As Time Goes By

On Monday of this week, I awoke as any other day, and during breakfast I noted the date and remarked that we were into the final week of February, "finally". 

Something niggled in the back of my mind, something I couldn't quite name, but it felt kind of important. I felt "off" all day long. Yes, I did the usual things with my family. Yes, I looked after myself and my business. Still, something was ... I dunno ... missing.

Not until the phone rang that evening did I realize what it was. Monday, February 24, was the five-year anniversary of my brother Ben's death. 

Free photo from Pixabay

The caller - someone very dear to me - said he'd been thinking about Ben all day and he wanted to call me to let me know it. We had an amazing conversation for a good half-hour. It was wonderful to hear his voice again. 

As he was speaking, it occurred to me that I had almost forgotten this was the anniversary date. Okay, I HAD forgotten.

But my subconscious, even my body, didn't. 

And today, at the breakfast table, I remembered how much I missed him, how lost I felt without him - especially at first - and that even though I would not wish him back to the suffering he experienced every day because of his physical conditions, I truly miss his humour, his talent, his presence. I miss how we would talk about important stuff, how we would sit together and sing and play our guitars together - "jamming" we called it.

Grief takes many forms and each is valid. One never stops grieving a loved one, but the shape that grief takes might change over time. Let me be clear: time does not heal this wound. Time does not heal trauma.  But love?  Love heals. And unconditional love heals best.

I can remember Ben today and honour his memory and his talent. I can smile at the memory of his antics and his single-minded loyalty to me, his desire to protect me from harm, and his pride in me as his 'little sister' ... I can laugh at his old jokes and how he could make people laugh with just a facial expression. I can close my eyes and listen to him sing his songs with me. I can hear him play the guitar - in his inimitable thumb-and-forefinger style.

And I know that someday, perhaps not soon, but someday - I will see him again. And we will jam together. 

Ready for Christmas?

It's a question I hear every year. And I am not sure my answer is satisfactory, at least to me. But I say it anyway.

"Are you ready for Christmas?" .... I think people mean, "Have you gotten your Christmas shopping / baking / decorating done?" To that intention, I usually answer, "Almost," and I would be telling the truth.

Summer 2011 - all of the family

But part of me is never ready for Christmas. The part of me that remembers that it was Arielle's favourite holiday, the part that remembers how she'd fill her mouth to the bursting point with Christmas dinner and then try to talk (as a joke), the part that misses her and her quirks. That part of me is never ready.

All the preparation I do for the holiday seems bittersweet. It's not as bitter as it was when the loss was fresh, I'll admit that. But there is a certain wistfulness about it for me. I wish she could enjoy it with us, or that I could be aware of her enjoyment. For all I know, she IS with us every Christmas dinner - it happened once that I was aware of it - that first Christmas. That was SO special. I hug that memory to my heart often.

But people don't need me to bleed on them when they ask something that for them, is more like a "hello, how are ya?" kind of thing. So I say, "Almost," to their query about my 'readiness' for Christmas, and they can go on their merry way. Only those who know me best understand what my response means. I guess that means I have grown as a person ... the "old Judy" would have made them feel uncomfortable by being brutally honest and ruining an otherwise great day for them. I'm not like that anymore. People have a right to feel happy (or whatever they feel) even if I can't quite attain that level of joy myself. And here I go comparing happiness and joy - two totally different experiences. Happiness is usually (for me) dependent on circumstances, and joy speaks more of an inner peace in spite of circumstances.

And yes, I have joy. I can honestly say that as deep as the loss of losing Arielle is, it would have been a deeper loss never to have known her, never to have borne her. There was a time I couldn't get there because the loss hurt so much, but now - I think - I can honestly say that our lives are richer for having had her in them, even if her presence is only a memory now. And I do have the sure hope that one day, I will see her again - without the faults that made life with her less than perfect, that made us - and her - so frustrated. I look forward to building an eternity of experiences with that girl: the one we couldn't (and can't) help but love. Do I miss her? OH yes. Every day! And grief's shape has changed over the years to make space for me / us to honour her memory in little ways that would only matter to us.

So am I ready for Christmas?

