Slowing Down

For the past couple weeks, I have been hurtling forward with tremendous speed.  I am keeping super busy, between work and after-work activities, and moments of being social.  Hurtling.  I have not had much time to think or feel.  Hurtling.  This also means I have not had much time to grieve. 

In a way, going fast has been easier.  I just write a quick note to Ron at the end of the day and spend a few moments reading my daily meditations out of Martha Whitmore Hickman’s book, Healing After Loss.  Those are the must-do’s in my grief process, no matter how busy I get.  But, if I am honest, this is not enough.  There is so much more beneath the surface.  I am able to skip over it for a time, if I go fast enough.  I have just been going from one thing to the next without slowing down to pay attention to those deeper feelings.  However, just because I ignore them does not mean they are not there.

Yesterday, the West Michigan Cancer Center held a memorial service to honor the lives of their patients who have recently died.  At first, I was not planning to attend at all.  I have already found ways to remember Ron and have attended other services, both formal and informal.  Then, I started to think that maybe I should go, just to have another opportunity for emotional release in a safe space designed for that purpose.  I found out that Vic Downing, the hospice chaplain who performed me and Ron’s wedding ceremony, was leading the service.  That sealed the deal; I was for sure going.  I invited Ron’s family and they decided to attend, too.

With the service looming on my agenda for Sunday, I hurtled through last week as usual.  Work.  Yoga.  Roller derby practice.  Partner loss support group.  Lunches with girlfriends.  Staying over at Dustin and Carrie’s on Thursday so that I can attend the support group (logistics – so grateful they let me and the dogs crash there once a week).  They even hosted us an additional night last week because I came home after yoga Wednesday to discover I had no power, which in my country farmhouse also means no water and is a bit of a tricky situation live in if I haven’t been stocking up to prepare for a possible outage (I hadn’t been).

At some point during the week, I screwed my back up.  This is a long standing issue for me, as I have one leg in which the bones (determined by full leg x-rays) measure a whole inch longer than the other.  The slightest thing can throw my sacroiliac joint out of whack and then I experience pain in my sciatic nerve.  Very painful.  Still, I came in to work and limped around, knowing it was not the worst it had ever been, figuring it would just go away on its own.  I did not take into account that I would not have time to rest it over the weekend, since I had stuff planned all day both Saturday and Sunday.  I did not take into account that I know very well that I need to stay off it when it gets inflamed in order to recover.  I just took some anti-inflammatory pills and hurtled on some more.

I left the work week feeling frustrated and unappreciated and misunderstood.  I am not alone in feeling this way.  Things have been very hard on my team lately.  As much as I think we are trying to pull together and make the most of many changes, we are all also getting a little (or a lot) burnt out.  It was hard for me to let go of these feelings Friday night and even into Saturday.

Saturday morning I had a guy come out to give me some estimates on some work I need to have done on my house.  Always hard to hear about all the things that are screwed up – I often feel like I am living in the Money Pit.  After he left, I walked the dogs and did some chores.  Then I went to a double header roller derby bout at the Kellogg Arena in Battle Creek.  The team I have been practicing with, the Battle Creek Cereal Killers, were in the first bout and it was awesome to see these gals in action.  I am still just learning, having only skated in two practices so far.  I see them and wonder if I will ever be able to do what they do – so nimble on their feet, so tough when they take a hit or fall to the concrete.  I want to be like them so very badly.  I volunteered to be a non-skating official (NSO) and got assigned to stand on one end of the track, holding a white board and writing down penalties that the refs would call out as they skated past me.  Truth be told, I kind of sucked at it.  Refs yelling things out the side of their mouths with their whistles half in are hard to understand.  So, I botched some stuff up, but it was really no big deal.  I was glad to be a part of the night and it makes me excited to think I could someday be a part of the action.

After six hours on my feet, I drove home, leg/hip/back bothering me something fierce.  And I was exhausted.  Not from the physical aspect of it (all I really did was stand there), but maybe from being in pain and certainly from the emotional energy that comes from being around people I don’t know and trying to pretend I am confident and less socially awkward than I actually am.  (Side note:  I am told by a Cereal Killer that derby will give me confidence and decrease my shyness.  I am so hoping she is right.)

Once home, I spent some time reading a new book, Loving Grief by Paul Bennett, and writing to Ron and eating some rice and just generally winding down for the day.  I remembered that I needed to bring a picture for the Wall of Remembrance at the Cancer Center for the service on Sunday.  I began looking through my pictures of Ron.  I decided on this one, taken in June 2009 from his first trip to South Haven.

Something then clicked in me.  I shifted from hurtling to hurting.  I saw this picture of healthy, whole Ron.  I realized he will not be coming back.  All of the things I want to tell him that I write to him, I will never be able to tell him in person, or even over the phone.  I saw this picture of the person I fell completely in love with.  The person I am still crazily in love with.  I realized that in the back of my mind, as I’ve been hurtling forward, I’ve been thinking that one of these days I will walk through the door and he will be there, waiting for me in the kitchen like he used to.  Thinking that I will see him again.  That I can tell him about it all.  That he will be proud of me for getting re-involved in the land of the living.  That I can tell him about volunteering as a NSO and the fight that broke out during the last jam of the first bout and he will be like, “Holy shit, tell me more about it.”  It suddenly (again) hit me that none of this is going to happen.  That the person in the photograph is really gone.  Of course I know this, logically.  I was there when he stopped breathing.  I saw them wheel him out of my house.  I have his ashes in a turtle pot on the mantle by my wood stove.  I sleep in the bed alone every night.  Of course I know he is gone.  But, do I really know it?  Really?  Having just finished reading Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, I know that this crazy back-of-the-mind thought that he will return is part of the process.  I am still not fully accepting this loss.  And how can I?  It is so profound.  I can wax philosophical about it and I can try to get myself functional again, but at the core of my being I am completely changed.  A huge part of me has been ripped away prematurely.

