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.

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.

They get me every time.  Twice a year with the time change, I’ll turn on KFOG to listen to 10@10 only to find it’s not there in the fall, and that I just missed it in the spring.  I was an hour early today, so I listened to the radio until the show came on.  That and the fact that there’s now only an hour time difference between me and my folks again are the only ways that the end of DST affects me.

Last year I made the same mistake, of course, and the change was just another sad, sorry reminder of how my life was so unappealingly different.  I got to lunchtime today, though, and my reaction was totally different.  My first thought was, “Dang, having 10@10 on at 11 made the morning go faster, because by the time it’s over, it’s nearly noon, and then it’s only an hour until lunch.”  For the first time since he died, the time change was not immediately associated with him, and was not a grief trigger.  I thought about it later in reference to A, but it was more of a passing acknowledgment than a deep mulling over of my sad state.

Progress.  I stop and take a picture of every milestone to remind myself how far I’ve come, in case I forget.  I never believed it possible I could come this far until I realize that I’m here.

Last Saturday at yoga class we did some focused breathing.  We paused between each inhalation and each exhalation, at the top and bottom of each breath, and I wondered if this was THE metaphor for life on earth, and whatever comes next.  Each inhalation is a lifetime here.  And then a pause to rest before coming back.  Then each exhalation is another lifetime.  And then a pause to rest in between.  And over and over, countless times.

What if it’s that simple?

E bumped into our across-the-street neighbor on his morning walk the other day; she informed him that our next-door neighbor’s memorial service was that day.   We hadn’t even known he’d passed.  He was an old man, though he did go out from time to time and drove himself still, his oxygen tank in the passenger seat.  He lived with his adult daughter, whose car restoration hobby frequently fumigates us inside our house and has made my working in the garage impossible some days.  Her dearly departed father engaged in several months of harassment about our trees that were, according to him, ever in imminent danger of crashing into his roof (though they weren’t) and wouldn’t quit until we had the tree guys out to trim them out of season.  First big summer storm that blew through resulted in his palo verde out back being cracked and the greater part of it crashing over the wall into our yard for us to clean up.  Palo verdes are prickly, as was our relationship with these neighbors.  So it was not a surprise that we were not informed of his death.

Still, our remaining neighbor had lost her father.  “Should we do something?” I asked E.  We didn’t know; we didn’t even know her name.  I looked up his obituary and found that he’d passed two weeks ago, at the age of 87.  He had lived ten years widowed, having lost his wife of 54 years.  And I learned his daughter’s name.

But to find him, I had to go through seven pages of obituaries looking for him, because I only knew his first name; his full name had been on a piece of his personal stationary on one of the notes he sent us, but I’d long since forgotten it.  I knew I’d probably recognize it once I saw it, but I had to skim every obituary until I got to him, in the S’s.  And what struck me as I did is that we all die of the same things:  heart attack, accident, cancer, some other disease, accident.  That’s really it.  

I think I had this idea that each death was unique, and of course it is, in its way, but overall, the list is short, and therefore universal.  And I keep coming back to the idea that anything that universal an experience is probably meaningful.  I took comfort from that idea.  It implied to me some kind of cosmic exit strategy.  I wish I understood the timing; I wish I understood why my 87-year-old neighbor left having lived almost my entire lifetime in years longer than A.  If only we could understand, perhaps it wouldn’t be so vicious, this forced rebuilding.

I watched ER tonight, as we’ve been doing every Thursday night for years—at least a decade.  This is the last season, and there are all kinds of guest stars and former cast members revisiting the show for one last hurrah.  Watching the preview for next week’s show, I learned Dr. Greene would be returning in the next episode.  Mark Greene died of brain cancer in 2002.  But somehow, maybe through flashbacks, he’ll be on next week.  I admit, I get very attached to TV show characters, and I cried when he died.  And I got goosebumps as I watched the preview and saw him again.  And I thought, “If only it were that easy.”