The ones I willed had to do with intentional healing. Heal is an Old English word that means to make whole. Heald means to weave or knit. For me, that meant a gathering together of the fragments of my mind and spirit that scattered when my husband died. But as awful as his death was, it doesn't tell my whole story of loss, which took up most of the last decade.
The losses began with my mother's Alzheimer's symptoms appearing in 2001 and ended with her death in 2009. My father died of lung cancer in 2005. Al was diagnosed with the same disease in 2006 and died in 2007 after the cancer spread to his brain. Those are the cold, hard dates that only hint at the deterioration, dislocations, and family fractures that made those days so bleak.
I don't remember what made me wake one day--when was it? 2010? 2011?--and decide to write a list of the major dates of the last decade. All those crises had merged into one big disaster in my mind, and I was ready for some clarity and also some clearing out in the hope of making space for new and good things in my life. I had been going through the motions. I wasn't yet at a point where I wanted more out of life. I was too depleted for that. But at least I wanted to want more.
In order to compile the list, I had to go through old notebooks and appointment calendars. I could not readily distinguish the details of one illness from those of another through mere memory. During those years some crisis was always arising. There had been many stages in my parents' last years. Their illnesses had overlapped with Al's, and there were similarities in symptoms and treatments.
Before I wrote the list, my failure to remember the benchmark dates of an entire decade worried me. After all my mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Although that diagnosis had never been confirmed through an autopsy, which traditional Judaism doesn't countenance, she sure had dementia. (My father believed that her symptoms began to appear after a fall when she hit her head. I'll go along with that.) I read recently--can't remember where--that fear of memory loss tops fear of death for baby boomers. Setting down the dates and leaving the list on my desktop for reference externalized my inner turmoil and put a frame around the period.
We learn about ourselves and our processes through maturation. We try to accept that our rhythms are not the same as everyone else's. For me, there is something about the transference of thought to concrete writing that gives me the distance I need to analyze and understand my emotions. I can't force myself to move on until I'm ready. I've tried many times, and what results on the page is stilted and vague. It's been said that when the student is ready, the teacher appears, and I suppose that's true even when the student and teacher are internal parts of oneself.
The act of researching and writing the list marked the beginning of my self-healing. Here is what I first listed:
2001 Mother's
symptoms began
3/31/05 Dad
died
2/24/06 Al
diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer
8/5/07 Al
died
2/19/08 Star
died
2/1/09 Mom
diedI was hesitant to include the death of my 13-year-old standard poodle in my list of human deaths, even though at first I was writing strictly for myself. I've hesitated again to mention it in this blog, but Star was a great spirit and companion, and her death grieved me.
I've added to that list since then, but that was my start.
