May he know peace
May he know joy in his children and his children’s children
May he know the absence of pain
May he revel in the loss of a body that torments him.
May he feel the love that is coming to him
from all directions.
May he know my love.
My love.
May he know peace.
Don’t isolate. Call friends. Don’t stew in your own juices. Get help. Keep busy. Do this. Do that. I am two months out of Robin’s death. When I sit down, I want to howl. Howl, howl, howl. I have no idea what hit me because I am making such an effort to not isolate, keep busy, etc., etc. I am now alone. I can feel my feelings down to my toes, and by the way I keep stubbing my toes resulting in one black nail and two bruised and sore toes.
When I am with people, I want to be upkitty, engaged kitty, anything but mournful kitty. Now I can slump. Slumping toward Jersusalem. Sloughing off the public robe and in my pajamas.
I don’t know if I even miss Robin. Do I miss him. I suppose I do for I wouldn’t be crying if I didn’t. But he hasn’t been himself for a loong time. We did get tender toward each other in the last year. I forgave him his imperfections and he forgave and understood my efforts to nurse him. We loved not like we used too, not sturm und drang but accepting who we were and where in our lifetimes we were.
I loved to rub his head, and furry back. He’d scratch my back and make our morning tea. He’d stumble around and I was fearful he’d fall again and hurt himself but you have to give people a chance to be somewhat independent and helpful. He hated being useless. He hated how hard I worked. Oh how he hated that. And sometimes I hated him for not being able to help.
I got tired and crabby. To be crabby and hateful to someone who has no control over their body is despicable. I couldn’t help it. I was angry at my lot in life.
He would get up in the night hurting, hurting, I couldn’t help him. I’d say “did you take your pills?”, he’d say yes sometimes, no sometimes,” they don’t kick in for two hours”. Oh he suffered. He suffered. He didn’t want to bother me. He would go into the living room and sit in his chair and draw his leg up and literally writhe until the pain passed. Sometimes it did. Sometimes it didn’t. All I could do is witness. Witness.
That has been much of my life. Witnessing but being unable to intecede. I know most people don’t know that, but it’s true. It has turned me alternately hot and cold. Hot when I’m angry, cold when my inadequacy has been so reinforced that I just turn myself off.
Now, as I sit from a distance and feel what those years felt like, I can only cry. I cry for all of us. For Robin, who I couldn’t help or heal, who I could only watch, to Kate who I had to let go of, to save myself.
Folks say quite glibly, “grief is the cost of love” I say “fuck you”.
For all the blah, blah, blah about love and loss and grief, all I understand right now is that it hurts. It hurts everywhere. It hurts because I couldn’t help, it hurts because I was not up to the task, it hurts because there was no happy ending for Robin.
It hurts because I am so unresolved. It hurts because I am human. It hurts.
Embodiment. I woke up thinking of what it means to hold someone. I’d lie in bed with Robin, holding him, my head next to his back, my arm around his chest, holding him tight. When Chris cried out on the phone, “He’s never coming back” my heart collapsd, my breathing stopped and I could feel his absence . He is not coming back. This is not a trip, a vacation, a Rotary meeting. This is gone. He is gone and he is not coming back.
I want to feel him again. I couldn’t take it all in, in the Hospital. I simply could not absorb that the body that held his spirit, that tortured him so much in the last years, was gone. Gone. All of him.
So much of our beauty is in animation. We are meant to be animate. His laugh, his wit, his goofiness, his inability to do the simplest things, his love for me despite the fact that my patience wore thin at times. His being, his very Beanness. That’s what I loved. I still love.
His feet didn’t work, his hands didn’t work, he had no conception of how mechanical things worked, his internal GPS was nonfunctional, he frustrated himself at every turn. What did that matter? He worked. As a man, a human being, a comedian of the first rank. How important is that, you ask? I say it is the most important.
Seamus wanted to hear some stories involving Sue and I. One of my favorites is a visit to Bloedel Reserve which is a property in northern Bainbridge Island landscaped within an inch of its life, with a Japanese Pavilion, a chauteau, and acres of trees and ponds.
