I remember
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.