AWOL

August 29, 2013

Dear You

…

Dear Sister,

…

Dear Dumbass,

…

Even with just six words, you probably have a sense where this is going;  I’m mad at you.  Right pissed, in fact.  Have been for a while, now.

I know you know what this is about, in general terms.  You let me down.  Abdicated your sisterly responsibilities.  Buggered off. 

And I wonder about that.  It’s not like you to take a hike when the going gets tough.  You are one of the original tough cookies.  Maybe that’s the problem.  Have you gotten so self-sufficient that you’ve forgotten what it feels like to need help?  Last year, I needed help.  Lots of it.  And you weren’t there.  And I’m pissed.

I think it all started last January, when I spoke bluntly about how tiresome I found some of our conversations, how repetitive and frankly unhealthy they were.  I do not have the natural gift of tact—the tiny bit I have was learned the hard way in painful situations, over and over again.  It is a shallow well and I’m sure it ran dry early in our conversation.  I am sure the things I said hurt you.  I am also sure that they were true.  Which is not an excuse for saying hurtful things—kindness should almost always trump truth.  But I think it was past time for them to be said.  I believe that your thinking needed some shaking up.  I think your self-sufficiency and ‘I can do it myself’-ness had gotten in the way of some rational thought.  I wonder if you were cooking up your own personal Bay of Pigs. 

I do not regret the things I said in that conversation.  I believed them then and still do today.  I believed that you needed to grow up.  I believed that you needed to face your conflicts regarding our mother.  I believe that you were stuck, in some ways, at 15.  I’ve put all this in the past tense, as we haven’t really had a conversation in the past 20 months and I don’t know who you are anymore.  And frankly, I’m not sure that I want to know, anymore.

 

My bottom line:  I went through the hardest year of my life and you jumped ship.  From emails several times per week to nothing.  We disagreed on the value of a relationship with our mother.  Fair enough.  I was working hard at having an adult connection with her, to leave behind the disappointments of the past.  You had chosen a different path.  But when our mother started chemotherapy for her recurrence of cancer—you disappeared.  I was worried and scared and … alone.  Not in a broader sense—my wonderful partner was by my side almost every minute and our family was with me every step.  Our aunts, uncles and cousins were on my side, in my court, had my back…you get the picture.  But my sister was missing.

I felt your absence.  There was a hole in our ranks.  I looked at our mother’s sisters and our cousins in their sibling pairs and wondered where my sister was.  You and I grew up together, fought together, played together, laughed ourselves silly together.  We lived through massive losses and came out the other side.  We were not always the best of friends, or the best of influences on each other.  We did not practice a lot of kindness toward each other and tact was a language completely unspoken in our teen years.  But we stuck together, particularly in adulthood.  We filled in each other’s blanks and tried to make our past make sense.  I had always admired you;  in those years, I came to rely on you.

So when our mother got sick again, I missed you.  I missed your presence and reliability and resourcefulness.  I missed your humour and our shared language of history and reference points.  I missed your being, your body, your steadfastness.

And when our mother’s disease spread to her brain and it became clear that she was dying, I needed you.  I needed you to help me call her friends and tell them that she had not one, but three brain tumours.  I needed you to be there with me through the embarrassment and awkwardness of her incontinence.  I needed you to hear her flagging speech and when that was over, to help interpret her benign facial expressions.  And I needed you to help me call her friends back and tell them that she had died.

This, all of this, I did with other people.  My wife, our aunts, our cousins, nurses, strangers.  Not my sister.

And you may say, quite rightly, that I never asked for your help.  Not in so many words.  And truly, that never occurred to me.  My pain during that time was so massive, so all-encompassing, so dense and impenetrable that I never thought to ask for help.  The help that I received was there before I was.  The help was not offered—it showed up uninvited.  Phone-calls, emails, cards, messages arrived unbidden.  People reached out and touched base, offered a piece of advice or a remembered moment from their own losses.  Most of it touched me, some of it rolled off and a few things made me angry.  But it all helped me.  I knew I wasn’t alone, I knew that there were dozens of people out there who loved our mother and were willing to show up.  They loved me by proxy, just because I had shown up.  Even the lunkheads who said insensitive things in the guise of comfort were comforting.  Because they were there.

So, if you want it, there’s your Get Out of Jail Free card.  I didn’t ask for your help.  And you couldn’t possibly see the lack of sleep etched in my face, or the worry in my eyes for our mother’s sisters, her ailing husband and all her grandchildren.  Have you ever met our mother’s grandchildren?

