Category: death

Eyes

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ Leave a comment

Grief is a hole carried deep within. It is the oxygen-deprived void, generally unseen by anyone else, living within our soul whose weight varies from day to day, moment to moment, from a quick catch of your breath to drowning suffocation.

Queen Elizabeth II died yesterday at the age of 96. Unless you’re 95, I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t sign that lifetime contract today. My cousin died yesterday, too. Life did not afford her 96 years. Absent the global outpouring of tears, her loss is no less devastating than that of the queen to her family. Grief is sure to wash over her family as sure as the queen’s.

Regardless of your feelings toward the British monarchy, whether you feel it is superfluous in 2022, an anachronism to modernity, or the steady hand on the till as time unfolds, the queen’s passing marks the end of an era. She worked with fifteen Prime Ministers throughout her long life, the first being Sir Winston Churchill. Churchill was born in 1874, a mere nine years after the end of our Civil War. She served as monarch for 70 years or about 28.5% of the entire history of the United States.

To remember a time when she was not monarch, you would have to be over 75 or 80 years old. Consider the changes the world has undergone during the time of her reign. Of course, few of us knew her. I can only project my interpretation of the video and deed she presented to the world. However, it seems that, whatever you feel about her, she sincerely believed in the queen’s duty above all else. No doubt, this came at a tremendous personal sacrifice. Whether it was a private life forfeited after her uncle’s abdication, a restructuring of her relationship with her husband Phillip in deference to her role, or the official position she had to take over any maternal impulses she may have felt, forbearance and sacrifice was her duty.

Grief is a hole carried deep within. However, there are occasions when it is visible. Words record the pain she endured at her father’s passing, King George VI, in 1952. Modern technological capabilities captured some insight into her grief after the passing of her husband. As we isolated ourselves in reaction to the savage viral death brought by COVID-19, the queen sat alone in St. George’s Chapel on that day in April 2021. Captured by Jonathan Brady of the Associated Press on that day, here she sits with her grief.

Look at her eyes. That is grief. The hole carried deep within, momentarily visible in her lost stare. I know that look. The paralysis grief creates, the mental gymnastics, and incomprehensible lack of understanding one goes through envisioning a world without a loved one are visible to anyone remotely aware. It is the eyes that expose our grief to others. It is through the eyes that tears flow. It is through sight that we feel sympathy and empathy. And it is through our eyes that grief reveals us shattered and lost.

If we are lucky, time softens the edges of our grief. We catch our breath at a memory, song, scent, or place, but we no longer suffer the drowning suffocation as often. We learn to control access to the most devastating memories; we learn to remember without reliving them. It is not an easy skill to learn.

The queen is gone. So, too, my cousin Gwennie. People worldwide may mourn the queen’s loss as if a steel and cement pillar of our societal foundation has crumbled and left us on infirm sand. Her family and my cousin’s will know grief exposed through our eyes. Be a comfort to those showing the signs of grief’s pain. None of us are immune to its theft of air any more than death steals life. The hole grief creates in its immediacy is devoid of oxygen. Help each other breath.

Control

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ Leave a comment

Can this be how it works? I’m 57 years old and see more life in the rearview mirror than the open road ahead. With that perspective, I find it’s become essential to reflect on what I’ve done with my time on this planet. Blissfully ignorant of the repercussions of news events growing up in bucolic suburbia, adulthood, parenthood, citizenship demanded my attention as I aged. I’ve experienced events no one wants. People summarize it as “life” when you see death. I’m not special. Just frustrated.

After the massacre at the movie theater in Aurora, CO, I began to write. Not with the expectation of affecting change, but rather to give my anger, my emotions, an outlet, an offramp for the toxic blood poisoning my body. I saw gun violence stealing a generation. While some social issues had moved the Overton Window, political intransigence (keep cashing the NRA’s checks!) and eventual American ennui accepted gun violence as baked into the American fabric in the name of “freedom.”

After the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, CT, I began to speak. Surely, a tragedy of this scale would shock Americans (and politicians) out of their stupor. Nope! I talked to groups in Texas as the lone spokesperson for the Brady Campaign in Texas. The only one. That alone tells you all you need to know about the calculus of “I NEED my gun, dead kids and teachers be damned.” Thoughts, prayers, and sad face emojis flooded social media until America’s fruit fly attention span moved on to the latest “tragedy” affecting Kim Kardashian.