Sue and I were ambling around enjoying ourselves when I spied a fence delinieating, I suppose, a separate space not open to visitors. But we spied a low cedar-shingled house, northwest style through the trees and decided to explore.
She and I climbed over the fence and hiked up a gentle slope toward the house. A window just at eye level intrigued us. We walked up to the window. A man was lying on his back in bed. His feet were uncovered. White, white white, it reminded me of a stone carving on top of a sarcophagus. Before a minute or two had passed, a jeep approached from around the front of the house and a man with a loudspeaker was yelling “You are on private property. Get out. Get out.”
We ran back to the fence. I would like to say we vaulted over it into the bushes but we fumbled our way over and ran. I know it was rude, and certainly unbecoming to elderly ladies, but we laughed for five minutes, breathless and delighted with ourselves.
(I have always called the Bloedel reserve the Blowhole Reserve as Mr. Bloedel made his money clearcutting trees in BC and in Wa.)
As I lay in bed dozing this morning ,I had a dream that Sue showed up at my house. One of my kids called out from the back stoop “Sue is here”, and there she was. Suey. She came down into the garden where I was working on constucting an art project which she had already completed and I had just begun. I thought of all the projects we had worked on and those she had completed over the years:
baskets, wooden spoon making, a sauna, bags, and clothes, and artwork, her BA in philosophy, artwork, more artwork, strange and wonderful small sewing pieces, building a sauna, building a gardening shed and chicken run,retiling the kitchen floor. She and her sister went to a cob house building workshop, and on and on.
She was constantly exploring her world, her interests,her passions. She was a wonder and found and expanded upon everything in her environment. Sue was a craftsman. Not in the small sense, ‘crafty’, but as in artist.
What she brought to everything I think was attention to detail, curiosity and love. She loved things by creating them, by opening up their potentialities. She made stuff bloom.
She made people bloom. I felt heard and loved. Her love helped me heal through many difficult times. She said I did the same but I am not sure that was ever true. What was and is true, is that she was my best friend.
Seeing her in my dream, the complete her, the joyful ever present her was a gift. Come back Sue. Come back.
Its so odd. We know how this will end, but while we wait, a low level of anxiety, a disturbance in my chest, a bubble of grief just below the surface, waits. I can think of nothing else.
Waiting… as she lets go reluctantly, we let go as well. Pre-mourning. An expectation of mourning.
She is guarded/protected by her family, only family. They are honoring her process by contracting around her. This is how it should be. All her energy goes to this transition. We who wait cannot fathom how this is, how this funny, energetic, bright woman can shrink herself down so drastically to attend to the process of dying. But attend she must.
When my mother died I felt so strongly a sense of rebirth, the gradual effacement of the membrane between dead and alive. Sue was aware of this in the last two weeks. She spoke about looking forward to see what comes next.
Its strange that I have accepted the family’s and Sue’s right to be private. I have felt resentful(I’m family), sad, and kind of ornery. But you know what? That’s okay.
Nothing to be done. We can’t fix this. We can’t cook enough casseroles, or provide enough succour to help this. Nothing to be done.
Waiting…
The first one was about Kate. The second about the house on Manual Road and the third about a job I lost through my own inability to deal with the trauma over the first two. I only want to talk about the third dream as it was a dream of joy and redemption. It was a gift of a dream I gave to myself.
There was a wholle group of us in a Elizabethan style library. Dark wood and books lined the shelves floor to ceiling. Everyone from Madrona was there and from KMHS. All my buds and staff. We were acting out parts of a Shakespeare play and laughing and hamming it up like we used to at staff meetings. It was lovely. It opened my eyes to what I had lost but allso the great joy of what I had built.
Somehow (you know, dream), this took me to my firing scene and how I could of played that out by just stating how I fucked up, I didnt know what I was doing, I went down a rabbithole of failure that I had blamed myself for. I fucked up the thing I loved the most that had saved me from going down the tubes.
Everything would spill out then—the betrayal of my husband, my daughter’s terminal illness, the loss of my house and my friends—all of it. That fucking toxic stew of shit right behind my breastbone.
Why didn’t I? In the dream I did and the whole edifice I had built, the humor, the I can do this, the determination I had no one that I was going to let feel sorry for me and shame me by that. I had an attitude and it almost ruined me.
