On June 3, it will have been five years since I left my office at the end of the day, walked around the corner to have a drink and dinner with a friend, saw my phone light up with a call from my husband’s phone, and knew, with my witchy sense, that my life was about to change forever.
It is five years since I ran five blocks to the hospital and found him in a curtained-off alcove, wild-eyed and moaning in pain. He had suffered two seizures, the cause of which at the time were unknown. One month, two massive shoulder surgeries and one brain surgery later, he was on his way home, to live out the last 50 weeks of his life with terminal brain cancer.
Ten days before June 3, we were shopping for new chairs with our two younger children, thinking about how to turn our attic space into a den for our now-teen kids. We were planning our summer vacation to the national parks out West – Bryce and Zion and Arches – and our daughter was learning how to drive. We were relieved that our oldest son had come home from his second year of college a little more willing to speak to us, and that our youngest son was entering his final year of middle school, happily playing soccer and baseball. We probably went to a baseball game in those days before our lives changed forever. And we also mourned with Vice President Joe Biden on May 30th, as his beloved son, Beau, succumbed to glioblastoma, a disease we had only just begun to hear about. We would know much more about it just a few weeks later.
When my mother died, and I keened and wailed and felt bereft and didn’t know how to crawl out of my grief space, a friend told me that it would get better with time. She was right. And just about five years later, I looked up, and realized that something had shifted, and it had gotten better. I didn’t feel quite as lost, quite as deserted. And a decade later I took that memory as a marker into my new grief, thinking that the five-year mark would again be meaningful.
The five-year mark of my husband’s death will be a year from now, June 18, 2021. But this year's five-year mark feels even more portentous. By the time we were at the funeral, I had already been already deeply grieving for a year. Anticipatory grief followed me from the day he was struck by his seizures to the day he died, one year and two weeks later.
I now lumber towards the anniversary of the day that my entire life path changed. Five years ago, I was living a typical middle class suburban life, with a mortgage and kids and a job and vacations. Today, I live with a sense of shape shifting almost every moment of every day. Nothing feels permanent, and often-times, nothing feels consequential. There’s a numbness that has set in, and even COVID-19, after my initial response of fear and depression, feels like an inevitability.
I remain grateful for the life I’ve led, and the life I continue to lead. I have a beautiful home, am safe for now from the pandemic, have healthy children who are making their own way in the world, and enjoy work that sustains me, despite a brief stoppage at the beginning of the COVID incursion. I have great new love in my life, who provides me with the ballast to make it through the rough spots and take joy from the quotidian. I have friends and family and a place where I can write. And yet. The horror show of the past four years of our country’s politics, combined with the terrible, life-altering consequences of being part of a generation to live through this world-wide pandemic, upends the comfort of the good parts and reminds me that none of it is stable, it is all transient.
And I think back on the day we went shopping for those chairs. Had we known that 10 days later our entire world would collapse, what would we have done instead? Being human means not knowing what lies ahead. If we did, we would be paralyzed with fear. Instead, we get to move forward, minute by minute, focusing on that which is in front of our faces. That’s what offers hope. The beauty of the day, the song of the bird, the smell of the honeysuckle in the morning. I’m glad we got those chairs, because one of them became my husband’s perch for the last year of his life. And as he sat on that chair, he would look out the window, and welcome the birds and squirrels to our backyard, focusing on the now.
Picture: Shopping for chairs, May 24, 2015
Karen, This is beautiful in so many ways. Thank you for sharing your life, your pain, and your loves. You're right... it's the small, essential, joys in the now that can and do keep us going. -- S
Posted by: Steve Van Holde | 06/02/2020 at 10:58 AM