#SOL17: Redemption

Rob's Hand (March 2016)

Jeremiah 8:21-22. “I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, and dumb with grief. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why doesn't God do something? Why doesn't he help?”

I. 

I am speaking with the grief therapist yesterday morning when a new understanding of this pain surfaces. I am experiencing the last weeks of Rob's life for the first time. A year ago, Rob was still alive, still here. One of the things I would say to myself when I sensed panic rising during that time is that I could still touch him, see him, hear him, kiss him. This litany of things I could do brought comfort. 

A year ago, I slept little and ate less and walked through each of his last 20 days at home attentive to only my husband and his needs. I swore I would do all I could to ease--as well as I might--his passing from this life to the next. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted him to know the love I felt and hope that he did. Oddly this drive insulated me from the pain.

I realize now that so much was beyond my reach, my touch. Rob passed from here to there on his own as he had to--as you and I will one day do as well. 

II. 

Those last few days in the hospital, the week in the palliative care unit, and the 20 days at home are now (in)formed by the understanding of what happened next--what happened on that last day. Rob's life has an ending. And it is knowing that he will die on March 8th at 4:15 in the afternoon that changes how all the previous days with Rob can be understood. 

Time folds back on itself. 

I keep returning to that John Berger quote I mentioned in a post last week. In a conversation with Susan Sontag he says, "Somebody dies. It's not just a question of tact that one then says, well, perhaps it is possible to tell that story. It's because, after that death, one can read that life. The life becomes readable."  

With his death, Rob's life became readable.


III. 

It's reading Rob's life a year later--that life I loved like I loved the man, that feelings well up, swamp me. I feel sorrow grab and take hold for I see so much more now than I could have at the time.

I see now how impossibly lost my sweet husband was during those last few weeks. I see how vulnerable he was. How childlike he was at times. I see his sadness when he would remember he was dying. I see now, that he forgot so much. Each morning he would ask me to help him stand, forgetting the paralysis that kept him moored to that hospital bed. I realize now that he didn't think it odd that he was in a hospital bed in the middle of our family room. I realize now that I never noticed that before.

He began the leaving process well before he took his last breath. And it isn't only the last few weeks of his life that are refocused. No. Rather, it is every minute I spent with him. Every memory that resurfaces. All of them are now subject to illustrating the distance between then and when he would die.  It isn't that we climbed all over the Badlands one August, but rather that this happened five years before the diagnosis. It isn't that the time in Tuscany was spent wandering and eating well and laughing often. Rather, it's two years before the diagnosis. 

Every photo has a timeline taped to it now. And the photos with Rob and Devon hurt the most. I can barely look at those first photographs. We were so impossibly young and lovely. I wonder how Rob could only have a handful of years with his son. 17 years is too little time. 17 years is a quick breath in a lifetime.  


IV. 

And though remembering all of this hurts, I sense this pain is more redemptive than harmful. More solace than salt.

#SOL16: An Old Chair and All We Cannot Know

Rob's chair.

I.

It was just an old, undersized, mauve reclining wing chair. 28 years old to be more precise. My parents bought it for Rob and me and we moved that chair three times across the last few decades. Today, I gave the chair away.

Rob always hated the chair. He said it was uncomfortable and though I defended the chair for decades, the truth is no one sat in the chair very often. About two years ago, Rob bought a chair of his own to replace an oversized recliner. He kept the chair in the guest room alongside the shelves and shelves of books he had read or was reading. This past Sunday, I finally summoned the courage to reorganize the room, removing old and damaged books, office supplies, and other odds and ends that found their way there. And getting rid of the clutter allowed me to better see Rob's chair. It was exhausting work--the third room I had cleaned and it was late in the day and so I sat for a bit in the chair, I think for the first time, and realized that Rob knew comfort.  The chair fit like an old friend and it was an old friend I so needed. And though Rob died in late winter, I felt as if I was saying goodbye to my husband this past Sunday.  At one point I asked Rob to send me a sign, something, anything.

Some days grief is nothing more than raw, unprocessed pain. Just pain. Sunday was such a day.

II.

On Sunday evening, I dragged Rob's chair to our bedroom, thinking I would swap it with the mauve recliner. Devon helped me to get the recliner out of the room and as I eyed it I noticed it was faded and no matter what I did to clean it, it still, would be uncomfortable.

Is this something you really want to keep? my son asked. 

I don't know. My mom gave it to us. 

It was never comfortable, mom. 

I laughed and said, You sound just like your dad. He too must be laughing at this, cause you know what? He was right. I never told him that, but that chair was never comfortable. 

We each stood at the top of the stairs, the chair between us as I considered what to do. Okay, let's take it downstairs.

I thought to donate the chair to the Vietnam Vets who have been to our home more times in the last few months than most, but learned they don't accept recliners. So instead, the chair sat in the hallway for another day until we hauled it outside. I then posted information about the chair on a Facebook group for my town and am hoping someone will take the chair away.

III.

For the last two weeks I couldn't meditate. I'd sit and begin to fidget 10 minutes in. I remembered a friend saying that her brothers had specific places in their homes for meditation. That made sense to me but I found that couldn't determine such a place in my own home. After settling Rob's chair into a corner of our bedroom, I wondered if I might have found my meditation place. Early this morning, before getting involved in the world, I sat in the chair, feeling it fold around me and I easily meditated.

No fidgeting, just that powerful fall to no time, no space. As I sat in the chair, I felt surrounded by Rob's spirit.  On Monday evening, I was telling this story to a group of women and one named what I could not say, "You got your sign from Rob."

And how right those words felt to me. My eyes grew wet immediately, stung and Yes, I wanted to say, Yes, I did get a sign, even though saying it aloud felt a bit corny. Before Rob's death I didn't pay much attention to signs, nor do I recall placing any great value on stories about signs. Before enduring Rob's illness and death, I was more a doubting Thomas wanting verification through a sense.  Give me what can be observed, what the mind determines. Watching Rob die and living the aftermath has opened me to possibilities that are not rational.  Grief mostly requires us to believe in what is beyond our experience--what is beyond our capacity to name. Grief is its own language full of starts and stops and pauses where early morning light finds a woman humbled by all she could not have known, held in the comfort of her husband's opened hands.