This page should be blank. She has died and she has been buried. I was there for both. Yet, it is impossible that my sister is not in the world.
Why should this be so hard to take?
Sometimes the loss is a shock, a jolt of adrenaline. Sometimes it is what it is now: a suffusion of gray bleakness seeping from my pores, my bones. It is neither regret nor worry. It is bone deep sorrow/grief. Bone deep.
My god. I don’t understand what has been happening. I have been to the emergency room, spent a night hospitalized, spent time with my sister in a hospice, spent time with what feels like dozens of relatives.
The last week or so has lasted two years. I am trying to keep myself away from a breakdown.
This is strange. Where is my gratitude. Can I find some way of making it through this? Why does it feel so hard when I am doing nothing? How can I be so tired?
But here I am. So ill, physically, from what I am almost certain is an emotional response to the stress.
It has been impossible to stabilize myself or to explain what is going on. I am not worried. I am anxious. I am finding out that these are really two different things.
One of the strongest arguments for faith to me, has always been the presence of doubt. Acknowledging that the belief you hold on to only works in the presence of doubt is an essential component to authentically holding that belief. Faith needs doubt to exist. I distrust any belief system that has no room for doubt. To my mind, such as system is just nonsense.
Doubt, though, on its own – not in the presence of faith, but of certainty. Consider: I must be certain about, for example, gravity. I must be certain it will hold to embark on any activity – or even to stand still. So, then there is no room for doubting that gravity will anchor me to this planet. It is just a certainty.
So what if then there is doubt? About things such as those that anchor us, that tether us to the life we’ve chosen.
In the context of gratitude, how do I reconcile being unfettered in the presence of things that are certain – that I have always believed to be certain? Do I become grateful for the object of my certainty, or the doubt about that object. Surely not both. I cannot quite hold to the idea of both, simultaneously. And yet that seems to be what is demanded.
I am exhausted with arriving at an understanding, a knowledge, a certainty, and finding that ripped from grasp.
But here, yes, I am grateful for even just this: that I am never just one thing, but many.
Gratitude 5: the human mastery of being opposites at the exact same time.
And lizards and frogs and spiders and bugs.
This winter, here in Florida, I wiped ice from my windscreen, and watched as all the lovely brilliant color faded from the front garden. They survived the first days of frosty chill, and then collapsed a week or so later as a new blast of cold blew in.
But it has been warming up. Life has reset.
In that same front garden, bees danced around the azalea bush, and birds sang in rich, bright notes among the still naked tree limbs. Lizards lounged on lawn chairs and bugs rushed their little bodies in zigzaggy ways through the air, trying to stay a step ahead of a determined Little Blue Heron.
An interesting spider showed up in the back garden with its weed-covered mulch – dead weeds, of course.
Tonight, there is an enthusiastic chorus from the Frog Section, and the wild weeds have wilted themselves to bed.
It is all heartening, and I am grateful, grateful, grateful in my despair. I am using this gratitude to right myself, to anchor myself – to find the hope during this long long swift march towards an inevitable end.
Gratitude 4: Wild, wild, wild life.
Although I spend many hours each week talking to hundreds of people, I don’t often see them in person. Today was a not an ordinary day. With enough elbow room that we don’t need to whisper or smother out sneezes, it is easy to not see my nearest neighbors for days at a time, but today I spoke with three of them.
The first was amusing, and odd. With him, I had a strange, unrepeatable conversation ranging from squirrel reproductive organs to the social hierarchy of vultures, and the names of all wild life near his home. They are all called ‘Sweet’. It was not always clear whether the current Sweet under discussion was a turtle or a squirrel.
It was enervating in the same way getting a fizzy drink up your nose is. As a collector of oddments in people, this was a genuinely rewarding conversation.
And then I chatted with a neighbor about her new-to-her son, and developing a strong, bonded relationship with him. Not odd at all, but she talks nakedly about the joys and the struggles of mothering. I wondered when I walked away if she realizes that she is living something remarkable. It was a heartening conversation.
And then a dog ran across my backyard and we had to cordon him, and so began my third conversation with a neighbor. About dogs, and exercise and poop! I’ll spare you that one. This neighbor and I had waved to each other and exchanged emails, but I’m fairly certain we never had a conversation in person. She was wonderfully pleasant and neighborly and her truly great dog was splendid and refreshing – like a spring morning.
