I am full, happy, in swing, swinging with life and refilling my well.
My dear friend Anna is at the side of her dear friend Sandy who will, with the consent and help of her husband’s children, "pull the plug" on his respirator in the next day or two.
Reading Anna’s emails, I reflected on the swings, the natural ebb and flow of living. It is not that Anna is suffering, she is a hospice volunteer and midwife, one of the most even-eyed strong hearted women I know. Sandy is similar in strength. My reflection is not that they are sad and I am happy… it is that prosaic and yet so much more vast. There is something so outrageously tenacious and sometimes even obnoxious about how life keeps going, keeps erupting, keeps LIVING.
When my husband Chris was so sick in the hospital last August, what was hardest for me, was being well. I wanted to be sick, too. It wasn’t right that something was happening to him that was so serious, that might take his life, if not now then in a few years, and I was eating and walking and living and enjoying it.
What I am aware of tonight is the swing of life and death.
I aware of what it feels like to be on both sides of the abyss – to feel life cascading in me and through me and to feel death and endings.
I feel stretched and rubbery, grateful and also angry, because holding both is much harder and wider than I am used to.
I am hoping that, when I am again at the side of that hospital bed, I will remember this wide place as well as I do right now.
Love to you Sandy and Bill, and Anna.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Susan Mar 30, 2006
Life goes on. Doesn’t it, though? I remember after my husband died, a friend took me to breakfast a couple of days after everyone went back home. It was a Sunday morning and the restaurant was bustling. People were laughing, cajoling fussy children, flagging down flying waitresses as I sat in my personal numbness. I remember being nearly overwhelmed with the desire to stand up and scream, “STOP! STOP LAUGHING, STOP TALKING, STOP BREATHING. You need to stop and appreciate your life right this second. You need to realize just how precious this very moment is. You need to wait until I can catch up with you again…until I can laugh and talk and breathe again.” I envied their “normalcy” and wondered if I would ever regain that rythmn, that blase. Life goes on. I have a new rythmn but I will never again be blase.
2 Kayll Mar 30, 2006
I think we are all a little changed (obviously) when someone really close to us dies or is deathly sick. We are bombarded by violence and terror from the news and often it feels so distant, so impersonal.
Until I lost my Nana last year so suddenly (she was vibrant and dancing one day, then dying after a stroke the next), I see life differently. I really feel the news stories now. I imagine the mother’s thoughts when she learns of her soilder son’s death. The boy hit by a train while he was looking the other way… I feel it now.
Life seems softer, more fragile and yet more beauitful too. It’s as if through the process of watching someone we love die, we are awakened to yet another season of life that we only noticed from afar.
And sometimes I feel very small and wish I had a t-shirt that says “Please take care of me. Someone I love died.”
3 cindy Apr 1, 2006
beautiful touching words Kayll.
cindy
4 Jennifer Louden Apr 3, 2006
Your comments all sum up so much of what I have felt before and I’m sure Sandy is feeling now. Thank you for being such articulate voices in this world!