Letters to Family and Friends

Every so often, I find myself constructing short prayers to deal with daily frustrations.  You know them.  We all do it in one form or another.  ”Oh Lord, show me how to speak civilly to this paid contractor who is messing up my house”, “Lord, grant me strength not to yell at this cat who is waking me up at 4:00 AM”, etc.

Tonight I needed a more serious one.  ”God grant me the strength to endure the past.”  I haven’t needed this as much you would think.  Dave has been gone about 10 weeks, but most of the time I still feel as if there were a glass wall between me and the events of August and September.  I can see them in my mind, but I can’t react to them most of the time.  I can reach out towards them, but I can only lay my hand against the glass.  The only exception is 3:00 AM nearly every morning when I wake from dreams.  The dreams are not always about Dave, but I can still hear distorted, half-remembered music in my mind as I am waking up.  Surely, it is the soundtrack from “Monsoon Wedding”, which was playing when Dave died.  I don’t know what song it was, but it’s buried in my memory somewhere and plays while I sleep.

The trauma of those last few weeks is buried with it, covered with a thousand tasks, decisions and even unrelated events.  It makes me restless.  I can hardly sit still anymore.  My job as a mourner is to sort through those as carefully as I sort through the contents of the basements and closets, though it is a less deliberate process.  An awful lot of it is beyond my direct control and I’ve hardly gotten through any of it yet.

A friend commented to me tonight how nice it was that Kitty had been allowed to come to the hospital in the last 24 hours of Dave’s life.  People say this a lot and usually my response is to think of the hospital and its good palliative care, but tonight was different.  Tonight I remembered … I remembered asking Dave if it was time for Kitty to go.  With great effort he shook his head a tiny bit and widened his eyes.  He could not move at that point and was nearly completely paralyzed.  He knew he was dying.  I don’t know if anyone else would have understood, but I knew him and could see the longing for home, the regret that he would die there in the ICU and the plea for a little more time with Kitty in that brief movement.  I glimpsed the Dave I knew was trapped in that immobile body.

And, oh … oh, Lord, grant me the strength to endure…  I did the best I could and Kitty stayed a while longer, but eventually she had to go home.  There were other people to consider and Kitty was anxious and I hadn’t eaten for 12 hours and the cafeteria was going to close.  So I sent her home and went to the cafeteria and the nurses came in for the nightly cleaning rituals that sent Dave’s heart rate plummeting every time.

When I think of this, it’s as if my own heart could stop.  All I wanted to do was protect him and I could do nothing, not even manage my own hunger so Kitty could comfort him longer.  I would have taken on the whole thing for him; the leukemia, the pneumonia, the fear and humiliation and pain and longing for home; all of it, if I could have.  If I could have … but I could do nothing.  Nothing.

What do you do with yourself in a situation where all of the context is gone? If I write enough in this online diary, perhaps I’ll be able to develop my own stages of grief. It was eight weeks since Dave’s death last Thursday and eight weeks is long enough for a new reality to set in. I would say those eight weeks were characterized by confusion and a general sense of free-fall.

The transition was marked by a trip to Utah, land of mountains that are beyond my paltry understanding of time and canyons that look all too much like the abyss that Dave disappeared into. I crashed upon returning and spent several days floundering in self-doubt, anger and shock at how little control we really have over our lives. It was a difficult few days and I don’t expect it to be the last time. What can you expect from such a time? Better to let the emotions wash over me as they come than to try to hide from them. “What you resist persists”, Dave says. It’s true. There is no way out, but through the tunnel.

Phase two seems to be characterized by grimness, and perhaps raw determination to survive. I want to take a new name, a good practice in times of transition. This time it will be ‘Moro’, from the dark Japanese anime drama, “Princess Mononoke”. Moro is the wolf goddess who has raised a human girl as her own. They are locked in a fight with the human community to save the forest from destruction and, after many years, Moro is grim and tired. She knows what the humans will do and how the other animals will react, but there is nothing she can do to stop it. All she can do is continue fighting her own fight and trying to protect what is most important.

So there I am. I knew what was happening the whole time. I knew Dave would die, though I tried to deny it. I knew the immediate aftermath would see me mixed up in all kinds of confusion and trouble. I know now that my old life is being washed away and all I can do is continue fighting my own fight for integrity and try to protect the most valuable parts of my identity. Most of it will be overcome, for better or worse. Powerful though I may be in my internal world, there is only so much I can hold on to.

