Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I was paying bills this morning, trying to get paperwork organized in the secretary desk that holds it all.  There were deposit slips and paperwork from the hospital and retirement stuff to be filed.  As I sat there writing checks, I was aware of how emotionally neutral the task was today, and what a blessing that was.

Thanksgiving 2006 was a totally different picture.  I was still a wreck.  It’d been only 4 months since A had passed, and I had informally abdicated my role as keeper of the family finances.  The bills were disorganized, unpaid, overdue, and stacked with other mail to the point that I couldn’t get the desk shut properly. I really had no idea what was in the pile.  I knew I needed to take care of it, knew I didn’t want to pay late fees, knew, just like breathing, this was something I needed to keep doing whether I wanted to or not.  And still, I walked past the desk thinking “Later.”

Now it’s “Later,” and I felt satisfaction getting the bills paid, other things organized, and walking envelopes out to the mailbox.  No dread.  No avoidance.  No cloud hanging over me, other than my recuperation which of course is going more slowly than I would wish.

It’s funny to me that for so long, every single thing I did was tainted by grief, and even the most mundane things were remarkable because of it.  And now, every single thing I do is remarkable because the grief is absent from it, and it gives me pause as I consider (happily) the change.  I wonder at what point every single thing I do will be entirely unremarkable.  I must say, I’m rather looking forward to that.

My surgery was this morning, and I am pleased to say I survived the experience.  One fear to be taken off the table. I’m at home, resting, and trying not to move too much.  They ended up taking a bit more than just the cyst, and I’m feeling it.  I don’t think that A visited me when I was under, but on the way to pre-op, I did see a piece of artwork depicting hummingbirds.  A sign that even E had to acknowledge when I nodded toward it.

Now I just have to wait for the biopsy results, and for my body to heal.  Surgery sucks.  And mine was minor; I hope it’s my last one.

Many thanks to all of you who sent your good wishes; I appreciate it.

I am 37 today.  This is the first birthday in maybe forever where I realized just how loved I am.  I received birthday greetings from friends and family across the globe.  I spent the evening with some of my favorite people.  I am fortunate.  I don’t know if I’m more blessed this year, or if I’m just more appreciative.  I suspect it’s the latter, both in that experience has taught me (brutally) to appreciate the good, and that I have healed enough in my grieving journey to be able to see and savor the good.  A would like that; he was all about savoring.

This is my third birthday without him here, but A sent me a gift.  There are these catalogs that are wholly connected to him, and they do not come regularly, and they do not come randomly.  They come when I really, really need to hear from him, or for special occasions. It’s really uncanny; you don’t have to believe me.  It’s enough that I believe.  The one that arrived yesterday was from a company he bought my birthday present from in 2005.  He also messed around with my iPod, playing DJ; he hasn’t done that in awhile.  I felt him near today, a stronger presence than I’ve felt in awhile.  I am loved.

I always liked the round 20 years that separated us.  I like evenness and multiples of 10.  I realized this morning that I was gaining on him now.  We’re only 18 years and an infinity of distance apart now.  I meet that fact with resignation, like so many others.  There is no “over it”; I regularly shake my head at a reality that I do not understand and live with regardless.  My understanding is evidently not required, however much it may be desired by me.

Tonight I sat and ate cake at my friends’ table in their new home, surrounded by boxes…my friend who, it seems, was the other reason I was meant to go that guitar camp in California…and she told us the story of her widowed grandmother, who felt her husband’s arms around her waist as she did dishes one night, and who saw the dog wagging his tail eagerly as he stared intently at the empty space behind her.  And I know that it is not in all of our heads; that this is a UNIverse, where nothing is lost, and in that, there is hope and the strength to endure.

Last Thursday I had an unexpected veterinary appointment for my (now) eldest dog who has had a nagging, violent cough for a couple months.  It comes and goes, but Wednesday evening he was whimpering with the hacking.  Our vet had already seen him and decided to try some antibiotics which seemed to help a bit, but the second course didn’t make a bit of difference.  So we took him in to our backup vet for the X-ray our vet had told us would be the next step.

When this vet came back with the X-rays, she started talking enlarged heart and furosemide, and my head began to spin.  I asked her if we were looking at congestive heart failure, and she said no, not at this time, but I was going to give him the same medicine I’d given my elder dogter right up until she died.  And I found that I was having trouble hearing her over the panicky static in my head.