Even though I spent an hour in the oncologist’s office, that was bolstered by my brother visiting, and my sister doing pain management and my in laws celebrating. Today was a day in which I felt built to be a part of the human race. I’m therefore grateful for humans. Swarthy, smelly, laughing, emotional, utterly charming humans: gratitude 3.
Gratitude 2: A smile.
During my training to handle customer support requests by phone, an admirable man told me to smile to through the – on average – 90 second call. Unsurprisingly, he pointed out that the caller would be able to hear it and would therefore improve the quality of the call. More surprising to me is how much of an improvement that makes to my whole day.
I do not quite smile when responding to the ring, but I make sure my voice is pleasant and welcoming, and I remain ready to laugh at the slightest piece of humor offered. I poke fun at myself for mis-spellings and they chuckle along with me. I am not a ham, and I don’t make it ridiculous, but my willingness to be pleasant sets up such a scenario that my caller is more relaxed and much more cooperative. Instead of accusative teeth grinding, I get the version of themselves that makes them pleased to have talked with me.
Though I no longer work with that gentleman, I think of him often. It is a large part of the reason I enjoy my job now and the next reason I have found, per my sister, to be grateful for small things.
In this moment of disappointing health, my sister talked about gratitude and finding things for which to feel fortunate.
When I got home from visiting her today, I looked at the images I snapped.
This is Gratitude 1: I can (and am) storing thousands of images on Google. I make images and I keep them. I press the shutter to record a memory, freeze a moment.
I do not worry about running out of storage. I can literally see more clearly through these lens than I can with the naked eye. Plants take on greater detail and get larger, and birds perched hundreds of feet away develop into partners of exploration: I see what they see. I try, at any rate. The wide landscapes and waterways that separate us become a hunting ground for us both.
It is uplifting to walk among the wild and be aware that it is the wild, even here, among the overwhelming presence of humans. It is rewarding to enjoy their presence and feel more knowing, more connected, than before I started making pictures.
Gratitude.
At least for today, February 3, that works.
One of the consequences of stress is that pinning the mind to something feels hugely difficult. Mastering the mind is my central goal in the repairing process.
In that vein, I started a bullet journal today to become more structured and focused. This will enable me to feel less overwhelmed and will keep all my mental and physical lists and goals in one place.
I’m also taking the approach that every new month is just like every other month. So, though we are 32 days into the new year, what does that matter?
Reset. Repair. Recover.
I had a thought just now that I want to be crushed by the fall of a giant redwood tree. This tree should be 3000 or so years old and would fall upon me, the forest lightening and the sky shuddering with the sound of its magnificent demise.
I had this thought after looking at hundreds of my nature photographs.
My mind is a unmixed paint – swirls of colors, nothing decided. This image popped into it. And this is what it means: I want to be consumed by nature, smooshed out to nothing and become a part of a great success story. It isn’t that I want to die. It is that I am exhausted with the effort to participate in being alive.
The terrible, effortful nothingness that is compounded by the strain of watching this disease stroll through my sister’s life is too much. Too much.
Today was her birthday. She was alright – pain, with breaks, is her alright.
Oh. Lord.
Here I am. I have just reviewed my output for the first part of this month. I have, I think, given up the notion that I have failed if I don’t write/reflect every single day. This is a challenging time and I can only do the best that I can do.
I was so unwell this month that it feels like breaking through a vat of molasses, straining through the surface tension and emerging free but still covered with the weight of that heavy darkness.
My sister was here last evening. We had a good time talking and hanging out. She is stronger than she has been and she says being here is peaceful for her. That is a good thing. She had a hard night of sleep because it is difficult to adjust herself when not in the hospital bed. Her spirits were good, though. I am hopeful that soon she will be strong enough to proceed with whatever care she decides on.
She is disinclined to go the chemo/radiation route. She told me that she if this is the last three months of her life, she does not want to spend them broken and tired. I agree, of course. But I think the oncologist might still be a good idea to get some hard facts as to what the implications for not doing chemo/radiation are.
I’m so tired of being mystified about life. It seems it is not in my range of habits/behaviors/attitudes to simply let life be. I feel like I re-wound myself whenever I question long-made decisions, but how to just move on? What is the strategy? The problem is that that questioning disables my taking action today. I don’t want to feel I’ve done or said the wrong thing in some moment of crisis.
I’m feeling a bit grateful tonight for my mostly weightless job. My commitment is to smile and try to improve some total stranger’s day. I take that seriously, and it helps me too.
Ah, hell.
I mean, ah, well.