You know how sometimes, if you can ignore something or pretend it away, you can stave off the inevitable?
Yeah, me neither. That doesn't, however, prevent me from trying.
Jem died at the beginning of November, peacefully, at home, in my arms. Just the daughter and I were here; the males in the family were over in the valley-- Rock Star at work, the son with his dad. It was almost anticlimactic, really. I don't understand sometimes why death, which is the second most momentous occasion in life aside from birth, seems to be a slipping away and then a sudden closed door, regardless of the violence or the length of the process leading up to it. I do know that Jem's dying and death that morning was beautiful and gentle and near perfect, and I think even at the time I recognized and was grateful for that.
Ma's cancer is this ridiculous uncontrollable thing that I am still trying to make sense of. I write that and it is a complete sentence, paragraph, story unto itself. Cancer never makes sense, does it? I am worried that she will be in this frame of hope and optimism for so long that she will put off doing what she wants to do because she keeps hoping that there will be another spring, another summer, another autumn. I want to shake her and tell her, "Live this. Right now. Recognize the preciousness of what you are experiencing every single day."
That's what I need to be telling myself, of course. I seem to have got myself caught in my own little perfect storm. Clarity will come, I'm sure. Something will make sense eventually. And I'm sure that my mind and my heart and my soul will eventually line up and start communicating, because there are some serious mixed wires in there right now. I look at all I have and know I should be grateful. I look at the raw beauty of this place and the way it chisels the people who live here, and I know in my head that it is amazing. But my soul doesn't recognize it. My soul looks into the chasm on the drive over the pass and thinks, "I could drive my car right off of that." And the depth of despair that is driving this subconcious feeling is so hidden and deep I don't know quite what to do with it, or how to fix it. I am sure I could go all metaphorical and realize that this desire to drive off the road is my soul's way of telling me it is time to jump into the chasm of the unknown. Mostly it just feels like depression, when it feels like anything at all.
What do you do when home isn't a place, but a person? My home-- my heart-- drives over the mountains every week to work. This suddenly feels like a long-distance relationship, and I have never been very good at those. Rock Star tells me nothing about us has changed, and this is necessary since my first job here didn't turn out to be all that the person who hired me said that it would. Not to mention that my body feels as though it is betraying me-- pain in my hands and forearms (nerve compression and apparently no-longer-dormant arthritis) that make it difficult to massage, the onset of perimenopause. And while Rock Star greets this with great humor and gentleness, I feel so very alone sometimes. Alone and at fault because this was his dream, and yet he is here only half the time.
I wish I were as gentle with myself as he is with me. I am grateful for his patience, for his support. But oh, how I miss him when he is gone, my chosen one. My heart and soul.
