Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I will never be okay with the fact that he died;

But I am determined to be okay with the fact that I lived.

This thought came to me fully formed, just as I wrote it above.  I’m trying. I think I’ll get there eventually.

I have been, as a friend of mine puts it, out-of-pocket these last few days.  The disturbance in the Force I’ve been feeling for almost 4 weeks continued and waxed and waned and then settled in to a deep sadness and hopelessness.  

I had gotten to a point where not only was I no closer to discerning what the hell my problem was, but I was also obsessing about not knowing what the hell my problem was.  And pretty soon, I was locked up in my own head, feeling crappy, feeling crappy about feeling crappy, and feeling completely isolated and alone.

I know that I am in large part the architect of that isolation.  I am an an INFJ (A was, too, surprisingly) and a Scorpio; I have always been pretty intuitive, and it is my way to reach out to people when I know they’re troubled.  So I expect (however unreasonably) others to operate similarly, because we all see the world as we are, not as it is.  And I am proud; I hate to beg for attention or consideration, even when I’m desperate for it, needing help, but unwilling to be needy.  And because I’m this way I find myself waiting around for people to also ask me if I’m okay, to give me an opening to say, “No, I’m not doing so well,” when I feel like I’m broadcasting despair, but that never seems to happen, so it just gets worse and worse and I spiral downward and inward.  I don’t know if people just don’t see it in me, or just don’t care, but as I sink, I start to assume the latter.  Whatever the reason, I am not one people check on, or check in with.

And once you’re in that place, everything is colored by it, everything bad that ever happened or could possibly happen to you is pulled into the vortex with you.  So while I don’t think this all started out as a grief-incited emotional riot, it certainly arrived there in time.  I have found, for myself at least, that any detour to the dark side is an opportunity to revisit the aching sadness of A’s absence in my daily life.  Which of course doesn’t help the situation any.  

I was, to make a short story long, in a bad way.  And I knew I couldn’t stay there.  But to reach out and ask for help is really hard for me.   I am strong.  I am the one who listens and helps.  I am the one who has it together.  My ego hates being the weak one, but I cannot be the strong one all the time.  And probably shouldn’t be.  I get a lot out of being the strong one; other people should have that opportunity, too, I suppose.

I started small yesterday; when a pal at the widow board asked me how I was, I actually told her:  “not so well.”  And when she told me she was a good listener if I wanted to talk, I told her a little more.  She had no answers for me, but she did have hugs.  It was a start.

When I got home last night, when I had the chance, I told E I wasn’t doing so well.  I had to tell him a couple of times.  I have been blessed in love with very smart, very kind, very loving men, but they have not been highly literate in subtext.  No man I’ve ever loved has ever asked me “What’s wrong?” unless I was actively crying at the moment.  It was hard; I don’t ever want to tell anyone that sort of thing if they’re not really going to listen.  I don’t think that makes me different than most people, though I could be wrong about that.  I know lots of people who will tell you all their deepest-darkest within 5 minutes of meeting you, regardless of whether you express interest.

We ended up having a couple hours of real conversation that left me feeling heard, and left me with some concrete things I could do to improve my life and how I felt about it, and I felt better than I had in weeks.  I don’t know if it was because I now had a plan, or if it was just feeling like I’d been let out of solitary.  Probably both.  I’ll talk more about that soon; I’m still processing it.  But today was a better day. And I’m hoping to make it two in a row tomorrow.

I have a necklace that A gave me, one he picked up in Kenya several years before we met.  He told me at the time that he must have been saving it for me.  It is made of black and brown wooden beads, with a large terra cotta bead in the middle, and 2 carved soapstone animals on either side.  There is one in a perfect necklace-fiddling location that is a rhinoceros, and his horn is carved flat on top in a way that invites my fingers to slide along the cool smoothness of the stone.

When I’d wear the necklace, I’d let A know, and he was always pleased to know that I actually wore it.  I’d tease him that I was "fondling the rhinos on my chest," which of course quickly became an allusion to a different and altogether naughtier activity than the actual reality.

I wore that necklace many times when he was alive, and no one ever said a word about it.  I recently started wearing it again, because I had outfits it would go with.  (A rustic African necklace with carved animals doesn’t go with everything.)  And every time I do, I get tons of compliments on it, at work, in shops, last night at the coffee house.  Which is strange to me, because it never elicited any response before; it’s only since he passed that it has.

I actually like it.  If people ask about it, I say it’s from Kenya, or I say "it was a gift from a friend," and leave it at that.  But I wonder if it has some kind of special energy to it now that makes it more noticeable; I know it always has for me, and now I tend to wear it when I need to feel a little closer to him.

