2021: To Be Held
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| December walk with Carolyn |
Once again the world goes round, snow powders my yard, the heat runs pretty constantly, house lights are on by 4:00pm if not earlier, the dogs lie by the fire, and the chickadees call me out to fill their feeder and warm their early morning frozen bodies. Sunrises and sunsets, when they aren't hidden by the endlessly gray flat clouds, warm the landscape in soft pinks, golds, and the peach of our wedding flowers.
It's the last day of 2020. I've been listening to radio stations' "best of 2020" shows—many uncovering music that kept us comforted in this pandemic year. Likewise some of my favorite photographers (yes you Steve Mease, Kyle Tansy, and Michael George) have put together year end portfolios with stunning images of a most unusual year. I browse year end lists from other publications: Top 80 over 80, The Year Like No Other, What We've Lost...the list goes on and is remarkable in how life with global loss has become our normalcy.
Last year, even though I was looking forward to my upcoming exhibit, I was facing this year with dread knowing Jim's cancer was no longer treatable...hoping we still had more time, yet not even knowing the worst of what was to be. My singular wish then was "Continue" as expressed by Maya Angelou. I could not have imagined how precious that word actually was in light of this year of immense loss for each of us. Or for that matter how my fervent wish was to become the daily painful desire for the continuance of my former life, former self, and for Jim to walk back into the house as he did for the last 15 years returning from Rochester, a bike ride, or sometimes far away places like Europe, Turkey, or Japan.
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| One of our last bike rides 2019 |
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My 2020 has been deeply divided into two parts. In my grief I've struggled to reconcile the two sides.
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| Birthday wishes sent to Jim January 2020 |
The first half of the year was about being intimately and completely with Jim supporting his end of life: hosting family and friend visits, last ski days, planting gardens that I knew he could no longer eat from, trying to coax Jim to eat anyway, bringing in hospice care, maniacally protecting us both from Covid, constructing and supporting his final conversations with those he loved via Zoom (with my lovely BF Lisa), planning and carrying out his last wishes, and lovely, lovely hour upon hour just being together as he slept, me quietly coloring or reading with his head on my lap. As June approached and became July, Jim was put on oxygen and needed complete physical care. For a vibrantly physical and private man this was perhaps our most profound hours of love. It became our most tender of intimacies. I will forever treasure that one of his last complete sentences to me was, though I was bedraggled and worn from constant care taking, lack of sleep, and emotional exhaustion, as he gazed up at me from our bed with those beautifully kind hazel eyes that I had said "Yes" to 16 years prior, "You are so beautiful, you are so beautiful".
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| With friends Greg and Toni |
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| Preparing photos for his sons and sisters |
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| Playing Bocci with Kelly, Fiona, and Tegan just as the pandemic hit |
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| The dogs were constantly caring for Jim |
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| Us as death grew closer |
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The second half of the year, divided neatly in half as if by an executioner's ax, began after my return from Jim's funeral. Then due to Covid I was forced into quarantine for two weeks. My life changed in one day from one of constant care, love, touch, and companionship to one of utter isolation and loneliness. That was precisely as my mourning heart went into the shock of losing my beloved, leaving me unable even to care for myself. Once more since then I've been in quarantine for my stay at Peace Village—stronger the second time around. Daily though, I am now alone. I struggle with this. I think about how important human touch is to each of us, how especially for grievers isolation is like drinking a poison tonic reeking havoc on our bodies, minds, and souls. Luckily for me, valiant folks have reached in to pull me out, to break the isolation of grief and loss. Daily I try again to reengage in life, one step forward, two steps back as the old axiom goes. And yet...
Cathy asked me the other day, what I would have done had Covid not created this deep ravine. At first, I lost my words because what I had envisioned grief would look like before Jim died was so different from what I am actually experiencing. Before his death, I had known that I would dissolve into the paralysis of mourning because I had done so with the death of my parents not so long before. I just didn't know how much more profoundly and painfully his loss would impact not just my heart but every piece of my coping abilities, identity, and future. What I had imagined pre-loss is that I would look to volunteer in oncology, that I would visit family and friends, that I would create art and build a nest to carry me onward. None of that could happen in Covid and with the circumstances regarding my house and property, even creating art was prohibited as I scrambled to protect and rebuild our home.
As this year turns to the next, I have lost hope in the future, or perhaps it's my despair overtaking my mind. I believe that Covid will be with us for a very longtime and that it will take years before our little planet and its inhabitants will be saved and healed from its threats. On a more positive note, I can say that I have found a deep well of faith to draw from, that Jim's dying has opened up for me a hole in the fabric of life and death that I can peek through and catch glimpses of Continuance that I had not imagined. I remember how Jim said I was beautiful, how he saw the lights of eternity, how he saw his mother come for him, how he repeatedly reached out wanting to go beyond, and how he did it with such love, strength, and grace.
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| From our first to last days, Jim always melted my heart with the way he looked at me. |
Having my most fervent, futile, and human prayers and wishes unfulfilled (much in line with our five year old granddaughter Satori wistfully stating yesterday "I wish Grandpa wasn't dead' and "I miss school, I hate the Corona"), I am afraid to set forth my wishes for this coming year. Yet, to mark where my heart is, I do. What I miss the most, what I want the most is very simple: to be held and hugged and to do so in return. To be able to shake friends' hands and kiss their cheeks, to smile fully again and to embrace those I love. It's pretty simple and its loss, layered upon the loss of my beloved, marks this painful year.
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| I miss this, I miss my remarkable beloved |
I love you Jim forever +70 and around again.
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