The Rules of the Story

A little over a week ago, the younger brother of one of my best friends was killed in a hit-and-run accident. From what I know so far, my friend's brother was out on his motorcycle when someone plowed into him at high speed, and then drove off. No rhyme. No reason. It just...happened. On the one hand, it's not been easy being there for my friend. Death is always hard to deal with. A sudden death like this pokes at some of the stuff about my wife's death, which had seemed to come from out of nowhere as well. And yet, I'm glad I've been able to be someone he can talk to, can safely vent to. I remember having the thoughts come up I wasn't sure I could share with anyone else, worrying about how they might react. I also remember how much of a relief it was to be able to say those things out loud to someone who wouldn't get critical or judgmental or try to tell me what I should do or think. Far too often, it's underestimated just how much having someone willing to accept you can mean, especially at times like that.

One of the things he mentioned that has been hard for him is the idea that some of the rules got violated. I'd written about that before, but there was a different spin that came to me about it. See, most of who we think we are is the story we create for ourselves. We don't recall the past exactly. We turn it into a story so it can be understood and encoded and so other events can be put into context and assimilated into it. The same's true with the future. We make up a story about how we think it's supposed to go...or sometimes how we're afraid it's going to go. Either way, we understand the past and the future as our story.

It's a story in which we're the hero. Oh, sure, we have plenty of people around us that we look up to and respect and want to be like. We talk about them being heroes to us. But, in our own stories, we are the hero...period. As we grow up, we learn certain expectations of how the story is supposed to go. Sometimes we're clear on them, and sometimes they're lurking in the shadows of our minds, hidden yet still holding tremendous sway on how we understand events and expect them to unfold. For example, I don't know anyone who has the rule/expectation that when we get married, it's supposed to be good for a couple years, then go downhill, and then one of us bails out so we can go find someone else. That's not the rule...at least not for marriage. Same with having kids. Nobody figures when they have a child that the rule is they'll be happy and healthy and then struck down by an accident or illness after 15 or 25 or 45 years. That's not the rule we learned.

When something huge like this happens and violates the rules, it shakes the very foundation of how we understand ourselves, our lives, and reality. All of a sudden, the things that we were so confident of, often to the point of never before having considered they might not be true, lose that immortal credibility. It's like seeing one who we thought of as a god suddenly dropped to his knees, whining and drooling from a sharp kick to the ol' family jewels. Sure, he might get back up and prevail, but the belief in the invulnerability of that god's been shaken. Or like seeing the sun suddenly pop up in the west and zip across the sky to set in the north. Even if it only happens once, it takes an idea that'd been so solid as to make the hardest rock look like heated marshmallow and puts a crack into it. And it brings up a hideous question:  HOW MANY OTHER RULES AREN'T QUITE SO?

For me, it's shaken a lot of those things up. The one that comes immediately to mind relates to getting married again. How do I know she won't leave me again, whether it's for someone else or by ending her life? How do I know that, even if I put everything I can into making the relationship work well, that she will do the same? The simple answer, which still sometimes makes me feel sick, is this: I. DON'T. KNOW.

The only rules I can look to that seem that solid anymore are the ones I choose for myself. What kind of man do I want to be? How do I want to treat others? How do I handle my mistakes? What do I choose to believe? What do I hold to be important? That's about it. The rest have fallen prey to Heisenberg, to a greater or lesser extent they hold uncertainty to them.

In the book Escape From Hell, the story is an extension of a re-telling of Dante's inferno. This time, the main character Alan isn't the one being guided out. He's the one who's gone back to try to guide others out. On the way, he's confronted by doubts about who he was, how he'd judged others, whether or not he was making a difference. The only rule he was able to hold to was needing to find out if it was true that anyone could get out of Hell. Not that everyone should get out or deserved to get out. Just that they could, if they were willing to do and change what they had to. Along the way, there were heartbreaking losses of those who were willing to struggle free of their torments, only to fall prey to other situations that dragged them in and held them bound just as firmly, if not moreso. In the end, it came down to his own rule for himself, that he would stay to find out if it was true that any soul could be redeemed...if willing.

I still find myself, my thinking, swayed by the old rules. They push on how I SHOULD look at things, how I SHOULD expect them to go. It's scary to have to remind myself that those old rules aren't the bedrock principles I'd believed them to be. And yet I can't shake the feeling that, if I don't release my tendency to clutch at and cling to them, they'll keep me bound in my own Hell. Whether made of velvet or steel, chains are still chains.

And I want to be free.

Signs of Healing

In the last week, I've had two things happen that pointed out to me that I've made more progress than I might have thought. One had to do with a co-worker talking about how her marriage isn't going so well. Some of what she talked about, specifically feeling distanced and alienated and estranged from her husband, reminded me a lot of how things were with me darlin' wife, especially in the last few years. It was hard to hear her talk about that. And it wasn't easy to let her know that I understood and tell her about some of what I'd gone through that was similar.

The other has to do with the sudden death of the younger brother of one of my best friends. It was a hit-and-run accident, one of those things no-one saw coming or ever expected. Not surprising, my friend is hurting right now. It doesn't help having to plan out the memorial and figure out how to get to where his brother lived and having to figure out what to do with his stuff....and be there for other folks around him, too. I feel kind of helpless to do much for him, given that he's several hundred miles from here, and the city where his brother lived is just as far in the other direction. I'm glad I was able to at least provide a reality check and let him know that the stuff he's thinking and the reactions he's having are pretty normal for an insane situation like this. Again, it reminded me all too well of the time after Ariel died when all that stuff had to get figured out. And it also makes me grateful for all the people that were around me to help me through it, too. I still can't imagine that I would've made it through that without their help and support.