If nothing else, I like it because every time they notice it, whether they realize it or not, it validates that he was here. That he touched that necklace, brought it home from another continent, and gave it to me.  Someone besides me is acknowledging that he was here.  He was here.

I got an e-mail from my cousin the other day.  Her father-in-law was in critical condition for complications after scheduled heart surgery.  Last I heard, he was improving, but not out of the woods yet.  He’s already had a stroke in recent years.  Turns out, he has some kind of congenital heart defect that complicates matters further, so all the kids in his family have also been tested as the result of his turn for the worse. 

My cousin’s husband does not have the congenital defect; however, they discovered plaque in his arteries.

He’s 35 years old.

My mother tells me that (in her work) she generally sees this in men in their 50s, not men in their thirties.  My cousin-in-law is ridiculously in shape, as is his wife.  They eat right.  They take all these vitamins and supplements.  I’m not entirely sure they could scrape up an ounce of fat between them.  So clearly, the heart disease is genetic in this family.  And now my cousin-in-law will no doubt be adding other medicines to his daily batch of vitamins to try to keep him from ending up in an ICU just like his father.  And my cousin will have to worry about him, and their child.

It was their wedding I went to, and cried through, a month after A died.  When they started their vows and talked about forever, I bit my lip and stared off into Lake Superior to my left as the tears rolled down my face, and prayed they would both be 99 years old before they learned that "forever" is sometimes much shorter time than you ever imagined.

And now I learn that he is stalked by the same genetic time bomb that took my A, and A’s father, and A’s father’s father.   After A died, his siblings were tested, and despite both of them being hard-core runners and fitness buffs, they, too, have problems developing along the same lines.  But at least they know; at least they have been warned, and can try to do something about it.  I hate it, for A, for his family, for my cousins.  And I know that there’s very little to be done about it.   It’s like a thief in your house that you can see through the windows, but you can’t stop him as he takes what is most valuable from you.  The best you can do is slow him down.

Native to this beautiful desert I live in is the prickly pear cactus.  There is a large one in my front yard separating the neighbor’s driveway from my own.  If you look at a prickly pear, you will see large spines sticking out menacingly from the pores of the pad, and it seems a simple enough thing to avoid them.  But what you don’t see is that at the base of those large and dangerous-looking spikes is a bed of tiny, hairlike spines that are invisible from anything but close range, and for those unacquainted with this desert plant, maybe not even then. 

More often than not, these are the ones that will get you, because you need only brush them to end up with a hand full of them.  Or something else; I’ve seen them sticking out of my leather tennis shoes and a green plastic garden hose I misguidedly pulled past one.

They are nearly impossible to see, and often you don’t know that they are there until you touch your hand to something just so and are rewarded with a zinging pain.  The filaments of these spines are like fiberglass; they work their way into and under your skin and stay there, impervious to all attempts at removal.  If you can see them sticking out, you can try a tweezers, but the spines are brittle and are as likely to break as be removed.  You can try letting white glue dry on the unfortunate hand, and sometimes you can peel them off with the glue.  Sometimes slowly rubbing across the spines with duct tape will pull them out, but only if you’re going the right direction; if not, you can end up helping them deeper into your skin. 

Sometimes you’re just stuck with them, and you have to put up with them until they work themselves out via the normal shedding of your skin.  Half the time, they won’t hurt at all.  Usually, you have to hit them just right, and then it’s a doozy.  And you want to just be rid of them as soon as possible, but the spines will take their own time leaving your flesh.

I’m not sure why, today, the prickly pear suggested itself to me.  But last night, in the dark, after I’d put away the book I’ve been distracting myself with, I was flooded with memories of A.  I do not often think of the trauma of those days after he died and before I knew it.  There is no need; it was a horrible time, and he had already gone.  Anyway, it is the sweetest memories that make me cry now.

That first kiss in the airport, brief and tentative, like I was kissing a relative.  And the second one, the real thing, that put jelly in my knees that returns even with the memory of that kiss and all those we shared thereafter.  The memory of the way his hands moved on his guitar, like liquid, like he had no bones.  The memory of the way his hands moved on me, like fire, like I had no bones.  The memories came one after another; I have no trouble remembering the good times.  Those are the ones that make me weep the most.  Those are the ones that had the tears rolling down my face into the pillow I hugged tightly as I remembered holding him.  I cry because it was so good to be "us," together.  I cry because memories are all I have now.

I don’t know why those memories came last night, so clear and palpable, so dangerous.  Most of the time, they don’t hurt at all.  But you hit it just right, and it’s a doozy.