Another Change

The house is quiet now without the burbling humidifier on the O2 tank or the click of the on-demand oxygen concentrator. I can sit in his place at the head of the kitchen table and enjoy the full spectrum view of garden and trees from here. I can turn on lights and make noise in the middle of the night and throw away the old fashioned Corelware dishes we've had for 28 years.

And I can wail and rant because I have all the opportunities for changes and adventure I can create and do alone. It's just that I don't want to do any of them today.

In one short moment, in the early hours of 8/28, his life stopped. Our life together came to an end.

I never, ever, thought I would be a widow. In the middle of the morphine and tube drainings. . . while I was immersed in and focused on his needs and wants, I lost myself more totally than I had before his illness. I craved the proximity of his body, patting and rubbing it whenever I was near. A dose of medicine or a bite of food always concluded with a kiss . . . a hug . . . a meaningful stare.

On the day before he died, I began letting him go in a ceremony for myself where I regrounded thickly with Earth and Sky. On that afternoon, I retrieved the energetic cords binding me to the layers of his body and chakras. I feel those cords now, writhing like octopus arms, searching for a hand hold on something or somebody else. Each time I sense the grasping, I wrap my arms around myself and hold on tight to this person I think I am at this time.

I know I am not broken, only overwhelmed with an indescribable sadness for the loss of this man who shared his life with me and the daily opportunities we gave each other to do just that.

And Watching

What to say? Nothing bubbles from the well of numbness beginning to creep beneath my skin. My face feels dead, a mask with dark circles and sagging cheeks unable to lift into a smile unless a special moment occurs to warm my heart.

He is being brave and cracking jokes about his situation. Then he quiets, and we stare at each other. That's when I try to memorize the way the lines crinkle at the edges of his eyes, and how his mustached upper lip pulls back across his teeth, and notice his eyes glint with a shade of his old, merry twinkle.

To watch him struggle to breathe breaks my heart. To see his strong frame shrivel from lack of food that won't pass the pressure-filled sac around his heart makes me want to scream at this cancer, “Leave him alone. Let him die with a robust body.” But cancer doesn't work that way, and neither does death.

Dying in the prime of life happens by accident or design. For too many of us, we have to have our skin and muscles wither until they turn to dust or ash.

My only consolation with this anguish is that when he stops breathing, I will probably say, “Thank God.”

Waiting

Feels like I'm sitting on a powder keg, watching a lit fuse slowly burn closer and close to my perch. I'm not tethered to the keg, more like immobilized. There is nowhere to go, no way to escape.

Anxiety builds in my chest, making it tight. I frighten myself with feelings of left chest pain, tendrils of dull to sharp aches moving up and down my arm. Then I take my Chinese anti-anxiety pills or my Rescue Remedy and settle again, trying to ignore the flame moving closer to explode the reality of what has been my life as a wife.

Looking at whatever is around me helps. Daytime helps, unless I become overwhelmed with my need to control. I pester my husband, “How do you feel? Do you need oxygen? Or Morphine? Or what do you think we will need to do toward the end? Or what do you want to eat? Or how do you think you are going to feel when the accumulation of fluid around your heart squeezes it to death?”

He looks at me, shaking his head, and a grin spreads underneath his beard. “I don't know. I've never done this before.” We laugh. I settle again.

Nights are hardest because the darkness makes my worries more apparent. I startled awake one night and heard no breathing next to me. Patting his warm back reassured me, but I wanted to know his pulse so I scooted out of my side of the bed to his and searched for his wrist. His deep voice resonated from the pillows, “I'm breathing. Go back to sleep.”

So I returned to my side of the bed and counted his respirations as if they were sheep jumping a fence and finally drifted away, for a time, from the shortening fuse of his life.

A Metaphor

The idea of death being an ugly, scaly, fire-breathing dragon challenges me to fabricate a shining sword and take on the conquest to try to eradicate this demon from our lives. Staking out a protective bubble around my husband, I thrust and parry until I'm breathless and fatigued.

It is not my fight.

Even when my husband describes his vision of the next experience as 'his next adventure', I want to help by using my sturdy implement to slash the energetic filaments connecting him to this world in an attempt to make his transition quicker and easier.

It is not for me to untie the knots binding him to this life. I can only release my ties to him.

My imaginary sword seems useless until I secure it, warrior-style, in a scabbard along my spine. There my steely blade strengthens my being so I can walk beside him until we part, and I have to go on alone.

Walking with the Fear of the Future

Human beings on the whole exhibit a lot of fear about their future. When I think about it, isn't this the main reason for building bigger houses, to encase ourselves in some kind of solid space we can call our own? Isn't this the reason we amass toys and gadgets to divert our attention from the 'what ifs'? And what about addictions to TV, drugs, gambling, sugar, coffee, or any thing to keep us focused on anything rather than the unknown?