Ummm, almost.  :)

Dearest Judy

 One of the hardest things about life is when the opposite happens, and we are forced (ready or not) to say goodbye. I am no stranger to separation by death. Yet every time it happens to a beloved family member or a close friend, it feels just as awful, just as violent - whether the person died in their sleep or in a tragic accident, or whether there was time to prepare or not. 

One of those incidents happened not long ago. A dear friend, unbeknownst to me, had a stroke and dropped out of view. When Judy was not on social media for 3 weeks, I began to get concerned and I contacted her family, who told me about the stroke. She was in the hospital. 

Judy had always been so strong, so independent, that we did not think much of the fact that she was getting old and it was getting harder for her to move around. We enjoyed her company, her laugh, her stories, her enjoyment of the little things, and most of all her love. When she would call me, she would identify herself as "Judy too," as my name is Judy. We would invite her to our house for Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. She and I would make "play dates" or as I called them, "aerie times", referencing our favourite metaphor, the eagle. She would invite our family to Dairy Queen and pay for our meals. She prayed every single day for each of us, as well as for her family and other friends. What a precious lady.

My husband and I went to see her on Christmas day 2023 when she was in the stroke unit; she was largely unresponsive, and her words slurred when she spoke, as if she was drunk. About a week later, we went in to see her again. This time she had been moved to a full-care unit where people go to recover. We were hopeful that she would get better. However, it struck me while we were there that they had put in a feeding tube through her abdominal wall into her stomach. She was totally dependent on them. I remember being grateful that the stroke seemed to affect her ability to compare the quality of her current life with the one she had been living prior to the stroke. We wanted to make our visits a regular thing.

The week after that, we got sick with some sort of flu and we didn't go to see her for fear that she would catch our sickness, which would not have been good. We were sick for about three weeks. 

During the time we were sick, Judy passed away. We didn't know. One day in early February, I went onto her wall on Facebook, and learned from a post someone left that she had passed, just about a month or so prior to her 80th birthday. 

I'd been keeping a Christmas card for her in my purse, which i wrote to her after our second visit. Yesterday I was looking for something else ... and I found it. Slowly, I un-tucked the back flap of the envelope, and slid the card out. The picture was of a cardinal. Inside I had written a short note to her from us, and I started it out with "Dearest Judy," as I often did on Christmas or her birthday. 

I froze. Floods of memories from before the stroke came to me, as if to comfort me. 

Try as I might, I could not (and cannot) be sad for her. In 2007, she lost her beloved husband Bob to a heart attack, and she often spoke of him with us, because we knew him from when they were married. We knew that they were reunited after all this time (this coming April 3rd it would have been 17 years). She is happy and pain-free for the first time in many years - head injuries from a previous relationship gave her Menière's Disease, affecting her hearing and her balance. She is finally free of it. 

No, I cannot be sad for her. However, I can be sad for me. I will miss this wonderful big sister of mine, who was technically old enough to be my mother. I will miss our long talks, our prayer sessions, our sing-songs, her vivid imagination, and so much more. I will miss how articulate and talented in writing she was, how spiritual and yet down-to-earth she was. 

And I can imagine her keeping watch over us all, in that "great cloud of witnesses" the Scriptures mention (Hebrews 11, I believe, but I could be wrong.) I can picture her joining our daughter Arielle's twerking class (Mother Theresa was her first graduate, haha)... and dancing with all her might. I can imagine her singing while Bob makes his heavenly electric guitar just wail ... and I know that while it seems like a long time here, it won't be long for her when she turns around and I'll be standing there, arms wide for a big hug.

No April Fool

 I'm not a great fan of April Fool's Day jokes. Most are pranks played at someone else's expense (a practice I consider cruel and spiteful), and so I weather the day hoping nobody does anything disrespectful. 

This year, nobody did. I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

On the evening of the next day, I got a telephone call from a nursing home out of province telling me that my mother had died. I checked my watch for the date. Nope. Not April 1st. 

The next few days, I worked with the funeral home director and with loved ones to plan and arrange my mom's funeral. It turned out better than I expected, and although the occasion was sombre due to the reason for the gathering, it was good to see everyone again, and I was surprised at how many showed up for the service.

