Recovery to Equilibrium

 Well, it's been a hot minute, hasn't it?  

The thick layer of dust that has settled on the metaphorical controls here belies that everything still appears to be in good working order.  Though I'm slightly surprised that the blog hasn't collapsed into a singularity of spam comments in my absence. Surveying the ruins, it appears that even those lowest forms of life run out of sustenance when the ecosystem collapses.  I imagine that given a device that could see back in time 65 million years to the Chicxulub event, you would have witnessed those non-avian dinosaurs spamming about "My sister beat the asteroid dust through the power of prayer and herbal supplements!" were the last to die off.  I am convinced we will eventually find the fossil evidence of this in some tangled bone pile in the Montana badlands. 

I was going to wait until 10 years had gone by since Ann's departing to make a post here, but 9 seems more than sufficient.  As I'm writing this, I have trouble believing that there are many, if any of the people who followed Ann's journey that are paying attention any longer.  However, if you are then understanding that each and every one of you was precious to her, and the few warm comments that got left on some of the darker posts made it easier to bear the weight of the burden.  I certainly can never thank you enough.

I have noticed in the recent past some other less decorous interests in the material here.  Accordingly, I've considered shutting it down, but my hand has always stayed because Ann wanted this to be kept up as a source of information for other blood cancer or BMT patients.  Per her wishes, I will not disturb anything.  Although now I struggle to see what a patient would get out of this.  The story of a Husband and Wife in increasingly tragic circumstances?  Dry dissertations on facts gleaned from countless hours in the M D Anderson medical library?  How to get a junior over achievers’ badge in hematology-oncology by reading Blood Journal and NIH studies?  

A better takeaway would be how some impossible person walks into your life one day and arrogantly chooses to rearrange it a little.  And you let them, then they do it a little more, and you do it back to them, and suddenly you find you are both intertwined and deeply in love with each other.  There is real a deep raw electric force when both of you unify to solve a problem or achieve a goal.  Nothing can't be overcome if you both want it bad enough and you love each other.  Until, of course, you run into something too big and beyond human understanding.  

Love transmutes through panic into hope. Hope is strangely effective in that it can buoy you to face impossible fears and do unthinkable things.  It binds the two of you so deeply that it supersedes and redefines the boundaries between the two of you.  Ann I blissfully and mercifully existed there for a while.  Certainly not as long as we would have wanted, but longer than the few weeks doctors estimated at the start of the journey.

When She has died, I believed my all hope and remaining love has been replaced by grief.  In the time since I have come to realize that grief is just another form of love.  I often think about the line Shakespeare’s play King John which is really about the death of his youngest son: 

“Grief fills the room up of my absent child,

Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,

Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,

Remembers me of all his gracious parts,

Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form:

Then have I reason to be fond of grief?

Fare you well: had you such a loss as I,

I could give better comfort than you do...”

 

It eventually gets better, but there isn't a day that has gone by where I haven’t missed Ann at my core.  There are still times when something amazing happens and I wish I could pick the phone up to tell her.  Ask how her day was going, or just text her a silly emoji.   I don't believe in ghosts, but I think my brain (meat-flavored VCR) does a more efficient job at collecting and organizing "Ann" content than almost anything else. And if I am calm and still, I think I can still feel her presence in my life.  I wish I could see her again more than anything.

Remembering doesn't hurt now like it did 9 years ago, the tender spots scared over.  I do find I have limited tolerance for people who assume I'm uniquely interested in cancer for some reason.   The same is true for intruders on my private memories of Ann or those who just want me to talk through the events of eight years ago ad nauseam.  Constantly sharing grief makes you feel crippled and powerless in the expectations of pity.  I have had enough of living in the past, suffering, cancer, and sharing my grief.  

I am happy to say that life found a new normal equilibrium for the moment.  My health is much better than it was 9 years ago - it’s an effort that I should have invested in years ago.  And my professional life has moved ahead dramatically.  Reconnecting with friends and family is a top priority, as is trying to undo those mistakes that I regret most dearly.  

Thank you for staying Ann and me through the difficult times and thank you for not forgetting her. I never will.

This will be the final post here.

 

I had forgotten how good writing was for me though and have decided to start another blog while this one sails ghost like onward into eternity.