Blind Spots and Soup

I was talking with one of the widows in the local group a couple of days ago. The one thing I've learned well in this whole nightmare is that it is a VERY GOOD IDEA to call your support folks when you're not doing well. Even if it's just to vent, it's a good thing. You don't need to even be able to clearly articulate all of the myriad threads and interwoven dynamics that are resulting in a sense of malaise and dysphoria (OK, I think my thesaurus just abdicated....). You sometimes only need to say that you feel miserable and have someone else hear it out.

This particular time, I was dealing with feeling lonely and sad and scared. What was really bugging me about it was that I couldn't put my finger on why. I've been pretty used to having a decent handle on understanding what's going on with me. It doesn't always mean I can do much about it; often, sadly, it has nothing to do with me doing much about it, at least at the time. But it's less crazy-making, at least in my head, when I have some sense of what's going on. This time around, that was not happening, and it was making me even more edgy and anxious and irritable and prone to having four-letter conversations with God while standing on my porch smoking a cigarette.

Having a little bit of sense left, I got ahold of, as I said, one of the local widows. She was one of the first I'd met out here. While there are lots of differences between us, I've always felt we've been able to relate quite well. I figured she'd be a good one to talk to, just to be able to put it out there and have someone say that they understand, that it makes sense to them, that I don't sound insane.

So my jaw hit the floor when, about three minutes into the conversation, she told me what she thought was going on, and it felt right.

I'd known we all have blind spots. Expecting we're all going to understand ourselves perfectly is about like expecting someone to be able to see the back of their own eyeball unaided. At the same time, the idea that I've had a good handle on myself (relatively speaking), has been a comfort. It's helped me get through the last couple-years-and-then-some. And, to be honest, there's a part of me that tends to think that some of my inner workings aren't the easiest to understand. That they'd take some explaining. So it was stunning and mind-numbing and humbling to have someone else, someone young enough to potentially be my daughter (hey, I could've started that early!) nail what's going on with me that quickly & easily. The shorthand for it? I want my mommy to come and make me soup.

No, not literally. I mean, not that I'd mind getting to visit with my Mom, and she makes some killer soup. But that was the shorthand. The more complete explanation is that I'm going through some scary stuff. I've had to go to a cardiologist. My heart isn't beating regularly. The last test is on hold as the cardiologist and the insurance company battle it out to see how much of it I'd be expected to pay for. And I'm still kind of floating in limbo with regard to just what the Hell it is, how serious it is, and what can/should be done about it. And that's all scary.

My friend made the point that, even 2.5 years out from my wife's death, I'd had a long time (almost 15 years) to get used to having someone there on a regular basis. Even folks with mental illness can pull themselves together enough and set aside their own crap enough when someone important to them is in crisis. Admittedly, that doesn't always last long. But at least they do serve as someone who's there. So when something like this that's serious and scary comes up, it both highlights the absence and also triggers the immediate, reflexive wanting to find that person who we've gotten used to being there...and kinda makes us flip out when they're not there. She compared it to the first time someone's gotten sick after going away to college. Sure, you might have friends around you could call in a pinch, but deep down, what you really want is for your mommy to come and make you soup.

The moral of today's story is twofold. 1) We all have blind spots. Having done lots of work on yourself helps reduce those, but it also, in some ways, makes them trickier and more intense. It gets easier to think they're not there because we've already figured ourselves out. And this kind of deep loss and pain and grief just aggravates all that. 2) No one makes it through Hell and out without some guidance. The angels who come to point the way can take a lot of different shapes and appear in a lot of different ways. But ultimately no-one does it all on their own. And there's nothing at all wrong with asking for or accepting help. Otherwise, it's far too easy to get lost in some of the bewildering and bewitching domains we have to travel to get down and out.