In the time during and since the initial rituals of grief and saying goodbye, folks have been kind and tender. And I have been okay. Probably more okay than I would have thought. 

Free photo by alexman89 at Pixabay

As we prepare for her burial in a few weeks, I've done a lot of pondering about how I've spent the last several years trying to be heard and believed about my lived experience as her daughter; even though I love her, it was not an ideal relationship for many reasons. And I've finally realized that people are going to believe what they want to believe about her (and about me) no matter what I say or don't say. With that realization, there comes a bit of ... peace, I guess. 

We all have that part of ourselves we only show to those closest to us. And I know that my mom did the same. Most people viewed her as a saint (in the sense that she should have been canonized...) but nobody knew what happened behind the four walls of our little house. Nor would they have believed it. 

Nor does it matter any more. She understands now more than ever how I feel, how I felt, and all the multi-faceted complex emotions that implies. And somehow, I am starting to understand the relief involved in the little saying, "April Fool!" when the joke is over - that the horrible thing that someone did or said wasn't what it appeared to be after all. That the truth is now revealed and the cruel joke is over.  

She can rest. And I can rest. And from now on, there is no more April Fool.

Only the truth. Just knowing that is enough for me. 

Hashtag Fiona2022

Fiona - Hurricane Fiona - took her good sweet time roaring through Atlantic Canada last Saturday, September 24, 2022. The intensity of the wind was about 150 kph, or 90 mph... a Category 2.  I know others have had worse, but it's the worst this little corner of creation has ever seen. In a hurricane, there are mini-tornadoes that twist around such things as tree trunks and transformers and literally rip them apart, leaving them looking like some giant hand reached down and broke them like individual matchsticks. 

The next-door neighbour's 100-foot-high maple came out by its roots, crashing  over power lines on both sides of the road, its crown landing on another neighbour's lawn across the street. With it, it took out the power pole that his, our, and two neighbours across the street were connected to. Lines severed, pole smashed into four pieces. Fortunately the power went out a few minutes before that.  

Neighbour's maple -
its roots exposed for all to see.

Base of the power pole
shattered.

We were spared the tragedy that so many experienced: damage to their homes and vehicles. In both cases, there were close calls! 

But we lost a good third of the trees on our property, mature shade trees and evergreens alike. And in the wake of that kind of devastation, seeing that other still-standing trees were weakened so the next storm might bring them down on someone's house - perhaps our own - led to the decision to cut down a few more of them. And yes, we have been grieving the loss of these, our dear tree friends, tall sentinels of our home and providers of shade and privacy. 

Yesterday, as the sound of chain saws filled the air from power company crews and others working in the neighbourhood, I noticed something that hadn't been there before: there was more light in our back yard. Those shade trees, while providing protection from exposure, had been blocking valuable sunlight from reaching our backyard garden and fledgling apple trees. 

And since the storm had demolished our neighbour's privacy fence, the sunlight could reach his beautiful landscaping. 

But the most amazing thing for me was that I could look across the neighbourhood and see something I wish I could bottle and sell: the people who live in these houses were helping each other, pitching in and sharing information and resources, and reaching out to connect with each other.

Fiona took away.  She took away a LOT; there is no doubt of that. The topography of our landscape and of our communities is forever changed. Some things will never come back; others will take decades. But Fiona also gave. She gave us a renewed sense of community. She gave us friends we didn't know we had. She gave us compassion and empathy for each other. She spurred our generosity. 

If there is a light in this darkness, I think it could be that.

The Hollow Place

 Most everyone has at least one hollow place in their lives: a place that has marked them and left them scarred, empty, unfulfilled in some way, and aching. 

For some, it's the loss of a loved one. For others, it's a dream destroyed. For still others, it's a ruptured relationship. There are so many places like that. Even when the wound heals, there seems to be a hole left behind, a place that is irreparably damaged. 

I got to thinking about this as the 9th anniversary of our daughter Arielle's death gets closer and closer. This past July, she would have turned 30 years old. That birthday was a little harder this year than the last one ... for some reason. Grief has no rules, it seems.

