled for a pest inspector to come that morning. My nightmare was almost over. I stood up, and looked around the living room—my blankets and pillows on the couch, where I had been sleeping the past two nights, other belongings in a laundry basket in the corner, everything else in clean trash bags around the room. If anything—this demanded more space than I could have ever expected.

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My grandmother passed away the following week. I woke up to my phone’s chime, the screen lit from my sister’s message. Helena are you awake?

List the facts: I have a class for Politics of Eastern Europe at 1:15 pm. I have readings on the development of nationalism in Eastern Europe to finish before then. She was my favorite grandparent. I need to prepare for a debate on the nuclear test ban. I have the booklist for the senior capstone project due in two days. I have to read 98 pages of Middle English and write a 1000-word paper for the next day. She told me stories about working as a nurse in England with her best friend, Helena—my namesake. I have the phonetics homework 4 packet due tomorrow. I have tabulation training at 8 p.m., so I can volunteer at the USMES debate this weekend. She taught me the passions of Christ. I can recite to you a passage of Chaucer’s “Parliament of Fowls” in Middle English pronunciation, and I can list the eight strategic nuclear arms deals between the US and Russia—years they began, ended, and never got off the ground—but I don’t remember the passions of Christ anymore.

Instead, I look at what can be solved, prioritize by the deadline, and keep going. By the time it’s Thursday, I’m exhausted and tired, but I have work at the newspaper. One of my friends started working there recently. “How are you doing?” they ask.

“Horrible,” I say.

They grimace, “Same.” I’m too tired to explain how it’s not the same at all. I nod and we go back to our work.

Another friend and co-worker arrives at the office.  “How are you doing?” he asks.

“Really bad,” I say.

But they go on, “Why?”

“My grandmother died a few days ago,” I tell him.

“Oh no, I’m really sorry,” he says, and that is the end of that conversation. But I see my other friend’s face change in an expression of shock and sympathy, trying to re-contextualize my response of horrible from earlier. Part of me cringes, wondering if I inadvertently sand-bagged them by not outrightly sharing the ongoings of my life earlier. They roll their chair over. “If you want to talk your feelings, I’m here,” they say quickly and intensely all at once. I nod and continue working. They offer again, four times that night. I appreciate the offers, but it feels strange and unnatural.

The truth is that I don’t know how to respond to the repetitions of Were you close? and I’m here to talk about it. It feels as though people are offering me a stage to perform my feelings, to perform my grief, to perform my love–over and over again. But I can’t bring myself to do so. In Mockingjay, the character of Finnick states: It takes ten times as long to put yourself back together as it does to fall apart—so instead, I’m frozen in place.

This is my grief. I make a list, I come to solutions, and I prioritize. I do what I need to do—I swim. I mop up the puddles that these storms leave behind, re-shelve my clothes and books, pull my sheets back over my bed, and piece my life back together again. I walk around in pain and find no relief in that time that passes; but this compartmentalization, this frozen preservation, is what keeps me together. Here, in Claremont, I am by myself—and that is alright. There are some storms that we walk alone.

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.” ― Frank Herbert, Dune

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A few days ago, when I finally removed Millie from the freezer compartment, she looked so tired that I almost forgot that she wasn’t alive. She probably never caught the carpet beetles like my rug did—but being careful never hurts. Her ears were crumpled from being smushed in a Ziploc bag, and she was so cold that my fingers hurt from holding her. I tried to imagine her view from the freezer compartment. She would have been fine, of course, but she must have been cold, stuck in the dark, listening to the hum of the ice maker. She’s had nothing to fear; stuffed animals don’t die from freezer compartments. But she might have been uncertain when the compartment door opened and light streamed in, facing awkward glances from my suitemates when they opened the freezer. I wondered if her crooked smile tried to convince them she was okay, as she watched the door close again. I took Millie out of the freezer, and out of the Ziploc bag. I shuffled back to my room, feeling cold from sleeping by the living room windows for the past few nights. Lying in my bed, curled up like a child, I held her to my chest as we both defrosted.