Melting Down at IKEA

After my mother's death, I decided to become a new person: kinder and more organized. I knew she'd like that. First stop: Ikea, to buy a new desk, filing cabinet, and shelving. Retail grief-therapy.

Ikea is a Scandihoovian superstore packed to the rafters with everything you need for home and office. All made with Nordic unfuss and anti-ostentation, cheap as dirt, assemble-at-home, with names, like the humlarp, the gluk, and the huskvllurple.

The gigantor warehouse is a buzzing hive crammed with consumer bees: groovy grannies, teenqueens, we-just-moved-in-together couples, we're-so-over-each-other couples, neo-hippies and post-yuppies. I'm looking forward to forgetting my grief, embracing the opiate of consuming, and escaping to the mundane. But all the sleek dressers and slick clocks exhaust me. The walls begin to close in on me. My heart starts racing, my head feels like a giant is squeezing it. As my partner arranges shipping, we're at the check-out registers, where long lines of cranky consumers push carts overflowing with stuff they want NOW! I can't stand up anymore. I sit on a bony little flarkl between the shipping and paying areas. Suddenly a huge wall of water is headed straight at me. I try to stop the tears, but that makes my brain ache. My shoulders are shaking and I'm gasping, making these little noises like a sad animal, my whole body wracked with sobs. Oddly, I don't think of my mom until now. Then I see her on her deathbed, gasping for air, ravaged with cancer, brain on fire, and that sends me over the edge. I don't know how long this goes on, but everyone seems quite nice about it. No employee comes up to say, "Sir, could you please stop sobbing on our flarkl?" As I calm down I feel relief, but I'm a wreck. Apparently the thrill of the buy and the escape to the mundane are no match for grief. Even at Ikea, grief never sleeps.

(To listen to NPR piece: http://www.kqed.org/pgmArchive/RD62)