#SOL16: Grief - Nothing Stays Put

from my art journal - "For in Grief, nothing stays put" - 5.28.16
(gesso, acrylic paints, newspaper, white marker, pan pastel, watercolor pencils)

One of the hardest things to come to terms with, if coming to terms is even possible, is the way grief with all of its power re-emerges so unexpectedly. In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis writes about this. He says,

Tonight all the hells of young grief have opened again; the mad words, the bitter resentment, the fluttering in the stomach, the nightmare unreality, the wallowed-in tears. For in grief nothing ‘stays put.’ One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? 

But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? (p. 56)

His account rings true. Out of nothing discernible, grief rises like a rogue wave, appearing suddenly, unexpectedly. Such grief submerges. And though you don't die, it just feels that way.  It is a paralysis that widows learn to stand inside, even as it unbalances the heart.

Sometimes the wait for a return to balance is long.
Sometimes a rebalancing happens quickly.
The only constant is the not knowing.
This is the way of grief.

#SOL16: Temporary

Bokeh Blue  (M.A Reilly, 2014)

I.

For the first time since Rob's death, I had a memory of him as he was prior to becoming ill. It was so fleeting, yet I could almost smell the way his neck often smelled. Warm. Flannel shirt warmed. I saw him laughing, head tilted, hair tied back, some strands escaping, falling down over a shoulder blade. His hair was still long, thick. His shoulders were wide and he was standing.

Mostly I remember Rob from the last few months of his life. This was such an emotional time for us. We were equally hopeful and terrified. It was early January, shortly after he had been megadosed with steroids. He had spent 9 days in the hospital, moving from intensive care to a surgical floor as he readied for spinal surgery. I was with him in the hospital room when he said to me, "I didn't even recognize myself this morning when I looked in the mirror." And this was true. The steroids had bloated and distorted his face so significantly that he didn't look like himself.

"You will," I told him.  "All of this is temporary."

"I'm a stranger."

"It's temporary."

Temporary.

II.

There are things said that take on new meaning as time passes. Meaning never holds still regardless of what we purport as truth. Meaning is always negotiated. I think of this, how the ideas related to the word, temporary, shift, get crowded, over populated.

C. S. Lewis's  in A Grief Observed writes,

"If the dead are not in time, or not in our sort of time, is there any clear difference, when we speak of them, between was and is and will be?" (p. 24).  

Often when I write, I wonder how I might speak about Rob. How might I characterize his death, his leaving, his not being here anymore? How shall I refer to him?  

Is afterlife as simple as shifts in spacetime? Is death in some ways more of a question of physics than theology?  Will I ever have answers?

III.

None of this lofty talk matters on Friday afternoons when I still arrive home somewhat breathless in anticipation of the weekend with my two favorite guys. For nearly three decades, Friday's arrival signaled the start of extended time with Rob and for the last 17 years--extended time with Rob and Devon. 

Now we are fractured. 

Missing. 

Broken. 

Temporary. 

And oddly. Whole. Yearning. Wanting.

The pulse of life beats regardless of my grief. I bought red geraniums this afternoon to put in bright blue pots. I passed the blooms and pots as I head out the door, into late April rain to walk. Since Rob died I have walked every day.  

I have walked when he could not. 

These days I walk mostly to live. 

#SOL16: A Litany

Rob before Treatment

I.

My husband didn't have a chance to fight the lung cancer that is killing him because he was too busy fighting multiple staph infections. Three staph infections in five months.  During that time, he received just two chemo treatments and one of those led to the staph infection that we had been told had been successfully treated running amok, settling the infection near the right ventricle of his heart and requiring emergency thoracic surgery and the removal of his 5th rib.

Grief (2/2016)

Rob has endured so much pain from the infections, the cancerous lesions on his spine, bone breaks, relentless tests, spinal cord compression,  multiple surgeries, the spread of cancer, and nearly 90 days away from home, away from all that is familiar, known, touchable.

With each new procedure,

Devon holding his father's hand (2/2016)

each new MRI,
Cat Scan,
blood test,
X-Ray,
Doppler ultrasound,
with each new blood culture,
each new surgery,
each bag of antibiotics,
each injection,
each transfusion,
each new needle in his arm, his thigh, his stomach,
each new pill to relieve pain: oxycontin, dilaudid, morphine, and lyrica,
each new fentanyl transdermal patch,
each new roxanol injection,
each new blood clot screen,
each dose of radiation,
each new arterial stick,
each new picc line insertion and removal,
each new port insertion and removal,
each cardiac incident,
each blood clot in his legs, his arm,
each new cancer fighting drug

                                                  --alongside these medical maladies and interventions,
                                                   
we were offered hope.

It is important that you understand that we were not being fanciful, imagining the best of outcomes. Was it not a month ago that we were assured that Rob would not have been a candidate for spinal neurosurgery, had he not had a prognosis for at least 6 more months to live?  Was it not a month ago that we were assured that the cancer was not aggressive?  How then did it spread so quickly to Rob's sternum, ribs, liver, spleen? How did we end up hearing 4 weeks later that nothing more could be done?  How in the space of 28 days did his life expectancy change from greater than 6 months to a couple of weeks?

II.

Doctors, even the finest ones, are mere mortals like us.

III.

In A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis captures this sense of false hope well. He writes,

"What chokes every prayer and every hope is the memory of all the prayers H. and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking, hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by X-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were ‘led up the garden path.’ Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing the next torture" p. 30.

The next torture.
That so aptly encapsulates what Rob has endured these last five months.

IV.

Sometimes late at night, as I sit in the chair beside his bed, listening to the putter and puff of the oxygen machine, I find myself wondering what might have been had that infected port not been inserted into his chest on that Monday in September. Or if that surgeon had spent a bit more time and followed up instead of missing the signs of infection.  I wonder where Rob might now be if the first staph infection had been treated completely so that when he received his first chemo treatment, the infection didn't result in a massive abscess.

What might have been had we opted for no treatment?