Note to all who read this. Fuck your pride. Be vulnerable if you have the chance. Don’t hide away in your hidey-hole licking your wounds in private while pretending everything is fine. I let my staff down and I left the kids down. Those are the only ones I let down.
At the end of the dream a relief swept me, a joy. Yeah, I fucked up. I fucked up KMHS. But I fucked up myself worse and have been doing that for years. Time to forget and forgive.
I have a certain affinity towards Daddy Longlegs. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because we both have long legs. I think for the most part it is because they never stop trying.
Daddy Longlegs hang out in my shower. They flit upon the tiles, they skim, they slip, they slide, they lose their grip and try again. They are resolute.
I mutter to myself as I wash my hair watching their struggles on the wall across from me: “Why bother, find another wall without tiles, hang out under the overhanging soapdish until I get out.” Their inability to accept that they will never succeed,to accept reality, is strangely frustrating to me. I try to devise ways to help them,but they don’t want my help.
They don’t listen. They continue their Sisyphean journey, their struggle to go up. Only to come down.
“It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away–that makes life meaningful and purposeful” Inner freedom cannot be lost.
I feel funny about using this quote in my context, but here goes, for all those who have endured months and years of caregiving, and still they worsen and still they die. I thought it could be effort in, victory out the other end. But it ain’t so, best beloved. I have been playing this all wrong. This is not a cause and effect thing. This is a do whatever you can and hope for the best. Try to do care with love and tenderness and if you can’t, take a break, a walk, call for help.
Inner freedom cannot be lost but you must hold onto to it and protect it from exhaustion, boredom with the day to day, and guilt.
I lost my temper last night. Rob called me into the living room. The enormous bandage on his second toe had come off with his sock and there was this mangled (macerated according to the doc) half a toe. Bleeding and stinky, obviously infected. It was wrapped on Thursday and he’s been on antibiotics. It looks worse now than it did on Thursday.
I stormed out of the room screaming “I can’t do this, you should’nt have pulled your sock off that way,” blah, blah, blah.
I left the room fuming, muttering. This wasn’t Rob’s fault. I calmed down but was sick to my stomach, tired of trying to patch up a body that won’t stay patched.
I rewrapped his toe. I have enough medical supplies to work in a wound care clinic. Later on, I apologized to him and said, in my defence, “I can’t do this. I’m not a medical professional. I don’t know if we can keep staggering along doing the best we can. Is this just the trajectory?” I cried alot. Tender moment, sweet moment, but I need to get in touch with his insurance and see if we can’t get some home health aide to come in. I am in over my head and Rob is sinking.
Both Rob and I need to accept that this is the inevitable result of forty years of diabetes. We need to accept this so that every time another toe goes, or his neuropathy worsens, we don’ t think it can be fixed or it’s course altered. It’s hope that both bolsters and undermines us.
If I can hold onto the inner freedom, my spirit, while taking care of him, well then, I can survive. But hope as to outcome is a chimera. Lalaland.
I’ve been reading John McPhee. Such a weird time. I am upstairs in my bedroom, Rob is down. We are living separate lives. I handle everything while he handles healing. I don’t mean that in a whiny sort of way. It’s just the way it is. Anyway about 8:30 I disappear upstairs and start reading and I’m reading McPhee.
He’s a hard read for me. He’s travelling around with the geologist king, David Love. Love was raised in Wyoming and has studied the rock there since he was a little boy. What he knows in his bones, McPhee is trying to describe on a flat sheet of paper in a book and I don’t know about you but I have a helluva time trying to visualize upthrust and volcanic action and glaciers and subsidence and all the things our earth gets up to. I barely can get my head around millions of years.
I wish someone could do a topographical study that showed these things morphing over time. I do better if I can look at something. I was thinking about the beginning of the Amazon Prime movies where they show buildings rising and falling and spreading and blowing. A visual, action tableau; A visual story that encapsulates four thousand million years. Wouldn’t that be cool?
Anyhoo, why am I writing about this? Maybe because Rob and I inhabit different strata right now. That’s a rather tenuous connection but it’s all I got.
Hello. Yes, this is Dog 