A Family Remade

This meme popped up on someone's feed somewhere last night and it gave me a gentle punch in the gut. It's so true. I have been living with grief for a long time. It's been like the shadow cast by my desk lamp. It hasn't been a friend, but it has been a teacher. 

I was heartbroken when my cat Nuts died of diabetes; he was only six and it was 2004, and I cried hard, especially because he was the smartest cat I ever met. We could actually speak to one another, and he had a vocabulary of a couple of hundred sounds. He could very clearly say, "No." 

"Do you want this?" 

"No." 

He liked to eat the back end of my roast beef subs ("heros" for my NY friends) and he liked spaghetti, and he was very picky about his TV shows (seriously; he liked wildlife documentaries). Anyhow, he died fairly suddenly, and it's always nice to talk about him, but I'm getting a bit off-topic. 

The grief started back in 2004, but it didn't end. 2007 was the beginning of an end for me. On Halloween night of that year, Hope's younger son Bronson rolled an SUV on an icy road in Indiana. Blind drunk, he survived the crash, but the truck had stood up on its nose, throwing him down into the well under the steering wheel. His six foot frame was jackknifed double into that tiny space, and his spine was broken in seven places. He was rendered paraplegic, and for months hung between life and death. 

I remember that night too well. I had actually ended my relationship with Hope at the end of September; there was too much weirdness with her Flavor of The Week, and I was in no fit state to tolerate it at that point; but when she called, hysterical, screaming, weeping into the phone that Bronson was in a car accident, that he was dying, that she needed to go to him, I did the right thing --- She called at 4:00 AM, and by 6:30 she was on a flight out of Fort Lauderdale. You do what's right. 

The Flavor of The Week had blown her off. Bronson was in a coma for weeks. She stayed with him the whole time. She was already sick with the Polycythemia Vera that would kill her (even though it had not been diagnosed yet) but she fought off her own symptoms and focused on her boy. The next few years of strain and stress and sorrow probably accelerated her own decline. She died in early 2013, and Bronson himself died in September of 2013. At least she didn't have to live through losing that child. 

The grief became vast when my Dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's in 2007. I can't describe what that felt like. It was a death sentence pronounced, and every day I watched my father disappear a little more, a polaroid going in reverse. I suppose to some extent we were lucky. Dad remembered Mom and Stacey and I right up until the end, and he never went down into that vegetative darkness where he was on a feeding tube and lying in a fetal position. But when he died, my robust father weighed only 104 pounds. He was frighteningly cathectic, a walking wraith. It all started with a minor fall in the Alzheimer's facility where we'd moved him after my Mom could no longer care for him, and his injury (which was very minor) turned out to be not the thing that killed him, but the gateway to a kind of institutionalized neglect, where the hospital staff decided he was too much trouble to worry about. I learned that the pattern was common in hospitals with average patients much over eighty. They simply made a decision that THIS patient as opposed to THAT patient wasn't worth the effort. If he'd been a corporate CEO or an ex-President I am 100% certain he would have survived that crisis, at least for awhile. 

It all began to take its toll on me. In 2009, I suffered two herniated discs and ran my black Solara convertible up a palm tree one night when I fell asleep behind the wheel after a particularly exhausting day. I broke my back, and spent six weeks hospitalized and in rehab. Hope and I were living together again, and she looked after the cats and after me. I spent my 49th birthday in the rehab hospital. She brought a cake and balloons, and fell asleep in my bed, exhausted. She was already dying, but we didn't know it.

My Dad died on March 15, 2010. When I came home from his funeral on March 18th I found my cat Reba dead on my bedroom floor. Reba had been a "gezuntah" cat, a big and muscular girl. I always said that Reba would have been hanging out in a bar and playing pool with the guys with a cigarette dangling from her lips if she'd been a human. But I'd never seen a cat so obviously in love with a human being (that being me). She'd pet my nose while I was sleeping, and if I went out of town whoever I asked to look after my cats would tell me that they'd find Reba in the same place every time. Perched on the end of my bed. Petted, she'd hiss. She was MY cat, and only my cat. I had noticed that she was looking a bit thinner lately, but nothing to talk about. But during the weeks that my Dad was declining, weeks when I was rarely at home, she lost a lot of weight. One day I petted her and realized she was skin and bones, but my overwhelmed mind didn't have the ability at that point to process any more sadness and worry. A part of me kept thinking that maybe she wasn't eating much because i wasn't home much. I assume she had some rapidly progressing cancer. So the day I buried my father, I took Reba to the vet's to be cremated. Poor Reba. She didn't even get her own grief time. 

About six months later, my little calico, Jasmine died. That was also very sudden. Kidney failure. She'd had some dental problems which had been treated, and I think the process stressed her. She was only 12 (the same age as Reba), early for a cat to go. Jasmine was very special. She was the only one of my cats ever to have a litter (when she was barely out of kittenhood herself) and she never really grew to adult size. She'd given everything to her babies, Simba and Sylvester, adopted by Stacey, and they'd grown into two gigantic cats (Sylvester weighed more than 30 pounds). Jasmine never forgot what it was to be a Mommy cat. She was gentle, and even people who disliked cats liked Jasmine. I've written a lot about her over time. It's at Konrei Zen, on July 16, 2014. 

 

Jasmine died on September 10th of that hideous year of 2010. 

About six months after Dad passed away, I remember having a discussion with my mother about the dirt on the driveway. She was living alone, coping with my father's loss in ways I will never comprehend, and was fixated on the damned driveway, again for reasons I can't comprehend. She wanted to wash it down. I had once taken a header on the wet driveway, and broken a hand, and I kept telling her it was dangerous to muck around alone and to let the best driveway cleaning service in the world do its job. "Who's that?" "It's called 'rain', Mom." 

Of course, she didn't listen. One Sunday (I wasn't there) she tripped over the garden hose, broke her femur, and aspirated. She ended up with life-threatening pneumonia and on a respirator. Every day I traveled from my place in Boca to Delray hospital, and then to Select Specialty Hospital, a respiratory center, until she was out of danger and could breath on her own. I don't know how many weeks that was. It felt like months. I lived off M & Ms, Wendy's and Coca-Cola with three hours sleep a night for a long time. Mom recovered eventually, but she always used a walker after that, and she always had respiratory issues afterward. And so went 2011. 

 

My cousin Keith died suddenly in February of 2013, and Hope died in April, and I've talked about that many times. My Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2015, and died (after beating the cancer) on March 15, 2017, seven years to the day after my father. 

Just re-reading this post has been alarming. Did I survive all this? Am I still sane? How many tears have I wept? To say that the last ten years or so have changed me is an understatement. I'm first learning how much. But now, after this long digression, I've come to the point --- 

Grief is love, unexpressed and sorrowful, for the object of that love has been taken away (on the physical plane) and will not return (in the same form). But if you have a surfeit of love to give, and the depth of your grief is a measure of the depth of your love, then find someone or something, or many someones or somethings, to give that love to. Love is, as lawyers say, fungible. You can spread it around and it doesn't decrease or thin out, miraculously. 

Despite all the pain and loss, I am so so very fortunate, blessed, gifted, to have found people in my life to love. I know that my parents, my friends, that those who are gone, would never object to giving these people, old and newer, the love that has been gathering in the corners of my eyes and in the lump in my throat for so many years now. Not so long as they are worthy of that love, and I believe that they are. Just a week ago I realized that the hollow in my chest was filled for the first time in years.

Grief is love with no place to go? I have found places.

So, thank you, my loves. You may not know one another, but you know who you all are. You are my family remade.