See, what these two things have shown me is that I am doing at least somewhat better. Even though it hurt to hear what they're going through, I was able to stay in the conversation with them. I was able to share some of what I've been through and thought and felt and done...the good and not-so-good. And though it stirred some things up for me, it hasn't left me a raw, shredded wreck afterward. Sure, I don't feel great. I'm not kicking my heels or cheerfully running to the next tasks on my list. But I'm not lost in my own maelstrom of anger and fear and confusion and sadness and resentment and grief, either. I'm bouncing back from that stuff faster...a lot faster. I take that to mean I've done some healing, that I've built up some strength and resilience over the last two-and-a-half years. And I'm good with that.

I'm not done on my journey. But I can see where I've made progress. And if I can help others along their way, too, then it gives some meaning to all this beyond just doing it for my own survival.

And maybe it's helping bring me darlin' wife's spirit some peace, seeing that I am healing up, that she didn't utterly destroy me when she ended herself. I'd really hope so.

Ending A Life

When me darlin' wife left this world, we had two cats. The younger one was one she'd bought at a local pet store that we really liked. He was special, as she'd previously sworn she'd never get another kitten at a pet store. She'd rather go to a shelter where there were plenty of perfectly good cats who were in much more dire straits and more desperately needed good homes. And yet, on this one day, somehow this little guy charmed her right away. As soon as I saw her point out to the clerk the one that'd caught her attention, when he brought him out and handed him to her, when the kitten just draped the upper half of him onto her shoulder contentedly....I knew we'd just gotten another cat. She named him Zen, and he's still with me now.

The older one was one we'd found as a tiny, timy kitten in the back yard about a year after we moved into the house. There used to be feral cats in the neighborhood, and our best guess was that a mother cat had moved her litter and somehow forgot this last little one. She was young enough when we found her that the vet wasn't sure she'd survive. Her eyes weren't open yet. At the time, she weighed about four ounces and was about half the size of my hand. We named her Moses because she was a foundling (and we didn't realize at the time that she was really a She). When we learned her gender, we just nicknamed her “Mo.”

Mo was my cat. Oh, she liked both of us well enough, and Ariel loved her, too. But she was my cat. At night, she'd sleep next to me. When it got to the point that Ariel & I weren't sleeping in the same room much anymore, Mo would almost always come and curl up next to me. She'd let me brush her out or clip her nails much more easily. And she got to be a big cat, too. At her heaviest, she weighed in at about 18.5 pounds, and it didn't feel like it was flab, either. It just seemed that she was a solid lump of CAT. When she'd come to greet me when I came home from work, it would always warm my heart.

Mo ended up developing diabetes. I've had to wonder if it had some to do with how we'd fed her from the get-go. The vet said it also could've been a genetic predisposition; there was no way to tell. But it was there. For awhile, it was controllable with insulin shots, which she accepted without any crying or complaints or resistance. For a time after Ariel's death, it even seemed to go into remission. She did OK without the shots, and I was just careful to feed her good food and control how much she got. But then the symptoms came back. And they kept getting worse, despite going back on the insulin and going up to some kind of scary doses. Toward the end, the vet said that there was more testing we could do to see if it was being aggravated by something else, but that it'd be expensive and honestly kind of a long shot. Not to mention there wouldn't be any guarantee that, if there were something else found, that it'd be something that could be corrected or at least controlled. And all the while, Mo was having a harder time getting up or walking around. The functioning in her back legs was failing. She was also loosing control of her bladder, which was making for some pretty spectacular messes. It was horrifying to realize that there were times her urine had gotten through the cracks in the wood floor and showered down on parts of the basement.

So about 10 months ago I had the vet put her to sleep.

I was very torn about it. On the one hand, I desperately did not want to lose someone else I loved. I'd just lost my wife; wasn't that enough? I didn't want to imagine what it would be like to come home from work and not have Mo there to greet me. Or to feel her flop down next to my calves as I was trying to sleep. I didn't want to have to deal with another major change that would require an additional painful period of adjustment. Hell, I didn't want to go back to having crying jags again. I know it's OK to cry and that sometimes it helps to get the feelings out—and yes, it's OK for MEN to cry, too—but I have never liked the experience of it.

And at the same time, I could see that Mo was suffering. It was hard for her to get up. It was hard for her to walk around. She couldn't jump up onto the couch anymore. She had to be lifted up, and it was hard for her to jump back down. Hell, she was having a hard time getting up onto the futon I sleep on, which was only about at her head in height. When she'd end up peeing on the floor somewhere, she looked so horribly embarrassed, at least at the time. She was as affectionate as ever, but her energy level was just not the same. I know she still loved me and was glad to be around me, but it was getting harder and harder to see the things that were making her unhappy, too.

It finally came down to it that I couldn't justify avoiding my own fear of more pain and loss by making her suffer to keep her around. I had to let her go. And one of the hardest things to accept about it was that it was as much for ME as it was for her.

Doing that changed some of how I looked at my wife's suicide. Oh, I still felt angry about it. And I still thought (and currently think) that she hadn't done all she reasonably could have to get help for what was going on for her. At the same time, it also gave me a glimpse of what it's like to see suffering going on that doesn't seem to have any good end to it...where there's no hope seen to be grasped. The details and circumstances are different, and in some very important ways. I can't help thinking, though, that the feelings are much the same. And when those get strong enough, they end up running roughshod over reason.

I still miss Mo, in some ways more than the person me darlin' wife had become at the end (and, boy, is THAT a bitch to have to admit!!). But I am grateful for the laughter and love she brought into my life...and the final lesson 'n' shift of perspective she provided when I let her go.

Thank you, Mo.