Indecision

Before David got leukemia, I had a habit of driving down to the New Jersey/New York area regularly. I would make a loop, staying in the Bronx with Peter, Xiomara, and Andrew, then driving to New Jersey to be with my parents. On my way back home, I’d stop by and see my brother, Mike in his residential facility. With David’s illness, those trips stopped. Sometime after his death, I resumed the trips. Mom and Dad had both died, so the loop changed: I’d visit Mike in New Jersey, feed him supper, drive to Manhattan to have supper with R’el, then onto the Bronx to spend a few days with Peter, Xiomara, and the kids.

Mike died in January, a week after I had visited him in his New Jersey nursing home and made the loop. In February, R’el and Peter’s family went to Florida for February vacation, so I took the month off. Next week, Jim and I are going to take a two-day trip to the Bronx. My first solo trip since Mike's death will be in May. I’ve been paralyzed about it. It should make things simpler, to drop the trip to New Jersey. But it makes it more complicated emotionally.

Isn’t it an odd thing. Much like my indecision about which support group to attend, or whether to just go home, eight days after Mike's death, the question of how exactly to do these trips, the logistics, the when and where, overwhelm me. I emailed R’el with my dilemma and she cheerfully wrote back, suggesting travel options and offering to look into anything I needed help with. All of which I could have easily researched myself, but which seemed beyond my capacity.

A friend of mine at Compassionate Friends, my bereaved parents’ support group, said she thought she’d been holding it together until she looked at a restaurant menu and realized she couldn’t decide what to order. Yes, it’s exactly like that.

For our monthly family book group, we read and discussed Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Jim and I also watched the excellent 1993 film, starring Anthony Hopkins and Emma Thompson. The main character, Stevens, is a butler in a great English country house in the 1920s to 1950s. He is extremely proper and reserved: he values “dignity” above all else, including human relationships. It’s a heartbreaking story. At times of great emotional crisis, all Stevens can express, even to himself, is that he is ‘tired’. That’s how his emotions find expression. For me, indecision is the expression of my grief.