Free photo by Ulrike Mai at Pixabay

About six or seven weeks before she died, she sent me a video of herself just ... being her. She talked about what she was doing in that moment, gave us a tour of her surroundings, and talked about missing us and loving us. I've played that video many times, more often lately - the sound of her voice is somehow comforting now.

And even though most times it doesn't "hurt" exactly to realize she's no longer here, there's still that hollow place, the place left over, the healed edges of grief. There's that empty feeling, call it the "new normal" as I've been known to call it, but in that, there is the knowledge that there is no going back. There is only moving ahead. There is only looking for ways to honour her memory. There is the acknowledgement - and the gratitude - that we had here here with us, even if only for a short time. There is the hope that someday, we'll see her again... someday.

But that hollow place remains. If I had chosen to live there, to keep the edges of that wound raw and torn, to torment myself over and over with the fact that I had experienced a loss that no parent should ever know (and believe me, the temptation to do that was real!) I would have been stuck there, unable to heal, unable to move on, unable to live life as she did: with zest, with joy. 

Yes, that hollow place exists. I don't deny it, nor do I deny that there is pain there sometimes, in the most unexpected of circumstances (like a smell, or a song, or a memory). I've learned to accept those as part of the never-ending process of grief, and I feel my feelings and honour her memory.

It didn't come easy. But it came. 

And I guess that if I had any words of comfort to you in your own hollow place, it's that the grief never stops BUT it changes shape. It heals as you move on ... and honour the empty place, as you let people love you in ways you can perceive. Moreover, it's possible to eventually help others with their hollow places because you know what it feels like, and you can allow space for them to feel what they feel and heal at their own pace. You can realize their hollow place isn't going to look like yours, necessarily, but the healing process is the same. Time is irrelevant. But it's LOVE that heals.

The Power and the Price of Love

 "Mom. They took Tux off the shelter site." She was crestfallen.

"Really?" I tried to look surprised and concerned at the same time. 

"I'm really glad I went to meet him in person."

"So am I sweetie. So am I."

What she didn't know was that I had gone to the site and put in an adoption form for this cat she fell in love with from his picture and his story on the site, right after we went in to see him, "to prove to myself," she had told me, "that there won't be a connection with me in person."

But there was.

He was about 4 months old, and he had been at the shelter for two months. He was so shy and fearful that nobody wanted him. But my cat-whisperer daughter saw something in him. And we had just lost our older cat - perhaps to an eagle, we couldn't be sure.

His back story was heartbreaking. He had gotten stuck in the fan-belt of the engine of a summering snowmobile ... at just eight weeks old. His mom couldn't get him out so she abandoned him there. A neighbor was out walking and heard his cries, so she set about trying to get him out. The rescue process was long and tedious, and many hours later, the woman called the PEI Humane Society. An Animal Protection Officer came and helped free him from the belt. But the damage was already done: with so many hands coming down from above, the pain of being stuck, and the sight of work boots and sound of raised voices, he was traumatized and was a black and white bundle of hissing and spitting. 

They put him in a crate to transport him to the shelter. Then they transferred him into a cage in the receiving area, where they assessed him. After his quarantine, they transferred him to another crate to go to the vet to be neutered. Another crate to get back to the shelter. Then transferred into his cage, then to another cage to be available for adoption. Nope. A foster family took him in (more crates to and from) as well as another kitten about his age. He and his foster brother lived with a couple of large dogs and a couple of cats; he liked another cat that was there. When he was four months old, they took him back to the shelter (yet another crate). No method of transferring him to a crate worked. It just added more things to be afraid of: blankets, towels, clothing, you name it. 

But then my daughter saw his pic and read his story. And she fell head over heels for him. We went to see him (as I mentioned, above) and she had resigned herself to leaving him there. So unknown to her, I got the adoption ball rolling, and the conversation happened, the one I shared at the first of this post.

A few hours later, she got an email. She opened it and started to read. It was from a friend of hers at the shelter, who was thrilled that this cat would go to her and who was congratulating her! When the realization came that he was coming to live with us, and that was the reason they took his profile off the website, she was so happy that she cried.

