There is a way down that I wish I had not found
Click to viewSometimes, when someone asks me how I'm doing, I just want to point them in the direction of this song.
If you don't like the song, or the performance, that's okay. I didn't post it for you, because there are very few people I know who really understand how this feels. Coming up on the third anniversary of Dan's death, I began to think that there was simply no way I could ever accurately describe how it feels to lose the one you love to anyone who has never experienced it. Worse yet, the experience of every person is different, sometimes radically, and we all handle it in our own own way, and we all experience different kinds of waves of the same sorts of feelings and thoughts. So while you can generally get it, your mileage is gonna vary.
In three years, nothing has ever come as close to describing my personal experience with the loss of my husband as this song and the way it is performed in this video. As one commenter puts it: "delicate chaos".
And that's been my life for the last three years: I've been in pieces.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not covering my head in a blankie and weeping in the corner, or hugging a picture frame every night when I go to bed. It's nothing like the melodramatic depictions of grief in films. And it's also been three years, so by far the worst of it is behind me, and I'm moving on.
But you don't understand, and you won't understand, and you can't understand, and you never will until the man (or woman) you love is suddenly ripped from your life, never to return. And I'm not talking about losing your mom or dad, or a sibling, or a best friend, or a relationship break-up, or an extended deployment overseas, or anything of the sort, because these things are just not the same. I'm talking about capital-D Death, which to my knowledge is still 100% fatal and permanent, and rather indiscriminate.
I'm not saying that I'm better than you, I'm just saying that you will never understand how it feels until it happens to you, and I hope that it doesn't, but the reality of it is: it will. Eventually. Is that nihilistic? Is it fatalistic? I think it's just reality and truth. Everything dies, whether we want it to or not, with the sole possible exceptions of Sarah Palin's political shelf life, Donald Trump's combover, and John Boehner's tan.
And the lyrics to the song are so true for me, so real, that this song, with all of its delicate chaos and vocal wolf howls, shocked me the first time I heard it. The album it appears on is also an emotional anvil to the face, one drawn back and repeatedly slammed again and again, just to drive home the point. Nearly every song on this record speaks to me in such a direct way, it's as if singer/songwriter Conor O'Brien (who, and let's be honest, looks like he's about 12) reached into my head and pulled out all of these elements and then forged them into songs.
And I also don't make this post for attention, or sympathy, or anything of the like. It's on my mind, and I'm going to talk about it. But it isn't like I'm dragging my soppy sobby ass through life wallowing in grief; I dragged that cross across my own personal Golgotha twice already, and I gotta tell you, it sucks. So don't worry that I'm lying in the tub with a Gilette safety razor on the lip of the tub and a case of Nyquil, because that ain't the case; it never has been, and never will be. Suicide is the coward's way out, and I don't have the guts to do it.
But I'd be lying if I said it didn't hurt. Sweet Christ on a cracker, it hurts. It hurts every time I think about it, which isn't every day anymore (thankfully), or even every other day. I try not to think about it, but sometimes things will just trigger it. I can still feel the nausea and the cold chill whenever I think about the phone call in which the hapless nursing home nurse who did not speak English all that well had to tell me in her thick Mexican accent "I'm so sorry, your friend, he is gone". (And when, by happenstance some months later, I saw her in Wal-Mart, where she pulled me aside after we'd both checked out and cried and put her hand on my arm and gave me details I didn't want to hear, and yet needed to hear.)
I can still feel my stomach landing somewhere around my feet when I walked into Dan's room at that nursing home and saw him lying on the bed in the opposite direction one lays in a bed, and thinking to myself wow, that old bullshit cliche is true, he really does look asleep. And I remember trying not to look at the orderly leaning against the window--invading what was an incredibly private moment--as I cried and cried and hugged Dan's body, which was cold, and his lips were blue, and his eyes were closed, and I put my head on his chest and ran my fingers through his beard one last time. He was gone, and the body is just the reminder--and the remainder. It's what we leave behind. I don't believe in ghosts or spirits or souls or heaven or hell or god or the devil, so for me, a great light in my life had simply gone out, and this physical thing was what I was left with, empty and heavy, a big sack of meat and water that once held the contents of my the man I loved and called my husband, even though Americans are pricks and we couldn't legally be married.