Were you curious?  Did you wonder how things were going?  Did you worry that I may not have been eating well, able to sleep, driving distractedly?  Did you think of me at all? 

I thought of you, often.  I thought of you with concern, bewilderment, frustration and anger.  I spoke of you flippantly, rudely and harshly.  I thought how nice it must be to live across the country and feel exempt from the impossible work of watching someone die.  I wondered if anything disturbed your dreams, appetites and routines.  I wondered how you could amputate me so completely, and live with the phantom pain of my absent body.  Or did you escape that, too?

How’s that working for you?  Is your life good these days?  complete?  satisfying?  Do you realize that I lost the remainder of my family last year?  Our mother died.  Dad’s been dead more than twice as long as we knew him.  And you vanished.  (I have a client that counts her absent [dumbass] father among her list of dead.  I get that now.)  The math is depressing--once there were four of us--now there is just me.  I attend family functions and see the other branches of our family getting bigger;  thankfully, they are generous and welcoming.

So, if you’ve been wondering about my radio-silence, I hope this answers some of your questions.  It’s not a balanced account, by any means.  It’s just me being disappointed and picking myself back up.  It’s just me trying to balance my books.  It’s just me trying to understand.

Happy Birthday.

 

Love (and many other feelings),

Robin.

 

Hug a Thug

I used to think of grief as a little old lady who withdrew from polite company to weep delicately into a lace handkerchief.  Now I know the truth. Grief is not your maiden aunt, the one with fine manners and long skirts and high collared blouses. Grief is a thug. It wears a stained, cracked black leather jacket and ancient blue jeans.  Biker boots, brass knuckles and chewing tobacco.  He reeks of scruff and dirt and bad breath and stale cigarettes mixed with motor oil and cat piss.

Grief is intrusive, rude and entitled. It doesn't care that you are busy, that you have things to do.  It pushes into your life at any time of the day or night, interrupting routines and sleep. Meal times?  Better set an extra plate because you never know when he'll show up, demanding to be fed. Bed time?  Even a king-sized bed wouldn't be big enough for cover-stealing, pillow-twisting Grief. 

Grief waits for you in the shower, sliding over your body with the soap, suffocating your skin. Grief ambushes you in the kitchen as you try to figure out what comfort food is going to soothe this terrorist. Grief hides in plain sight, lounging on the dashboard of your car like a depraved bobble-head doll, daring you to read street signs through your tears. 

Grief will find you in the grocery store, at a friend's house, on vacation. He is a diligent body-guard, ensuring that your world stays small. You cannot out-run him, drive faster, get far enough away--he is always there, like a chronic itch, a bad rash, a hemorrhoid.  You can drug him, medicate him into a stupour, but he still hangs around, just clumsy now and snoring. 

Grief will hide anywhere:  in lines of poetry, between songs on a playlist, in colours, shapes, tastes, scents--he can fit anywhere. (For me, it was turquoise--my mother's favourite colour--every damn thing I saw in that colour had Grief in it, waiting to poke his thumb into my eye.). Grief demands access to every part of your life--and trying to keep him out just makes him work harder. Lock the door? He'll jimmy the window. Go away for the weekend?  You'll find him asleep in the back seat of your car.  Sure, he takes the occasional  moment or day off--but he always comes back refreshed and ready to hold you hostage again. 

And finally, finally you find ways to deal with him.  Ignoring him doesn't work, so you start to expect him. Set that extra plate, plan for an extra 'participant' in activities. Build in additional time to deal with him, if you can. Acknowledge him, validate him. Sure, he's still got a sack of dirty tricks and surprise attacks in store, but his zeal for these will wane eventually.  You'll start to see him coming, to recognize his shape in the shadows, to hear his heavy footsteps approach.   You'll begin to understand that fighting him is really fighting yourself.  That his entitlement to your life might remind you of your own power.  That his outline matches your shape and his despair is only as deep as your own resources.

Gradually, slowly, he discards the leather jacket; he puts on soft-soled shoes; he shaves.  He starts to respect your routines. He brings his own lunch.  He leaves at a decent hour.  He takes the bus on his own.  And one day, you'll realize that you haven't seen him around for a while.  And then you will spot  him on the street in your neighbourhood, and your stomach will clench, but he'll be looking at someone else.  He may catch your eye and nod, but you'll be able to turn and walk away. 