I went to sleep crying and I woke up crying.  I pulled myself together and went to the Cancer Center.  I hung Ron’s picture on the Wall of Remembrance.  The staff person who helped me hang it remarked, “I like his eyes.”  “Me, too,” I responded, my face breaking.

Yes, those eyes . . . just look at them, people.  Are they not the kindest, most compassionate, most forgiving (yet not without a playful mischievous streak) eyes you have ever beheld?  Oh, how I loved to be seen by those eyes.  How I loved to have Ron look at me.  We would sometimes lie in bed for hours, just talking and staring into each other’s eyes.  I have never had anyone take me in the way Ron did with his eyes.  In them, I felt like I was worth something.  I was whole.  I was loved.  And I loved back.  That all I have to stare into now are photographs, well, it just breaks my heart.

Ron’s family arrived on time to the service, seven people who drove/rode four hours round trip to be there.  Vic talked about having a stone in your pocket, carrying this ever present weight of grief.  I flashed on the fact that I literally do walk around with a stone in my pocket, most days anyways.  Ron gave it to me in August 2011 when we were visiting Tahquamenon Falls.  It is tiger’s eye and heart shaped.  I rub it when I am anxious.  It reminds me of him and our love and that wonderful vacation that fulfilled a last wish of his.  Vic also read a poem by Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet who died in September 1973 after being diagnosed with cancer.  Because he wrote in Spanish, there are several slight variations in the English translation, but the one Vic read went something like this:

LXXXIX

When I die I want your hands on my eyes

I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more.
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind.
I want you to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together
and for you to go on walking the sand where we walked.

I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I loved and sang above everything else
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything that my love directs to you,
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.

Vic told us to imagine it was our loved one saying this to us.  Between this poem and the Beatles covers (Yesterday, Let It Be, Blackbird, etc.) that a volunteer from hospice with a wonderful voice was signing while playing acoustic guitar, I was overcome.  I cried and cried.  There was a time to speak about your loved one, even just to say his name.  I could not form words.  I could barely catch my breath between the sobs I was trying to hold in.  I listened to the people who stood and talked about losing their best friend and love of their life for 30 years, 38 years, 60 years, so on.  It may be selfish, but my thought was, ‘All I got was three years.  It’s not fair.’  It was all I got.  Three years.  Yet it was also so much that I got from spending those years with Ron.

Me and Ron’s family all went out to eat after the service.  It was a great, sunny afternoon for a lunch outside at Bell’s.  Everything went so smoothly.  Ron’s four year old nephew, Milo, even behaved himself.  I know Ron would have been impressed and pleased with everyone coming together and getting along and having a day of absolutely no drama and just close togetherness.  I wish he could have been there. 

I had a few more things to do in Kalamazoo after the family headed back to Alma.  I got home right after the sun slipped behind the field in my backyard.  As usual, there were just not enough hours in the day, especially now that I have filled all my days up.  I went to sleep with significant pain in my back.  I woke up today the same.

This morning, in pain and with my grief fresh, I did something very uncharacteristic.  I called in to work.  I have not done this, to take care of myself, in well over a year.  I know I had to take time off to take care of Ron, including, when I think about what was going on a year ago, last October when he was hospitalized due to bleeding so much out of his stomach that he needed a blood transfusion.  But I have not called in, other than to be an hour or two late, for myself in a long time.  Certainly not since I returned to work in June.  Normally the guilt I experience at doing this outweighs whatever benefit I could possibly derive.  Today, though, I just needed it.  I needed to take care of my back.  I needed to take care of my emotional state.  I needed to stop hurtling and stop performing and stop functioning and just take time out to be how I am.  I am sure that tomorrow when I get to work and hear how rough it was, I will feel bad.  But for right now, right in this moment in this day, I am glad I took a time out.  I am glad I hit the pause button.  I am glad I am allowing myself to feel and miss Ron and experience this monumental loss.  Sometimes, I need to slow down.  My back has a way of forcing this reminder upon me.  It may be sad to be with my feelings, but sometimes being sad is what I need.

In the future, I realize I need to work on the balance.  I need to find a way to move forward, but not at breakneck speed.  No more hurtling.  I need to follow my Turtle’s example of slow and steady, moving forward one foot in front of the other, one step at a time.  Racing just winds up depleting me.  So, being mindful of the lesson learned, I need to consciously build in some time for self-care, reflection, grief, and for my beloved Ron Projects into my new, busy schedule.  It’s okay to be moving forward from where I was, but it is not a race.  Healing cannot be done at a rapid pace.  Going forward, it will be one day at a time, taking time to notice where I am and how I feel.  This needs to be the way.  Anyone who sees me racing can feel free to remind me to s l  o   w        d     o      w       n .