A Not-So-Happy New Year
The holiday season, culminating with Ken’s birthday, was nearly two months of emotional overload. Physically I wasn’t in very good shape either. All of the overeating and “overdrinking” during a typical year is enough to put me in a bit of a catatonic state for a few days in early January but this year it is taking me weeks to emerge from what was not as much a time of revelry as one of so much sadness. It didn't help that I came down with the cold that seems to have impacted half of the population and lost my voice early in the month. As we begin February, I have a lingering cough that seems devoted to keeping me subdued.
I was surprised at the number of people who wished me a Happy New Year. While I wondered at the time if they were hopeful for me, or just not thinking in the moment to whom they were speaking, they were most likely just sharing the standard greeting for this time of year. If only the changing of the calendar could produce an emotional shift, an alteration of the persistent grief that dogged me for nearly all of 2023. 2024 is a year that Ken will never live in. How can that be happy?
So I started 2024 emotionally drained and physically spent and just when I am beginning to recover, I now face a month of horrible anniversaries. A year ago January 27 was the beginning of the end: Ken’s final ER visit, when we found out his excruciating pain was due to hemorrhaging in his liver. After three nights and unit after unit of blood, the bleeding finally slowed, and we had a cheery phone call with the oncologist about pursuing insurance approval for an experimental cancer treatment. That evening I went home with renewed optimism, but overnight the hemorrhaging resumed and he called me in a panic to come back in: we were both terrified that he would die that day. And even though a surgical embolism fixed that complication and we cautiously looked ahead to getting him stable and back on track for treatment, 24 hours later the doctors from both his primary and our local hospitals had conferred, and it was clear that the cancer was too far gone. His oncologist was given the unfortunate task of relaying this conclusion to me, and I had to tell my husband that his medical providers believed it was time to enter hospice. It felt like a horrible betrayal, to lie next to him in his hospital bed, the late afternoon sun streaming through the windows, and relate what the doctor said. Ken was never much of a talker, but the silence that followed my disclosure was long even by his standards.
I have volunteered for one of our local hospice programs for about a decade. Supporting the staff and patients and their families in an in-patient unit, visiting with patients who are alone at home, sitting with patients who are unresponsive but whose caregiver needs a break. Even so, I felt largely unprepared for the intense experience of 24/7 hospice care. Every one of those 25 days, Ken and I and the family and our community scrambled to hold it together for each other. It was a profound experience that I was unable to fully process afterward since it culminated in a death which then took processing priority. And even though sleep deprivation may have muddled some memories of those days and nights, myriad moments of beauty, of indignity, of holiness, of fear, of love crowd my mind a year later, desperate to be remembered and understood.
With all of these thoughts in my head, I struggle to write. In fact, I continue to struggle to do just about anything. I went to a memorial service recently and I wanted to wear my long winter coat. It was not in the closet. I checked three times. There is nowhere else in the house where it would be, so I must've left it somewhere. But I haven’t gone to many places this winter where I would choose to wear a dress coat…maybe church on Christmas Eve? I don’t have a dry-cleaning ticket, but I call the cleaners anyway and they confirm that I have an item there. When I pick it up the clerk does a double-take at the tag. When I get home, I see why. I dropped it off April 7. I shake my head at this reminder of my abnormal level of functioning. I am by nature easily distracted, but with grief further blurring my focus, it is difficult to take care of even the smallest bits of business.
Friends seem to understand where I am, and yet they usualIy are surprised when I start to cry during conversation. And I was told recently by a loved one to essentially change my attitude, that I risk reinforcing these negative pathways in my brain. I’ve been turning down invitations and cocooning into my sadness, because I need to face this grief even if it’s not pretty to look at. With the distractions of spring, summer and fall still a few weeks away, it’s probably a good time to give my sadness the attention it has been demanding. I think one reason sadness is a difficult feeling to express in our culture is because we consider strength to be an important characteristic. And strong people are not sad. In fact, they generally don’t show much emotion at all. They are confident and sure of themselves. I am sure of very little right now. I am unsure of the future of myself and my family, I question where I fit in our former relationships, I wonder who I am.
But I am confident about a few things. First, even though I am sad, even though I ache for Ken, I can accept that it hurts so much because we were a solid “us”, and his absence creates a void in me. Second, I trust that it is ok to crack from this sadness. Because when it breaks me, it doesn’t mean I am weak, it just means I have changed. Lastly, I need to trust myself. I need to trust that I will move forward when I am ready, regardless of what the calendar or anyone else says.
According to the groundhog, it will be an early spring this year. That’s an unusual prediction, since the typical report is that there will be six more weeks of winter. Even though I am content in my winter isolation, I won’t complain about an early spring. But I know that no matter what Punxsutawney Phil says, winter will be over when it is over. And presumably someday my grief will be less disruptive to day-to-day living, but I’m not making any predictions as to when. And I can accept that ambiguity.