One of the coping mechanisms I've discovered is the technique of forming stories with happy endings, just to give myself hope. I find myself skipping across the potential details of my near future to a place where my novel is successful, where I'm busy writing the next one with a covey of friends flittering about. The day dream helps me through the downright, stark and blazing fear of what the next months, or few years, may bring. I can't handle the details my minds trips over as I try to look over (overlook) the pictures of oxygen tanks, home health nurses, special diets, dashed hopes, and sleepless nights.

I can't go there, and to daydream myself past it all, well, it's really a farce too.

Cherishing the 'now' moments is again the theme. I'm planning as if there is a tomorrow, you know, the one right after today and working at being conscious of the small treasures of the current 'here'.

Blue jays fluttering through their morning bath and squabbling when one tries to move through the queue before their time. A hummingbird upside down so it can nose into the contorted last bloom of a day lily. Fresh ollalieberries for a cobbler. A bobcat sauntering across the driveway. The peace rose with more than two blooms for the first time in years. My first zucchini of the season.

Life comes down to precious moments cobbled together as a path making its way through the disaster of sorrow and fear.

It's Different in the Night

Whoever said, “Life can change on a dime” had the right concept. Or maybe it was “Life can change in a second.” Or maybe the words were more like “Change is inevitable” or “Without change, there is no life.”

I've known, intellectually, when we get older, we can get sick. We can break bones or lose hair. Disease processes are around so we have something to die from. I just never thought about any of it in relationship to my life, my world. Now my husband and I are faced with the reality of this intellectual concept. See how calm I can be when I write this all slowly in my notebook? I can pick and choose my words in an attempt to distance myself from their reality. It's early morning, the birds are chirping; the air is fresh. I'm calm here.

Last night was a different story. In the darkness, anger bubbled. Made me sick around my heart, squeezing my vital organ with such pressure I had to get up from our shared bed and find solace screaming onto the pillows on the couch. The anger knew no bounds. It took in the Universe, AMA, my husband's stubbornness, the government, the oil spill, the cancer, anything and everything was targeted until I felt spent.

“Move your emotions through your being,” a counselor friend suggested. “Feel them all so you don't hold on to them and get sick yourself.” Eventually, after a Tylenol for the headache I'd brought on with my rant, the edge of sleep crept across my body so I could crawl back to bed, letting the new rhythm of his breathing lull me into hopeful dreamlessness.

Helplessness

July 12th? . . . 13th? Sunday? . . . Monday? Hard to figure what day it is when the only thing I can anchor to my memory is the afternoon I drove my husband to the VA hospital. He was short of breath and feeling poorly. It was a tense, four-hour drive. He wanted to be behind the wheel, I know, to give himself some sense of control, but he admitted he didn't feel very well.
And he had reason for it. I don't want to go into details, that's not my intent here. What I want to do is process this feeling of shitty helplessness. There was and is nothing I can do except wring my hands and pace. I try to read but can't concentrate. I think I want to talk to others but can't find any words worth saying. I have a sinking feeling in the middle of my stomach, and my head swims. I am told I need to find and have one solid thing to hang onto.
I tried making the floor of the hospital ER my piece of solidarity, but it meant I had to maintain contact with it. I didn't want to leave it, which was not healthy, and clinging to it put me in the way of nurses and doctors. So I ended up visualizing any horizontal surface beneath my feet as my grounding surface and made my legs into grounding cords. When I felt rocky and out of sorts, I diverted my attention to my memory of being on deck of the Crustacea, a friend's 40-foot sail boat on which we toured Alaska's inland passage a few years ago. It helped.
Another friend who lost her husband last year suggested I eat grounding foods: protein, chocolate, or whatever felt like it helped to maintain that connectedness. “Take showers,” she said. “No problem,” I said. The tears flow better when I'm underwater.
Holding a stone from the parking lot and keeping it in my pocket acted as an emergency treatment for weightlessness. So did laughter with family and strangers.
Some kind of control over anything helped: like deciding to leaves voice messages rather than be asked questions I couldn't answer. Emailing and texting are handy. Methods of forgetting what's happening are Soduko and crossword games and action-packed novels. TV doesn't seem to involve my attention as well.
I continue to dig deep for any bit of sanity I can find, appreciating prayers and the small ceremonies of gratitude I usually practice. I am my own antenna between Earth and Sky and attempt to circulate the energy available from both through my body. Using my Reiki hands keeps me in place too. There are parts of the day when my husband is dependent on me to be the rock he can lean on, a person who is real with a sense of humor. Other times, he serves the same purpose for me. I'm grateful we are alternating our positions for each other on an as needed basis.
We can't take away the fear of the future for us. I can only make this moment right now, memorable, and then this one, and now this one . . .