That’s the answer. That’s all I can do.

- Moro

I found this list on his workbench…

• What you resist persists
• Don’t be a football to other people’s opinions
• Expectations reduce the joy of life
• Don’t take a position.  It reduces your options.
• Positive and negative are complementary
• Don’t see intention in other people’s mistakes
• Responsibility is power/growth
• Random acts of kindness increase the joy in the world
• Don’t pour water on other people’s enthusiasm
• The present moment is inevitable

- “God comes in where our hearts are broken.”

It’s a little known fact about me that I always have boyfriends.  That’s just another way of saying I have lots of friends who are men, it’s a side effect of working in a technical field and of not having children.  I meet a lot of men and sometimes have more to talk about with them than the women I meet.  I like them.  They are interesting.  Dave never minded this and now that he’s gone, I feel lucky to have people around who know how to do carpentry and can lift heavy things.

I was mad at one of these friends for several days.  Don’t blame my friend.  I’m no picnic to be around these days, always crying or picking fights and this friend wants to help me, but doesn’t know me well enough yet to know I’ll recover on my own.  I just need someone to remind me that everything is fine.  He doesn’t know me well enough yet either to know I’m not so much mad at him as at the universe.  He has the misfortune to have just the right combination of traits to make him seem like a good universe proxy for me.  Of course, I’m deeply embarrassed and ashamed of dragging him into my fight, but I’m human too and I’m still working out when to be patient as well as who and when to fight. 

It’s like being the prince in C.S. Lewis’ The Silver Chair who is mad all day when he is free and sane all night when they’ve tied him to the chair.  I have mad times, when I feel like the universe hates me and I react to people with that in mind; and then I have sane times, when I can see that the hatred is imaginary.  Hopefully, my friend will forgive me for the mad times when I react to him as if he were a disdainful universe rather than simply another human being with his own problems.  When I get through this tunnel of grieving, I expect to be pretty darn sane and hope I won’t look back to find I dragged other people through it with me.

A common comment during Dave’s illness was that I was strong.  I never knew what to say to this.  I just did what had to be done, I didn’t think of it as being strong.  Dave was the most important person in my life.  How could I do anything other than the very best I knew how to do for him?  This comment has been made about me in other situations since then as well, but I didn’t take it seriously.  But today, I was working out in the gym and I saw myself in the mirror. I’ve lost 10 pounds since summer and I’m always surprised how small my reflection is.  There I was, in my skinny workout clothes with one leg hooked up to a machine.  At this weight, I can see the outlines of my muscles through my skin.  I look diminished, but with latent strength.  While I was staring, surprised again, at my reflection, I thought about how I have nothing to prove.  I know Dave loved me.  I know my friends love me.  These days, I’m pretty sure relationships are the way to God, and I preserved both my integrity and the integrity of my relationship with Dave through the worst scenario I could possibly think of.  I have nothing to prove.

I was so angry at my friend and hurt that I thought I would have to cut him out of my life, but it isn’t true. I don’t need to make him anything other than what he is, just to prove to the universe that it has wronged me. Dave’s leukemia and pneumonia were random. We couldn’t control anything that happened in August and September, and I can hardly control anything now, including my moods. But if God is in the relationships, not in the random misfortunes, then I have an opportunity to know God better by standing aside and accepting my friend as he is. And I have an opportunity, maybe even an obligation, to develop that latent strength enough to do this if I can.

I feel like I’ve been picked up by a tornado, but there are some ideas worth pursuing in here.  If only they weren’t so hard to grasp.

I’ve climbed back into my bed again.  I’m hoping it will be warmer here and it seems safer than the rest of the house.  I’m usually here or in the kitchen when I’m home because the second floor has too many ghosts; Dave in the office, looking at his computer; Dave in the bedroom, lying down and looking at his little computer.  There are ghosts of him watching TV in the living room too.  I’ve always thought it was plausible that the boundaries between times are temporal, but not physical and in any given place everything that ever happened there is still happening in its own time slice.  That would mean Dave is still here, still alive, just over those temporal walls.