We picked him up the next day. Poor kitty - still another crate experience.  My daughter took him to her room, where she had set up a litter box and a feeding station, and spent the next few weeks doing nothing else but teaching him that people were okay, that it was safe here, that he would be fine, that he was loved and that it felt good to get petted.

We all changed his name to Callum - which means peace - and it soon got shortened to Cal.

I remember the first time she allowed me into her room to give Cal someone else to interact with, to teach him that it wasn't just ONE human he could trust. She told me how to sit, what to do, and how to talk. Within minutes, his terror ebbed away, and I had a tuxedo-clad kitty rubbing up against me and purring. He drooled, but we figured that he had been rewarded with food for letting people handle him, so he associated being stroked with receiving food. He never got over that habit. After a while, it was one of the endearing things about him, as he got to know us all, including the other cats and eventually, last year, the dog. (Well, okay, he never really enjoyed the dog, but you can't have everything.)

There was a one-sided 'bromance' between him and our black cat Loki, who was about six months older than he was. The first time he saw Loki, he ran right up to him and head-butted him so hard it knocked Loki into the wall!! Loki was taken aback, and gave one short hiss - out of surprise more than anything else! 

He never knew his own strength. The largest of our cats, he was the resident scaredy-cat. So he let Loki rule the roost. And he and Eris (our female cat, around his age) played together. They'd play chase, take turns running after each other, and sometimes Loki would join in. When he finally stood up to Loki (after Loki had been picking on him too much), the fur flew, but Loki respected him more after that. 

And so did the dog - he had to swat at Bullet a few times before the dog got the message.

Cal at about a year old, 2015

Cal was a big fella. He was gangly and big-boned, clumsy and a little lumbering, but his heart was as big as all Texas, as the saying goes. 

His favorite piece of furniture was our bed. He would sprawl out on the bed and lay on his side and his older (adopted) brother Loki would lay within three feet of him. They would stay there all day. And when they weren't there, they were on the cat tree (the ledge of which he is laying down on in the picture provided.) Being up high increased his confidence. He learned that he had a right to take up space, and we saw him slowly heal from his traumatic kittenhood. It was so inspiring to watch! "This," we would mutter, "is what love can do. So powerful. Just love. Pure and simple." 

Last Friday, he started to have a hard time breathing. We thought he was trying to cough up a hairball, but he was doing it more and more often. By yesterday morning, we knew we had to call the emergency room vet. They took us right away. Apparently (we had no idea) breathing problems are equivalent to an animal being hit by a car when it comes to deciding which cases are most urgent.

They calmed him with medications, did an X-ray, and then showed us what the problem was. His chest cavity was filled with fluid, which was compressing his lungs and making it really hard for him to breathe. We saw two little black blobs on the X-ray ... the size and appearance of prunes. The vet explained. "Those are his lungs. All this white stuff in the rest of the chest cavity is fluid. It's pressing in on his lungs and there's not enough room for him to get a full breath." So she recommended taking a good bit of that fluid out to make his breathing easier, and testing the fluid to see what the cause of his problem might be. Not all of it, she said, because the risk of a collapsed lung was more if they took it all out. So we consented. They gave him some intravenous liquids and put in some anti-nausea medication. We brought him back home around 4 pm. Dr. Marlene is AMAZING. Just saying.

That night, after he had found a hiding spot under my side of the bed, Cal managed to eat some tuna (his favorite), and drink a little water. He stayed there all night. The family gathered in the living room and talked. We all knew it was just a matter of time. If he got worse, we couldn't keep subjecting him to that crate and to the interventions of strangers.

There were many tears. Nobody got much sleep that night.

I checked on him in the morning. He had stopped panting, so I thought he was doing better. I petted him; he purred. His breathing was still too fast, but I went forward with my plans for the day, which included meeting a friend for an early-afternoon coffee nearby. I took my phone with me "just in case you guys need to go back to the vet with him." I made it clear that I wanted to be there too. All they had to do was call.

I got that call around 2:30, while I was finishing up coffee with my friend. "I'll meet you there," I told my daughter. 