He never forgets about you or loses your address, but his obsession for you wears off.  It may take a year or a decade, but he eventually loses interest.  You will never forget him, either.  How could you forget someone who knows you so well?  He who has shared your bed like a lover, who knows every aching second, with you inside your skin.  You have marked each other.  There will always be a part of you that can reach for him, that can find him in a second.  Those desperate moments of loneliness, of refusing to accept the truth, of terrifying change.  But they are temporary and they will pass.  You have marked each other.  The scar you have left on him is unknown.  The mark he leaves on you could be anything:  fear, hope, strength, brokeness.  You can leave it out there for all to see or cover it up with long sleeves or a tattoo.  Whatever it is, it is yours.  You have earned it.  You have survived.

Before and After

(I started writing this in the middle of March. Took me a while to get back to it...)

It has been four and a half months since my mother died.  It feels like yesterday and it feels like years. 

She died in early November.  Many family members were with her when she died, and it was peaceful and seemed pain-free for her. 

I was so relieved when she died.  I was relieved for her, but mostly, I was relieved for me.  Her death released me from all of the unanswerable questions, from the terrible anxiety and dread, from not knowing what to say and do.  It set me free from benignly ignorant 'knowing' looks and comments, and from the lies I told constantly about how lucky I was to have this time with my mother.  Her death gave me something concrete to think about, to plan my time around.  It allowed me to assure people (and myself) of something.

Her funeral was a project--something to plan, execute and survive.  It was the final project (so I thought) of two long months of uncertain schooling.  It was on a bright, fall day (her favourite season) and lots of us took part.  Her grandsons were her pallbearers, her great niece sang "Hallelujah."  Her granddaughters carried flowers.  I spoke, as did her sister.  The minister knew her well, as did the funeral director.  She looked mostly like herself in the casket.  In fact she looked much healthier than she had in the previous weeks.  That was odd, and oddly comforting.

I thought that after the funeral, things would get easier. 

Hmm. 

Not so much. 

Things are better.  I am at home now.  I no longer have the next visit to the hospice hanging over my head.  I no longer fight, in quite the same way, to gather my resources each day.  I no longer have to face my prejudices and assumptions on a daily basis.  These things are a relief.  I've learned that it's just a different brand of hard.  I feel things that I did not anticipate.  That I didn't know existed.  I'm not sure there are words for all of the feelings that are bubbling up out of me.  I have wept more than at any other time in my life.  I have had deeper self-doubts than I thought possible.   I have never questioned so much that I had previously thought were rock-hard certainties.

The main feeling I have these days is of disappointment.  The palliative process did not live up to its Hollywood hype.  The medical and spiritual parts of it were bang on--my mother had extremely good care and was safe and comfortable.  But  for me, as a family member, I found little of  the expected 'shining nobility' of the process.  The reality of palliative care is one of grit and stabbing pain, of not knowing and needing and subjugating and endless tears.  I felt a little cheated:  Where was all the navel-gazing and new insights?  Where was the deathbed conversion?  Where were the final words of wisdom and truth that would sustain me throughout my life?

Ahem.

Why do I have to keep learning this lesson over and over again? The relationship does not change--not in that short period of time, especially when the main players are busy dying and agonizing, respectively. My mother and I were never good at talking to each other, at sharing truths and wisdom. Our truths were so far apart that they sounded like lies to each other. I bought the hospice hype--every bit of it. Invested in the shiny, happy image that 'everything will be okay.' Effortless. Weightless. Or maybe I was hoping so deeply for connection, for redemption that I let myself believe that a change of venue would furnish it. Simplified this complicated, convoluted relationship because, damn it, didn't something need to be simple? Easy?

Apparently not. Easy...doesn't matter. Convoluted doesn't matter. These words suggest comparison--as in, my relationship is more complicated than your relationship. Pity me, support me, pay attention to me...whatever the cry is. We get what we get. We can change parts of it, but not all of it; certainly not most of it. We have to face whatever our situation is. And this is easiest if we can accept what our situation is.

So, my mother and I remained who we've always been: my mother and I. We may have been our gentlest selves, and on our best behaviour most of the time, but we were still strange to each other. Just as we were always strange to each other. I've been looking at the before and after of this process hoping to find that 'the hard part' is over. What I'm finding is that it's all 'the hard part.'

And weirdly, that is comforting, too. I'm not winning, but I'm not failing at this, either. I'm surviving. I did what I could do. I wish it could have been more, but what I did was enough. I stretched myself further than I thought I could have--and did my best, walking that dark tightrope with my eyes closed.