I want to bolt from this house.  I want to pack up a few things, get in one of the cars and drive away, never to return.  It’s too awful, too painful, to be reminded every day that Dave is gone.  Every time I go up or downstairs, I pass by our bedroom and for a moment it feels as if everything is ok and it is a familiar place of refuge.  Then I remember that nothing will ever be ok in this house again.  When Dave died, it lost all of its power to protect, to nurture, to be a home.  It’s a haunted house now, memories slicing and nipping at me everywhere I go.

This house was a lot of things.  It was the place in which we had our routine, it was the location of my garden, it was the House of Bad Cats.  Now it is a house of ghosts.  As long as I live here, I am living in the past, and someday I am going to look back and wonder how I survived this phase.  The only viable option is to sell it as soon as I can.  Conventional wisdom says to wait 6 months or a year before making any decisions, but I need to start a new life.  I didn’t choose this, but if this is how it’s going to be, grim as it is, I need to move forward, if for no other reason then to keep on moving.

This is a response to Sue’s comment on poem #4.

I had to switch to poetry. For me, poetry is a way to describe the indescribable. Prose is good for facts and stories, but I think only with poetry can I describe the netherworld of the emotions. I can write about how Kitty’s purring reminds me of the rumbling of Dave’s lungs in the days before he died, but telling the story of how her purring kept me awake doesn’t get across the confusion and horror of being there in the hospital. At the time, it was like being in a fog. I don’t even know how I got through it. And now, my task is to sort through all those experiences and find out what the emotions were, since we all know they are in there somewhere and are bound to come out one way or another. Better to try to get at them through poetry than wait for them to squeeze out the sides and attack me when I’m not looking.

If anyone is still reading this, I hope they will write about how they see what happened.  I’d really like to know what other people are experiencing.  Dave’s illness and death was like a boulder being dropped into a pond; it made big waves that are still making their way outward.  It’s not just about me, at this point.  It’s about everyone who knew him or who knew someone who had a similar experience.

So please use the comments as a place to write about that.  Maybe it will be therapeutic for others to write as well as read.

Bonnie

Symbols left and symbols right,
haunting, crying through the night,
Air conditioner, old night-light,
keeping you within my sight.

There is no way to turn back time,
or even capture in this rhyme
that you and I, we were just fine,
relationship was in its prime.

Go to the hospital, they said.
We parked the car with rising dread.
For six long weeks your blood was shed;
ritual numbers colored red.

I called you once, I’d lost the rings,
and you were always finding things
for me when you were still awake,
Two symbols of what was stake.

Hallucinations took you far
away from me. One more defeat to mar
our old reality.
Pneumonia was the third.
Your voice no longer heard.

Sedated stillness for a week,
like you were already gone.
My hope remained, but it was weak.
Plans for widowhood were drawn.

You slowly woke, but could not move.
No matter how I did implore
Your body’s health could not improve.
I had to let you go once more.

Bereft again, now that you’ve gone.
We never knew what was in store.
The worst conclusion now foregone.
I’m overwhelmed by metaphor.

Carry me down from the graveyard hill.
I climb on your back, we laugh as we will;
gamboling, playing like puppies
that fill the living with life while
the sleeping are still.

Stand and look down at the name on the sign.
The flowers are dead,
here’s the stone still in line.
Stand here with me,
on the place that is mine,
And treasure the moment, still ripe on the vine.

Look through my eyes and see what I’ve seen. Your
heart is still beating,
warm , steady and clean;
Strong arms circle round,
and I’m in between,
Yesterday climbs on today in this scene.
Your heart and his heart and mine too, it seems.

It’s true that this blog is officially ended and most people are no longer looking at it.  However, I need a place to put this poem and this seems as good a place as any.  I was working on a longer, more coherent poem using the goats from the last post, but I haven’t processed enough of this experience to write anything like that.  Everything is still loosely linked images in my head.  I haven’t made any sense of them yet.  Since writing is therapeutic for me, I thought I’d try capturing the images into short, rhyming poems.  The sing-song sound of them helps describe how they feel.

I’ll put others here as I write poems that can be offered for public consumption.  This is poem #4.

Wake up
Whirring, rumble, purring;
Cat sleeps peaceful,
leaning during
another night when I am stirring.

Wake up
Whistle, birdlike beeping,
Rumble from your lungs increasing,
Numbers on the screen are creeping,
Find the nurse, she isn’t
keeping watch right now.
And I was sleeping.

Suction buys a hard decision.
Hours later, plan revision.
Tubes gone, breath gone;
Mouth the words.
I’ll never know what I’d have heard.