My anger peaked with the death of my wife. Fuck cancer makes a great tweet, a guttural reaction without consequence. Utterly suicidal and dying with my wife, I could not yell at the tumor. I took it out on God for a while (also useless) and even turned to God for a bit (utterly meaningless). There was no one to blame, no revenge to be had. No offramp for my anger.

And then Americans, in the obvious next step for a society that had abdicated all personal responsibility and suffered no consequences, elected a narcissistic moron president—a billionaire (if you believe him) speaking for the uneducated rubes. Merit and logic were dead. With each lie, with each crime, I expected consequences. None came. Robert Mueller fumbled the ball with no defenders anywhere near him. Facts were relegated to the trash bin. Tweets became governmental edicts. And I waited. Furious.

When I get angry (when I get down), it is because things should be easier. “Keep the simple things simple; the hard things are hard enough.” But nothing was easy. Changing a light bulb resulted in the glass bulb snapping off the metal base, a trip or two to Lowes, and a call to the electrician. Nothing was easy. Ultimately, I realized it was an absolute lack of control. There was nothing I could do about any of it. My wife was dead, guns were more important than life, freedom from fact and responsibility replaced actual democracy, and rabid evangelicals believed in Trump as the messiah. Stop the world; I want to get off.

And now we have Ukraine. Again, one man brings the world to the point of a world war—one man. Ukrainians are fighting to survive- as a nation and a people. “Denazifying” Ukraine? Really?

I’m reminded of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot speech as I watch an army destroy entire cities. Stepping back for a second, it seems bizarre that NATO and the UN watch the massacres with tepid financial penalties because Ukraine doesn’t belong to their club. It’s like a high school clique turning its back on a less cool student getting beaten up because they don’t wear the “right” jeans. I understand the political ramifications of engagement. But on a human level, it seems callous and impotent.

So here I am—no one special, poisoned with anger and unable to control or change anything. Hell, I can’t even watch baseball now! The billionaires are too busy fighting with the millionaires. I get the feeling that if aliens did visit earth, they’d look down and say, “Nah, they’re petulant adolescents with nascent technology and a penchant for killing each other. Keep driving.”

So, my clock continues to tick down, and I’m not ignorant enough for its promised bliss. I’ve read Viktor Frankl and Thomas Paine but still cannot find reason or acceptance. How do I accept all of this? How do I “let it go?” No, seriously, I’m asking.

Sandra

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ Leave a comment

My former mother-in-law, Sandra McIntosh, died on Friday. She had had multiple sclerosis since before I met her in 1987 and finally succumbed to ovarian cancer at age 81. This is a difficult piece to write.

I met her in 1987 when delivering her daughter’s baseball glove after she broke her leg during a company softball game. It was an excuse to see Lisa. Nothing more. We weren’t even dating at that point, but I had my sights set on her. Indeed, with a broken leg, there was not much need for a baseball glove! Sandra met me at the door and was very courteous if confused. That initial reaction held for the entirety of the time I knew Sandra.

Her husband, Doug, was my friend. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1999, Lisa, our two young children, and I moved in with him and Sandra to care for him. He and Lisa had similar, effervescent personalities. It was a fool’s errand to try to keep up with them. But, oh, did we laugh.

In December of that year, he died in my arms as I tried to help him to a chair on the one night in all those months that Lisa left the house with her friend Naomi. Telling Sandra to stay in the bedroom while I called 911, and then Lisa felt like juggling cats underwater, my head drowning. Immediately after that, Sandra came to live with us. She lived in assisted living facilities off and on after that, sometimes living with us, sometimes living in ALFs.

Lisa was diagnosed with cancer in 2008. As many of you know, she, the kids, and I moved to Texas to treat her. Forgetting the dye had already been cast, and despite her Herculean efforts, she died in 2015. Sandra was with us in Texas from 2010 until the kids, Sandra, and I returned to Rhode Island in 2016 after the kids graduated from the University of Texas at Austin.

Before Doug died, he made me promise to take care of Sandra. It is a promise I have always tried to uphold. Lisa made me make the same promise. Two peas in a pod, those two. I promised her, too.