And I remember feeling suddenly very alone, and very empty, and very relieved, and then very guilty for feeling relieved; relieved because I'd been playing nursemaid for nearly two years, and did it for a year before that, and 6 months before that, and then before all of Dan's problems I dealt with all of Jeff's problems, and while I loved both of these men with all of my heart, nothing sucks more than having to pour your heart and soul and energy into taking care of someone who can't help themselves. It saps you of all your strength and will and you forget yourself and become this other thing that exists just to make sure that the person you love is okay.
But you do it because you love them, and if you cut and run at the first sign of a problem, well, you're a cunt. Plain and simple, you're a selfish douchebag who should be run over by a train so long that there won't even be anything left of you for the firemen to mop up and squeegee into a bucket.
And I also felt relieved for Dan, because he had been in so much pain for so long, that at least he was no longer in any kind of agony, and, in a weird way, he got what he wanted. When I first met Dan, he was all emo, and wanted to paint his fingernails black, and was all into Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails. There was an awful lot of emotional pain and anguish in his life, and he told me one time that he knew he would die before he turned 30. When I asked him why, he said he didn't know, he just had this feeling. And I remember saying to him that was bullshit, and not really a great lead-in to starting a relationship, because he was 25 at the time and, well, 5 years of shelf life isn't so hot, and that he probably just felt that way because of his parents and how they treated him.
And then I was angry, because we made plans, goddammit, and he was supposed to get better, and he was so fucking close, and our life was going to be better, and get better, and we'd already been through so much together: 11 years, friends dying, my father and my brother dying, his piece of shit parents, money drying up, jobs vanishing, layoffs, being kicked out of where we were living (twice), Dan fucking up, me fucking up, crazy asshole psycho mind game playing douchebag room mates from hell and all a whole fuck of a lot more. It was supposed to be getting better. And then it didn't. And then my life got a whole lot suckier.
But I got over it.
But what I haven't gotten over, what I can't get over, is when I think about that moment when the blood clot lodged in Dan's heart. Because I know that's what happened, even if his shithead parents just wanted to get him in the ground as quickly as possible and were happy with the concept of him just having a big ole fat guy told-ya-so heart attack, so that his twat of a mother could feel smug and comfortable with the shitty way she treated him his entire life. But I know that's not what happened. I know that he got violently dizzy, and then threw up all over the makeshift desk I put together for him so he could use his computer and play WoW and City of Heroes, and then he couldn't breathe, and the staff gave him oxygen and called 911, but buy the time EMTs got there, he was pretty much gone, and they couldn't revive him, because his heart stopped, because there was a chunk of crap that had been floating around his bloodstream for a few weeks because he had that procedure, and even though we made that decision together, I still feel it's my fault.
Because I was the caretaker. Because I told him that procedure was his best and probably only hope for any kind of image of his back for at least six months, or however long it would take him to lose 50 more pounds so he could get a MRI. But we made that decision together,and I didn't hold a gun to his head. In the end, he made the call.
When I think of how terrified he must have been, and how horrifying it must have been, and how alone he must have felt, because I wasn't there when it happened, and they couldn't get a hold of me because I forgot my shitty plastic Fisher Price cell phone at home, it hurts so fucking much. So he was surrounded by strangers and probably confused and probably just out of his mind afraid. Because things were supposed to be getting better, and this was decidedly not better, this was pretty much the king of bad hoodoo. And he was only thirty five goddamn years old.
So sometimes, when I get asked how I'm doing, I just want to say: For a long long time, I've been in pieces. In the corner of a room, in an endless afternoon. And there is a way down
that I wish I had not found: you just split yourself in two; one for them, and one for you. All the words I mean to say, they never come out the right way. And there are things that I could tell you, but they'll never come out the right way. And there are sides that I could show you, but they'll never come out the right way. Cause I've been in pieces.
But it'll be okay. I'm okay, really, it's just that sometimes it hurts, and sometimes it hurts really bad. But I don't dwell on it, except in those moments when it overwhelms me. But, on the whole, despite the best efforts of politicians, terrorists and my own memories, life is good. Not great, but good. And I'm fine, it's just that I've been in pieces, and I think I've found them all, but it takes time to put them all back together.
The problems is, you never get them back together in the same way they were arranged before, and so you're just not the same person you were before. Things are... different. They just are, and you can never, ever be that person again.
Also, I don't want to "get over" Dan's death, because getting over it implies that it had no meaning, and that he had no meaning, and that he as a person was in some way not worth knowing, or loving, or remembering, or being hurt by losing him. And none of those things are true.
How do you get over losing the one you love? You don't. You learn to fucking handle it and get on with life. You just suck it up. And every day I get up and do it all over again.