August 18, 2010

As I was sweeping the kitchen floor (there were brownies baking in the oven that are now cooling on the counter--- what is my life now but that of a domestic?!? ), I was thinking about it ALL. And I thought ‘it was my job for so long to keep him alive....’ Almost as soon as we were reunited--- maybe even the day we sat on a couch together again, he told me so in a way that you know you are hearing the truth... that he had had 'recovery' but not a reason to be alive. He did things then, after that day together when we first went down to the bench--- huge movements towards living, rather than existing. By being present, he felt he had a reason.

I wasn’t DOING anything to bring this about, I just existed. Soon, tho, I would encourage him that employment was possible, and eventually he found it. On very dark nights, I would talk him away from the river, etc etc etc. When things didn’t seem right I would alert him that a manic episode was coming. I could hear it in his voice. When something physical was going on, but being ignored, I would gently nudge him towards attending to it.

A few years ago, it was November, there was snow storm after snowstorm, it was either right before or right after Thanksgiving and he needed a defibulator/pacemaker, and I was quite ill myself. And I can remember being in our living room and my husband kind of seeing me off as I left to go to the hospital and the worried look in his eyes and I was saying “I don’t want to go” for a myriad of reasons. I was exhausted myself, I was sick and I was scared and I finished off the litany with “But if I don’t go----I am afraid if he doesn’t KNOW I am waiting there that he won’t live.” We (husband and I) had been through enough of living and dying to know that will might not be everything, but it certainly was huge.

Of course, I have no midas touch, but that doesn’t really matter and never did. He had for decades talked about my presence bringing a calm to him. The first two decades, I don’t think I even heard him. (It would have been so hard for me to believe something like that about myself in any case.) This last one, all my senses were heightened.

I’ve been about buoying him up for so long, taking care of him, encouraging him…. I am like a mastodon with these things anyway, emotional adjustment comes to me very slowly in ANY case--- but in this, it was my aim to keep him alive for so long, it is really no wonder that I am having the hardest time of it now.