I don’t know why them and not me. It makes no more sense to me than knowing why cancer is, ultimately, suicidal, that it kills its host. To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, “Why me?” “Why not,” said the universe.

Sandra was an only child. So was Doug. So was Lisa. We used to joke that Lisa didn’t have a family tree; she had a creeping vine. And now, they are all gone. However, the family tree/vine continues in Lisa’s children, my children: Samantha and Cameron. Thanks to IVF, they exist. Thanks to luck, they are not only children.

Sandra did not have Doug or Lisa’s electric personalities and never tried to keep up with them. Looking at family photos (or even photos from her high school yearbook), she rarely smiled in them. Most of the time, she isn’t even looking at the camera. However, that is not to say she didn’t enjoy herself. She loved crocheting, painting, drawing, family get-togethers, “cousin’s parties” at the Cape, and Christmas Eve’s at the DeCesare’s.

She learned to cover her not knowing something with wit, exaggeration, or obfuscation. She was either a graduate of a nursing school or any number of four-year universities to listen to her talk. Over the past twenty years, I’ve spent many hours with her in Emergency Departments. Invariably, she tells the nurse that she spent many years at that hospital as a nurse. Once, at dinner, she bonded with the waiter, who told us he was Hungarian. “I’m Hungarian, too!” she said. She put other’s minds at ease with her exaggerations and obfuscations, blending into conversations rather than dominating them. She made everyone feel they belonged indeed, that she belonged.

She did attend and graduate from a nursing program in Boston in the early 1960’s. After that, she worked briefly at a psych hospital. She then spent her adulthood watching Doug’s meteoric rise through the business world, attending board outings, professional dinners, and weekends at the Cape. She settled into life as a quiet wife and mother. She taught ceramics out of their basement and signed her works “Sugar.” Lisa never acquiesced to Sandra’s request that she sign her pieces “Spice.” Indeed, signing them “Oil” and “Water” might have been more appropriate. Mothers and daughters.

Now she is gone like Doug. And like Lisa. The family I married into, all gone. I feel bad for my kids. The unlived memories and stolen years with their mother and grandfather hurt more than the memories and years stolen from Doug or Lisa because the kids still exist to feel the pain. I can only offer stories and hope I did right by their grandfather and mother and the promise they made me make.

Funny thing about promises: anyone can make them to anyone else. I know Lisa made Naomi promise to look in on me occasionally, to see how I was doing, to see how the kids were doing. I appreciate it and, like everyone else, am doing the best I can to live a meaningful, productive life. I have remarried and am allowing myself to be happy. May we all have a reprieve from grief for a while? I wish I could promise.

Sharks and Cancer

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ Leave a comment

quint

So, eleven hundred men went in the water, three hundred and sixteen men come out, the sharks took the rest…”  Quint, Jaws

It has been a very difficult year and a half. First, in November of 2014 my father died after a brief but excruciatingly painful fight with lung cancer which had spread to his bones. Almost one year later, last September, my wife died after a long fight with breast cancer which had spread to her lungs. And then only six months later, my dog died after a painful fight with a soft tissue cancer which had spread to his bones. One year, then only six months, part of me wonders what horror will befall us in three months. But I have to believe that the pain and suffering have ended now.  I can’t help but appropriate Quint’s quote to, “So, five of us went to Texas, three of us come home, cancer took the rest…”

Cancer has targeted my family for far too long now. I don’t want it to have any more power over us. My children have spent fully one-third of their lives living under the threat of cancer taking their mother and then their dog. Almost their entire teenage years, years difficult enough without cancer moving in to live with us, has been spent living under that dark cloud. They are 21 years old now and, in spite of these added pressures, will both graduate on-time from the University of Texas at Austin, each with over a 3.5 GPA. How they have been able to stay focused amazes me and is a testament to their strength of character.

I know people have had it harder than we have. I don’t claim to have a corner on suffering. And I am grateful for the seven years we were able to steal from cancer by moving to Texas and seeking treatment at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. I’ll never regret that decision. But if we could have a break from any additional pain for a short time, that would be great.

Each of us is dealing with these losses in our own individual manner. Certainly, grief counseling has helped, but we still face a world in which neither Lisa nor Delbow will walk with us any longer. We have had long discussions about faith, heaven, philosophy, and all of the accompanying topics. We disagree as much as we agree but the discussions are always lively and fascinating. I hope that we can each find some comfort in our positions.