I texted the highlights to E while I was still at the vet’s office waiting, and by the time I’d given him the entire scoop that evening, I had fallen into a serious funk.  My baby was sick.  I’d lost my sweetheart and my eldest to heart disease, and now I was looking at going down that road yet again.  I just couldn’t do it again.  I didn’t want to.

On top of that, I’d had some concerns about finances lately, and then there’s my own health, which remains a big question mark until after I have my surgery in a week and a half.  And suddenly, I found myself weighed down with worry about all these things.

I have to tell you, I resented the hell out of all this worry.  I have been in a pretty good place lately.  I’ve gotten to the point where the “new normal” is actually just “normal,” and I’ve been appreciating what is happening in my life for what it is, rather than for what it isn’t.  And if you’ve been through it, or you’ve read here long enough, you know how I’ve crawled and clawed my way to this place over the last 26 months.

This, I have to admit, has given me a sense of entitlement, unwarranted as most senses of entitlement are, that having done the hard work of surviving and grieving, and having been down so very long, I should be excused from any major trauma, worry, or problems for a significant period.  No sick family members.  No death.  No health scares of my own.  No crises—just for a little while.  Haven’t I earned it?  

When I think about this surgery, and the potential cancer that they could find, or just the potential screw-ups that could kill me on the table, I get pissed at the idea that NOW it could all be over, just like that.  I endured all this, and made the effort to bring myself back to life from the netherworld of grief, just to die now?  I’ll be damned!  The irony alone would finish me off.

It’s ridiculous, I know.  But even so, I want to believe there is balance in the universe, and that when we spend time under the wheel, eventually it must turn so that we’re on top awhile again.  Haven’t I earned that much?  Maybe it’s true; but maybe it’s also true that that wheel turns faster than I imagine.

Tuesday night, I sat down and paid bills and found that things were not as dire as I’d imagined.  And last night, my vet called back with his opinion of the X-rays, and a third opinion of a radiologist who seems certain that my dog does not have an enlarged heart, and doesn’t need heart meds at this time.  He needs antibiotics for what seems to be bacterial pneumonia.  So for the moment, that leaves only my thing to worry about, and other imminent but currently invisible disasters to be named later, and I feel less stressed then I did a few days ago.

You know, I thought I’d be so happy to finally be off the roller coaster of grief.  What I didn’t expect to find was that the roller coaster of life isn’t all that different; somehow, I remember it differently—more even, more predictable, and the peaks and valleys less extreme. Somehow I remember it as not a roller coaster at all, but it seems to me now that it must have always been; life hasn’t changed so much as my perception has.  I’m feeling nostalgic for a simple, peaceful existence that never existed.  Not in this world, anyway.

E and I were talking about Sarah Palin at lunch today, and about how now that the election is over, all the people in McCain’s camp who didn’t like her are leaking juicy tidbits about what an ignorant diva she was, as if that wasn’t evident to anyone with eyes.  I wouldn’t have voted for her for meter maid, but it hardly mattered for me, because there was no way I was going to vote for her boss anyway.

What interested me, though, is the dilemma she posed for Republican and undecided voters who saw her in much the same way I do.  Their lament was “She’s a breath away from the Presidency…and McCain is 72, after all…”

I have to admit, that while I thought she was wholly unqualified, that particular potentiality was never a concern for me.  It just didn’t figure into my personal electability equation, but for some people, it was THE thing.  It wasn’t until today that I had another thought, which was that perhaps the people who were really afraid the elderly McCain would die and leave us stuck with Palin were still uninitiated into the reality of an untimely death of someone who mattered to them.

Because in my world view, McCain is no more likely to die today than I am.  I no longer assume anyone will live any amount of time.  This is one of the vistas of the perspective that bereavement has given me.  My A died at 55.  His own father at 39.  His mother well into her 80s.  Everyone whose stories I know through the widow board and via widow blogs lost their loved ones long before the age of 72.  I went to my first funeral, that of a third-grade classmate and friend, at the age of 8.  There was a time when I willingly confused mode with mean and assumed most people lived into their 70s.  Now I fully understand “average lifespan” is a myth made up of millions of people who lived both very short and very long lives.

John McCain’s MOTHER was on hand for his concession speech Tuesday night; she’s a spry 95.  McCain is as likely to live until term limits threw him out of the White House as not.  I can only shake my head somewhat indulgently at those who still possess the naivete to believe that only old men are at risk of dying.  I wish had no reason to know better.