When we got inside, I checked on him inside the crate (again with the crate!!)  He was in clear distress, panting open-mouthed and slavering. Strings of drool hung from the sides of his mouth. I saw panic in his eyes. The vet met us shortly and immediately took him back into ICU. They started an IV and put him on oxygen. 

That's when we had the "quality of life" conversation with the vet. 

The next hour or so was a blur. Lots of waiting for medications to kick in so he would be more calm. Long minutes of petting him and saying our goodbyes. Tears. Hugs. More pets. Then the vet came in with the needles - 3 of them (sedation, an agent to stop the heart, and saline solution to go into the vein after the deed was done to avoid blood leaking out when they took out the IV.) Everything was designed for maximum comfort, minimum stress for both us and him. The vet was great: respectful, compassionate, and knowledgeable.

While we were waiting for them to do the paw-print, the vet from the previous day, who had dropped by because she had 'forgotten' her notes, came in to see us and express her sadness at how things turned out. What a blessing! We had the unique opportunity to thank her for everything she did to ease his discomfort and make him as calm as possible. She had been his vet when he was younger, and that made it easier to talk to her about him, and to share memories ... the scene reminded me of a funeral home in a way. 

Yes. Yes, she cried. It meant a lot to her for us to thank her. I'm so glad we got a chance to do that. Vets don't get a lot of thanks. They should.

The strange face of gratitude

Almost nine days ago, on February 24, 2020 at 10:10 pm, my brother passed away. It was unexpected, as he had been getting slowly better with dialysis and his kidney function was improving. But one of his two catheters, the one that carried his bile out of the gall bladder, became infected and caused blood poisoning (also known as sepsis.) He became too weak to get out of bed, and to make a long story short, after police got to him, he was in bad shape and died later in hospital from septic shock.

I say this only to set the stage for all of the aftermath of his passing.

Free photo by Larisa-K at pixabay

My brother and I were as close as any brother and sister could be. He and I were like soul-mates. We thought alike, felt the same things, and had the same background. We "got" each other. Almost every day, separated by the miles, we talked for at least a half hour, sometimes as much as three hours. And we enjoyed ourselves to the full while doing so. It was a joy to talk to him, to watch him grow as a person, to share experiences and thoughts and hopes with him and he with me, to make plans together for the future, to talk of our love for God, for family, for animals, for nature, for music, and for life.

I miss him terribly. And time will not diminish the pain of that. Only Love can.

In the last few days, I have had the opportunity to look back and marvel at how many wonderful and miraculous things have happened. Leave alone the miracles in his own life: being cured of colon cancer in 2017, surviving two heart attacks (fall 2017 and winter 2019), and witnessing many other smaller miracles of the everyday. Just in his passing and the subsequent events arising from that, I have been able to be thankful for several things:

• He did not die alone and undiscovered. This was his greatest fear, and it was on a day when he was expected at a medical appointment (dialysis) that I finally got someone to check on him and knew enough to call 9-1-1.
• He was spared having to say goodbye to our mother.  He was anxious regarding how he would handle her death. She is still alive (although she has dementia), so he was spared this pain.
• He was ready.  He was finally moving toward feeling at ease in his own skin, and he was growing spiritually and so excited for the things he was learning about how to live life. There is no doubt in my mind that he is waiting for me on the other side, enjoying restored / perfect health and strength in everything that gave (and gives) him joy.
• My husband is retired, and he never left my side during this whole ordeal of going out of province, making arrangements, and greeting people I had not seen in decades (and whom he barely knew) - even though it is outside his comfort zone. That's love, and that heals.
• My daughter was able to stay home and look after the animals all week, and she, too, went outside her own comfort zone to come and attend the funeral with us. This is a huge deal for her, because the thought of losing people in her life makes her very anxious and panicky.
• My work situation is such that I was able to take the time off to make arrangements for his funeral, plus some time to decompress. My boss was unexpectedly understanding about the whole thing.
• Co-worker after co-worker ... each has expressed condolences on Facebook. They really do care. That blows me away.
• I was in the middle of taking a break from my studies when this happened. As a result, my schooling was not interrupted, and I didn't lose any marks for lack of concentration. My brother was so proud of me for taking steps to be a counselor. He rejoiced with me over every milestone. He would want me to graduate with full honors.
• The circumstances of his death, plus the communication with family and friends, re-established old ties long since given up for lost.
• The fact that he died in the winter meant that there was no committal service (graveside) and I was spared the stress and pain of seeing his body put in the ground, the hardest part of death rituals for me.
• The love from family and friends has been nothing short of miraculous and has even now already started the healing process.
• My psychologist is amazing. I saw her yesterday and poured out my heart regarding many of the above things - in detail - and she listened and supported me in my grieving process.