Finally, there is the issue of moving forward. The house, already quiet from Lisa’s absence is now even quieter without Delbow’s rambling about. The kids are on spring break this week, so I have a respite before facing that still house alone. I now have six months of experience without Lisa and living alone. I hope this serves me well when the kids return to school. But before we know it, school will be over, graduations will have been concluded and we will be packing up for our trip back to Rhode Island. I hope it goes well and we can begin our new lives healthy. No sharks, no cancer.

No Autopilot When Spiraling In

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ 3 Comments

spiral

As we continue our corkscrew toward the ground, we took another turn today. My wife can no longer easily swallow, causing her to cough when taking medications. Because she is so short of breath, she cannot cough up that which she has aspirated and she begins wheezing which results in her vomiting. Because she is not eating, the only thing she vomits is green bile from her stomach. It is a vicious circle as we spiral in.

The kids are convinced now that something will happen the day I drive them back to college. Given how we have tightened the spiral, I’m not sure I disagree.

Looking outward from inside this corkscrew is disorienting. As soon as I am convinced that something has settled, the wings tilt inward still further and we spin that much faster toward the ground. But one can find focus in this spin. When I least expect it and am most ill prepared, the gravity and magnitude of the situation (essentially the finality of it all) clubs me with a mighty blow after which I find myself gasping for breath, crying and floating directionless in the air until the reality of current circumstances force me to see the spinning and rapidly approaching ground through the windscreen.

There is no peace when spiraling in. Life’s obligations and daily tasks still require our attention: the dog needs to be fed and given his meds, the laundry never stops, groceries still need to shopped for, bills still need to be paid, work still needs to be done. However, there is a certain feeling of mechanization about it all. We go through the motions of shopping, eating, dressing, sleeping, as we have all summer, but there is no soul in it. Put your seats in the upright and locked position, return your tray table to its stowed position, tighten your seatbelt tight and low around your waist. The captain has exited the aircraft and will not be returning. Cancer is now piloting the aircraft. Thank you for flying the terminally ill skies.

The insanity of the situation is that all but one of us will survive the inevitable crash. We will survive but in what condition? And as hard as this flight has been, I cannot imagine how we will carry on after we bore into the ground. And it is approaching ever faster and filling my field of view. Unfortunately (or fortunately), I cannot see it clearly, because of the blinding rage and constant tears.

Stage Whiplash

~ thoughtsatlarge ~ Leave a comment

1808366

“There is not much sense in suffering, since drugs can be given for pain, itching, and other discomforts. The belief has long died that suffering here on earth will be rewarded in heaven. Suffering has lost its meaning.”                                                                                                                        Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

When Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote this in her groundbreaking 1969 book, On Death and Dying, she was, of course speaking of the patient, the person dying. In the book, she famously describes the “stages” the terminally ill patient goes through: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. The book was not meant to be considered a research study, a point she repeatedly makes. She also emphasizes that these stages may be skipped, occur concurrently or be returned to on the way to Acceptance. And yet we suffer. We all suffer.

As I watch my wife go through this process, I cannot help but realize how similar the process is for the caregiver, the family members, and the survivors. We, too, are passing back, through, over, and around these stages in our effort to understand what is happening to our loved one. My initial Denial and Anger had given way to Bargaining (“this is our new normal, we’ll take as much time as we can get”), when on any given day, I can slip easily into Depression and back to Anger only to wake up the next day after a dream in Denial. No seatbelt or ABS brake can prevent that whiplash.

I cannot imagine a day when I have reached Acceptance because Kübler-Ross also wrote:

 “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.”

Am I grieving already? Yes. Am I confusing the “stages” and grieving? Perhaps. All I know is that each day (and often times several times within a day) brings a new emotion for which I am unprepared, I thought I had made peace with, or I anticipated would bring me peace, only to find myself confused and lost again. And one of the worst emotions I carry is that I know that while I am suffering the whiplash of these stages, I am not the one dying, I am not the one suffering or actually going through Kübler-Ross’s stages of the terminally ill. As she also wrote, “Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.” Suffering has lost its meaning because we all still suffer.