Eleven Months In

Two Years Ago

Tuesday, 9 July 2014
Day 22 of the stem cell transplant

David’s white blood cell count is down to 1.9 (reference range is 4.5 to 11), but the nurse practitioner isn’t concerned; fluctuations are to be expected. She does another bone marrow biopsy: David’s fifth. It goes better than the fourth, which David described to R’el as “the worst pain in America”.
And so we wait. Seventy-eight days of quarantine to go.

Tuesday, 12 July 2016
11 months since David's death

I take the T into Kendall Square and have a basil limeade with a new friend. I plan to take the T back, but decide to walk to the Harvard Square T station instead. Before I get there I decide to walk farther, to Porter. Before I get there, Alewife Station becomes my new goal. At the firehouse on Garden St, I bear left. Wrong! Instead of Alewife I end up near the Fresh Pond rotary. Cutting through the mall parking lot I take a steep dusty slope to cross over some railroad tracks. The extra sweat drips right into my eyes. They sting intensely for several minutes and it is an effort to keep them open. I pass by the station, having now walked four and a half miles, and resolve to continue to Arlington Center. Once there I eschew one bus stop after another and continue on to Lexington. I stay on the bike path for a mile past our house in order to complete a half marathon: 13.1 miles.
A half marathon on the eleventh monthiversary of David’s death.  A tribute to his life.

Sunday, 3 July 2016

My friend, Deb, sits next to me in Relief Society and says she finds her body needs 9 hours of sleep to heal. (She had hip surgery 7 ½ months ago.) She expresses mild frustration at that, but says it is what it is.
So, am I taking my body’s cue on healing as I sleep without an alarm or am I being lazy and self-indulgent? For today I’m going to go with the healing theory.
I return home from my three week vacation on Wednesday, June 30. Next day I’m ambitious, but by the end of the day frantic to tears with what I haven’t accomplished. Friday, my therapist guides me to realize that I have put my grief on hold for the three weeks and now yet another day with my overly-ambitious reentry plan.

I want to mourn. I’m scared to mourn. I’m in a more relaxed, calm place than eleven months ago; I fear going back into that very sad, helpless, painful place. The tears spring up while reading my current grief book: Rare Bird, by Anna Whiston-Donaldson. I feel relief in the tears.

My experience with Rare Bird is similar to my experience with An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison (a bipolar memoir: I collect them). Neither woman’s biography is anything like mine, but there is a fundamental resonance.
At eleven months into this, reading Anna’s description of the early days after the loss of her son helps me process mine.

Thursday, 7 July 2016

I’ve decided to take July and August off. What does that mean? I’m not even sure; I’ll discover that day-by-day. What I’m looking for is the expansiveness in my life that I’ve felt in the last four days. The luxury of reading and writing, of being comfortable spending time, hours of it, nurturing my creativity. I want to take a break and really experience the grief in this last month before David’s first death anniversary. I want to give myself permission to grieve, to feel, to move more slowly and live more deliberately.

Friday, 8 July 2016

What does healthy grief feel like? In Rare Bird, Anna Whitston-Donaldson suggests leaning towards grief rather than away from it.

Saturday, 9 July 2016

As I cook for our weekly Sunday supper (we usually have about twenty people here), I listen, for about the twentieth time, to the second act of the new Broadway musical Hamilton. When the Hamiltons’ son, Phillip, dies and the company sings “Going Through the Unimaginable”, I cry every time. Grief at losing our son. Grief at losing a young adult son, cutting off what could have been a long and bright future.
I listen to the CD twice more. The third time, I move from the kitchen and sit in the family room, letting my body shake with sobs.

Is it wrong for me to play that song over and over? In a month we’ll experience the difficult first anniversary of his death. I want those feelings out in the open, to face them, embrace them. It’s an internal battle for me. I’m the one who is still expecting me to be ‘over it’ and ‘stop wallowing’ by the first year mark. Lean toward it, Mary.