I could say much more, but I will stop there. All of those things (and more) has left me with something I never expected:  the strange face of gratitude in the middle of my suffering, in the process of my grief.  That does not mean that I am untouched by losing him. Rather, it means that I feel somehow honored to have been a part of his life for as long as he was here - with no regrets for having helped him as much as I could - and privileged to be a part of a circle of family and friends that, unknown to me, was there all along.

Gratitude is a strange response to grief. But here I am. Grateful. And grieving. But grateful.

Existence versus Life

As I write this, my mind and heart is a jumble of myriad tangled feelings, thoughts, memories, and pain – each competing with the other and yet co-existing and draining my strength as they fight their constant battle. This battle? This war? This is grief. This is love when arms can no longer hold the loved one.

Less than 48 hours ago, my brother Ben passed away from septic shock combined with pneumonia that he developed from an infection in a tube-site for his gall bladder. The tube was initially inserted in February 2017 and his surgeon hesitated to remove both it and the gall bladder for fear of him experiencing a coronary on the table. He had atherosclerosis (with a total of 3 stents in various heart arteries, for which he was taking a blood-thinner since the last heart attack on February 14, 2019.)  He also had insulin-dependent diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, nephrolithiasis, and chronic renal failure, and he was on dialysis three times a week.

In fact, that’s how I found out that he was in trouble. His dialysis nurse called me and said he didn’t show up for his Monday morning appointment. After trying to reach him, thinking he had overslept, I called a relative and asked them to go check to see if he was at home. His car was, but he didn’t answer. After that, I called 911 who patched me through to the RCMP. They went to his house, saw him awake on his bed through his (main floor) bedroom window, and he was unable to get up. They broke the door down and called the EMT people. That would have been around 3 pm or so. The EMTs came and got an IV started. They took him to the local hospital who assessed him and intubated him as he was having difficulty breathing. Then they ambulanced him to the hospital where he normally did his dialysis. They got him there around 7 p.m.  Three hours after he got there, he took a turn for the worse, and went into septic shock. The nurse called me and asked me or someone to come to the hospital right now. They tried to revive him three times but to no avail. At 10:15 pm, he was pronounced dead.

And that is what the doctor told me ten minutes later, over the phone, as I was getting my coat on to make the two-and-a-half-hour trip to see him. Such pain I had not felt in over six years since my youngest daughter died at the age of 21.

My night-time trip was cancelled, of course. I made plans to pack up the next day, and go to the homestead to assess the damage and the mess. I might have slept four hours that night. The next night, with the help of some Melatonin, I slept for six hours, although there was one interruption at five a.m. when Ben’s alarms went off to remind him to get up for dialysis. Hopefully, tonight will be better.

During my waking hours, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the difference between existing and living. For most of his life, Ben just existed. He grew up thinking that he was a nuisance to his parents. He bore the inner scars of physical and psychological abuse by his mom and abandonment by his dad who never stopped her, and the bruises of an older brother who criticized everything he did and regularly pounded on him. He bore other scars too: a marriage that lasted only 14 years before it ended in divorce, alienation from his sons, rejection from an endless string of women, as well as being used by women who befriended him only for his bank account. His was a lonely life. He battled the loneliness with his art: he could draw landscapes, animals, and people just by looking at pictures of things. He composed so many songs and sang them with me and with that older brother when we were all so young (I was 16 at the time, so he was 22 and the other brother was 26) – gospel songs that were so beautiful you could hear a pin drop when we were done.

