Jerry would have loved this so much. He planted wildflower seeds (which he got from the same company that supplies the flowers planted along I-24 in Tennessee, which we always loved to see as we drove down from BNA to singings in Alabama) in the yard last fall, and this spring there've been waves of flowers - the first batch I took photos of with my cellphone, which he looked at in the hospital - although they were awful little photos and he couldn't have made out much - and now there are lots of purple coneflowers, a flower he liked and planted a lot, which are attracting so many large, colorful butterflies. He would have loved it. He would have been taking photo after photo with the camera he got for his birthday in February and never had a chance to enjoy.
I miss him so much. Everything that happens is something he's not here for, something I can't share with him, and that's how it will be for the rest of my life, and it just hurts so, so much. I don't understand how I'm supposed to keep going, or why.
OK... blot tears, blow nose, take deep breath.
Went through a few more things in the basement today (not sure why there were LL Bean catalogues from the late 1990s - I think they probably migrated with us from Hendee Street when we moved into the house and just got stowed in the basement and forgotten. Although, ahem, we moved in midway through 2000, so they were already past their usefulness by then). There's still a lot of boxes and piles to be sorted, some of which are Jerry's things and will have to wait until I can face doing that. I did find a wooden box, which possibly Jerry made, with a few old family photos in them, which I'll give to Seamus tomorrow for him and Erin to have. Photos of little boy Jerry, before he was Jerry, back when he was Jim, make me cry as much as everything else does, even though obviously I never knew that little boy - but I just think about what that little boy ended up going through at the end of his life and it just breaks my shattered heart all over again.
I keep reading that eventually the details of sickness and suffering fade away and are replaced by happier, older memories of better times. I hope that happens soon. Last night I was lying in bed and started thinking of the tubing that stretched from the oxygen concentrator, which made so much noise that we put it in the dining room, into the bedroom during Jerry's final days, and how much the cannula bothered him, and then I remembered that soon after he died I realized the cannula was still there and I took it off of him so he was finally free of yet another of all those tubes, so many damn tubes. I don't want to remember those things anymore. It was painful when he was having to go through it - and now it's painful to have to remember it. I hope these memories fade away soon.
I want to take a moment again to thank all of you who've been sending messages and cards: I appreciate your words and your kindness. Thank you.
P.S. I finished the Didion. I didn't expect a happy, upbeat resolution and the assurance that everything's gonna be fine, fine, fine, and I didn't get it. I have no more wisdom about surviving this than I had before. So no more magical thinking about The Year of Magical Thinking.
I think it's normal to go over and over and over the details of the sickness, as well as to obsess over photos and every other little detail about who Jerry was and what you've been through. We become a little obsessive-compulsive for a while. We have to do that so our brains can take in the incomprehensible. Eventually everything gets into the brain and gets sorted in some kind of order, and then we don't need to obsess so much; we can let it go.
ReplyDeleteWhen Minja died, I became like the Ancient Mariner, idealizing her and telling even random strangers what had happened. I thought I was going crazy, but my wise friend Stephen said, "No. You're grieving." So try to take comfort in the idea that everything you're going through is part of a normal grief process. It's not fun, but it is normal.
Stephen also said, "Grief is the price of love." Because if we love someone we're going to lose them eventually. I was angry at him for saying it--"Can't you be a little more sympathetic?!"--but he was essentially right.
Many years before I lost my husband, we had a premature baby who died shortly after her birth. I remember very vividly the need to "tell the story" to practically everyone and anyone (with interesting results: many close friends ran in the opposite direction, a few people I didn't know well, and wouldn't have expected it of, responded in very helpful ways). I think it was what I needed to do to integrate the loss into my brain, to make it real. I also think telling the story to others helped me stop going over it in my own mind -- as if the external version I could "hear" while the internal version didn't get permanently filed in the database of my brain. Some years before that, while I was in college and visiting relatives in another country for the first time, my cousins lost their baby, and I remember asking my cousin questions that prompted her to tell the story (I think I just wanted to get a grasp of what had happened to her because I knew nothing about that kind of thing), and she said, you know, you're the first person to let me tell the story, and I recalled that comment when I went through my own similar experience and that was a help in and of itself in making sense of the aftermath.
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