Four years ago in the midst of a year in which I was taking care of my terminally ill husband 24-hours-a-day and still trying to keep up with my full-time job and be present for my three scared and hurting children, I started to realize how low my tank had gotten. It’s like the now-tired analogy of the airplane instructions – put on your own oxygen mask first and then you can take care of the others around you.
So I dutifully tried to put on the mask. I went into therapy. I started taking anti-depressants. I used the multiple gift cards given to me for massages when I could steal away for an hour, which became a rarer and rarer occurrence as the year wore on. Occasionally I snuck out at night, after I had gotten my husband settled into bed (an hour-long procedure) and would grab a beer at the local tavern where a neighbor played jazz on Tuesday nights. Once I even drove all the way downtown to meet a friend who was in town from Israel, praying that my husband wouldn’t wake up. I needed small breaks.
These were rare moments of bad behavior. My husband tried hard to be as accommodating as he could of my needs, both work and personal. But he was so very scared. To help allay his fears, he needed me to be nearby all the time. The one evening when he did wake up and learned that I was around the corner at a friend’s house for a concert, he insisted I come home and berated me for being so insensitive. It made him insecure to not have me around – and while at the time I was frustrated and angry by his response, these many years later I’m just sad that I was so desperate that I needed to play the recalcitrant teenager and didn’t have the internal strength to be there when he most needed me.
So the depletion of my tank continued. By the time he died, after a year of illness, I pretty much was running on empty.
It has taken so much more time than I ever could have anticipated to replenish. But the first few months after the funeral belied that reality. Instead, I was operating on some kind of magical auxiliary tank. I had manic energy, and couldn’t decide what to do first. I traveled to Israel with my daughter. I got a dog. I went to New York for a gallery opening and wound up meeting the love of the rest of my life. I took a big new job. I ignored all the maxims about waiting a year (an arbitrary time frame at any rate) before making big decisions; I dove into reclaiming my life.
And then I crashed. I crashed hard. The auxiliary tank exploded. Lightning bolts of grief and loss and pain shot through my body; I never knew when I would be struck. I never knew when something would trigger me and knock me out of commission for a day or a week or longer. I had no energy to be with people, except for my very closest, and I had no ability to attend social events, let alone the many work events my profession demands of me.
My friends and colleagues were unerringly patient; I was able to play the widow’s card over and over and over again. I couldn’t see a movie in the evening because my legs would get twitchy and I couldn’t sit still for so long. I had limited patience for chatting, even with my closest people. I had no tolerance for anything that felt shallow, irrelevant.
My crash coincided with the 2016 elections, which, of course, were anything but irrelevant. On November 9, I felt like the country had joined me in my mournful state, but by November 10, they already were out protesting in force. I could not join them. I had a friend who assured me that there would be plenty of opportunity for me to join the resistance (and sadly, how right she was) but at the time, I felt overwhelmed by the idea of even getting out of the house each day to go to that big new job, let alone spending the rest of my time in marches and rallies and opposition to this new, ugly, demonic force that was suddenly cloud cover over our lives.
Soon, I had to leave the big new job, and spend a year learning to breathe again. I have a perch on a beautiful mid-century style couch that cradles my body perfectly and sits under the front window looking out onto my street. I have spent many hours on that couch, surrounded by books and various devices and the dog. And yet most of the time, I just sit and stare. And the invisible oxygen tank sits next to me and whooshes and soothes and the needle gently nudges up.
It is now more than three years since my husband died. Somehow, I have gotten to a place where the needle on my tank now rests at about the ¾ mark most of the time. I have realized that while my grief has been absorbed and processed and now resides more as a constant companion rather than an intruder, it is the PTSD I have from the trauma of my caretaking year that has been the larger culprit in my inability to return to full function. And I have gotten smarter about anticipating its arrival. When I realize there is something looming that will cause rapid depletion, I act accordingly to mitigate the damage.
This past week saw my first truly full week of work in my new consulting business since I opened my doors last spring, along with several evenings out for both work and pleasure. And I only had to cancel one event on my calendar to forestall and manage the potential for depletion and ensure I could see out the week in full.
My life will never return to the pre-illness days of being a full-time working mom and the energy and coordination that required. Nor will it return (I hope) to that place of manic caretaking. Today, I live for a different sense of what’s normal, one that pushes back against a world that demands ever more, not ever less. I crave sufficient energy to live my life with purpose - to do my work, spend time with my love and my friends and my children, to write, and always to take the time I need to stare out a window and replenish the tank.
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