Yet he suffered. I remember him coming home from senior high school and sobbing as he begged me never EVER to judge a man just on his appearance. I never EVER forgot his words. 

Yes, most of his life he was a melancholy man. He existed; he created beautiful things and appreciated beauty in nature and in people, but his existence was spent waiting for the next good thing to happen, and being disappointed time after time after time. 

After his divorce in the early 1990s, he moved in with Mom and Dad. He was there for Mom after Dad passed away, and he made sure he was there to look after things for her. Others would come in and see him lazing around, as they called it. He rested because he couldn’t breathe if he got up and moved around. He had so many ailments: his lungs, his kidneys, his heart, his gall bladder, his pancreas,… people didn’t understand and he felt a lot of condemnation come from them. Nobody understood him, he told me, except me. And sometimes even that wasn’t enough to tame the monsters of hatred and bullying that he experienced – whether real or imagined – from others.

Once, he even tried to commit suicide. He had finally learned how to love unconditionally, and his girlfriend stole from him and used the money to get high. 

A few months later that girl died … and it took him months to make peace with that.

Photo "Eye" by graur codrin at www.freedigitalphotos.net

But by that time, he had learned to live. To REALLY LIVE.

You see, in October 2016, Ben had been diagnosed with stage one colon cancer. And in January 2017, he underwent a six-hour procedure to remove the cancer along with a 5-inch section of bowel. And when he woke from that surgery, while he was still recovering in the hospital, he was listening to the radio and a singer Skip Ewing was singing, “How can he be a king? He’s just a kid.” And God spoke to him in his heart, and said, “Are you listening, son?”  And he responded, tears streaming down his face, “Yes, Father. I’m here. I hear You.”

From that moment on, Ben started to really LIVE. He had some setbacks and some heartaches (like the death of that girlfriend). And he was living on a very limited income, never knowing if he would need to starve in order to be warm, or to freeze in order to eat. It was hard. It was REALLY hard. But he was finally LIVING. We would talk on the phone – and I would let him listen to music that he liked – and he would cry tears of beauty and joy. He never forgot how God rescued him, miraculously let him live, and would look after his every need. Even if he misplaced his car keys. Or his needles. Or his wallet.

Last year, on Valentine’s Day 2019, he suffered a major heart attack. The paramedics found him and the emergency team had to put an intravenous shunt through his shin bone to give him liquids. He screamed in pain and then his heart went into atrial fibrillation. They had to use the paddles to get him back – and he was “gone” for a few seconds there.

He remembered those few seconds. He felt completely at peace. He couldn’t see anything, but he knew that he was loved, cared for, and safe. And from that time onward, he lost his fear of death. He lost his fear of living, too. And the living he had been doing up until then just intensified. He could not keep silent about God’s love for him. Anyone who knew him heard him talk about higher things, spiritual things, wonderful things like love and joy and peace and goodness. He touched so many people that way: people in dialysis, people in drug stores, people at church, in grocery store lineups, everywhere.

That’s not to say that he didn’t have questions. We would talk for hours at a time as he tried to understand some spiritual concept or other. We talked almost every day, for up to two or three hours at a time. (It’s a good thing I have such a good cell phone plan that includes free long distance!) But every time we talked, he would not hesitate to tell me what he had been learning, what God showed him or how He helped him find something he needed. Or met a need in his finances. Or let him talk to someone about his experiences in the Lord.

And now this week, I have been living in his house without him here. Memories galore. Yet it feels so surreal: not quite right, like he should be here laughing and joking with us, listening to YouTube videos, or talking about how wonderful Heaven is.

And yes, he could not let a conversation go by before he mentioned how deeply he longed to see his Master’s face, to walk the shores of Glory with Him, to hug Dad, and to jam with friends and family gone ahead.

And now he is there. And he is LIVING beyond his wildest imaginings – and he could imagine a LOT!!

Good night Ben. See you in the Morning. Keep a chair for me by the hearth, and say hi to Dad for me. I love you beyond measure. 

And … I will miss you. I’ll never forget what you taught me about how to live life in a positive way and not just exist expecting the worst.

Thank you. Thank you SO MUCH.