Pardon Me

I’ve been in jail. In prison. I put myself there. Even though nearly everyone around me told me I wasn’t guilty and I was judged innocent by a jury of my peers, I confessed to the crime and locked myself up, determined to punish myself for the rest of my life for something I didn’t do but thought I could have prevented. I believed it was my fault. Every time someone offered me a Get Out Of Jail Free card, I threw it in the trash. I needed someone to blame and the only one I could think of was me.

This may be the most personal blog I’ve written to date. Many have told me that by reading my perspective they have been helped with their own grief. Pain, my counselor often says, is the commonality of our humanity. No matter how different each of us is, it is our suffering that shows how alike we are. We connect there. Not everyone wants to read how deeply grief has affected me, though. I respect that. It is their right to stop reading my thoughts. The journey through mourning is profoundly personal and unique. Perhaps they won’t spend as much time in the slog of grief as I have when their turn comes. For me, writing about this pain is one of the few tools I have for disarming it.

After all, I was left here. I have to survive and keep living.

I blamed myself for Rob’s death. It’s a common reaction under the circumstances. Call it survivor’s guilt perhaps. Some say we have a need to blame someone for tragedies like this. I’ve tried to blame the hospital. The doctors and even the nurses. The firefighters who blew off our symptoms when they were called to our address. The nurse practitioner who examined us the day before we were taken by ambulance to the hospital—she sent us home and promised to call us the next day to see how we were. We never heard from her.

I focused blame on a country, a world, in uproar over a mysterious virus and the politically played life and death games that restricted lifesaving medicines from availability. I’ve blamed God for ignoring the prayers of hundreds of people who sincerely believed He would heal my husband. But He didn’t. Rob’s body was not healed when he was taken to heaven. God knows what we’re asking for when we pray for healing. He doesn’t play games with our prayers. He knew exactly what we were asking for and He said no. He’s God. He can do that.

So, I asked Him to explain and there was silence. In a void of answers, I filled in the blanks. At our core, we are all storytellers. The story must have an ending. A meaning. It can’t just be an event without closure. Rob and I got covid, we got sick the same day from an unknown source. When we finally were diagnosed by actual physicians, we both had double pneumonia and were admitted to the same hospital on the same day with the same symptoms. After nine days, I got well enough to be released. After five weeks, Rob went to be with Jesus instead of coming home to me.

The pain of that is excruciating. Again and again, I’ve gone over what happened. We lived in the mountains, hardly exposed to anyone. We were not convinced about the efficacy of masks, especially the way they are handled by nearly everyone. Rob wore them more than I did. We were forced to social distance by lockdowns and peer pressure. We both used hand sanitizers even though we know they kill helpful bacteria when we do. We did what we could according to what we both believed after doing our own research, and for a year we avoided the virus.

Until we didn’t. And when it found us, I assumed that it was my fault. We should have been more careful, I thought, just like everyone said. Ironically, if Rob had caught the flu, unable to overcome it, there would have been less guilt for me to deal with. But catching covid is different. There’s an unspoken shame about it, revealed by the questions asked of us by nearly everyone, including hospital nurses, “Where do you think you got it? Did you always wear a mask? Did you social distance?” If you don’t get one hundred on that little quiz, suddenly it’s obvious that, not only didn’t you study for this important test, you blew it so badly you’ll wear a scarlet “C” on your forehead forever.

I’ve re-read the text messages Rob and I wrote to each other until he couldn’t handle his phone anymore. “I wish we’d gone to the doctor sooner,” I wrote to him that first night. He never blamed me or himself. He didn’t live like that, controlled by guilt. I was the one who told him it was time for us to see a doctor and face the dreaded covid test. Still, neither of us believed we had covid. I’ve faced some criticism for that, but covid didn’t wipe out all the other viruses and bacteria that plague humanity. The onset for us was the same as any other cold. Until we both had trouble breathing, we believed the adage that you’ll get better in two weeks or fourteen days if you see a doctor because it had always been true before. When, after five days, we got worse, we saw a doctor.

Blaming myself has been a one-man tennis match where I lob accusations at myself, then run around the net and return the serve in self-defense. If you haven’t picked up on that at this stage of my story, you probably don’t play tennis. I don’t either, unless the point of the game is guilt and condemnation, and then I’m a pro. It’s a heavy burden to carry the guilt for my beloved’s illness and death. He was more active than me. He’d survived many serious threats to his health and come out on top. He was more fit than me. He was more positive than me. He was luckier than anyone else I know. He should have been the one to survive. I shouldn’t have made it.

We’re not designed to carry burdens like that. I know Rob wouldn’t want me to, either.

The problem with needing an ending to this story is that I don’t know why I lived and Rob didn’t. I don’t know why neither of us suspected covid. We have many friends our age with their own health challenges who also came down with that virus and lived through it, several of them without even seeing a doctor. Why did it take down Rob? Even the doctors were puzzled. But the bigger question is this: would he have made it if . . .?

“If” is the worst word in the English language. I don’t think I even need to tell you all the sentences in my life right now that begin with “if.”

When I couldn’t exactly pinpoint who was to blame for Rob’s death, the only logical person is the one who knew him best, loved him most, was there when the first sniffle showed up, and didn’t nag him to go see a doctor until five days after it was too late. I saw it all. I was sick, too, but since I survived that’s now a moot point. I didn’t do everything I should have to ward off the possibility of a pandemic virus taking out my darling. And everyone who knew and loved him, too, has paid the price for what I didn’t do.

See how easy it is to put a spin on that tennis ball and lose the match?

This morning, facing another day of sorrow as I do every day, I rearranged some books on a shelf and flipped open a book my counselor recommended but which I haven’t yet read, Finding Meaning by David Kessler. It fell open to a chapter entitled “Why” which, coincidentally, is also the title of my life right now. The page I began reading was subtitled, “Playing God.” Avoiding survivor’s guilt and regret over the “if’s” is the topic.

“To begin to heal, you must give the power back to God,” he writes, acknowledging the need to release your anger because God can handle it. Once some of that anger is released, you’ll start to understand that “if your loved one died, and you didn’t, it was not supposed to be you. . . because if it was supposed to be you, it would have been.”

The real question then is not why Rob died, but why am I here, and what meaning can I find now in the life I’ve been asked to live?

Kessler is a solitaire player. So am I, both of us on apps. I didn’t know when you lose at a game of solitaire, you can hit a button to “replay this game.” I should have known. I’ve asked God for that button a million times in the last six months of my life. But Kessler said that even though the option lets him examine the cards for hints about moves that might have given him a better result, sometimes he discovers that “given the hand I’d been dealt, even if I played every move exactly right, I would still lose.” Then he got the message on his phone, “No useful moves could have been played.”

I bolded that last line because that’s the way it looked to me when I read it and how it felt in my soul when I understood it.

Given the hand I was dealt. We were dealt. We did the best we knew to do with the knowledge that we had and the experience we’d gained from all the other hands we’d been dealt in life. But this time, even if we’d played every move exactly right, we still would have lost Rob.

I don’t understand that. My soul begs for a different outcome. I remember, in God’s defense, all the times He heard our prayers for healing—which were really only a temporary reprieve—and we survived many dangerous scenarios. Rob’s heart surgery, his strokes and TIAs, all the risks he faced as a firefighter, that massive blood clot in his leg, years of side effects from blood thinners, my melanomas and other skin cancers, endometrial cancer that cost me all my hormones and three years of my life in recovery. All the events we were protected from that I don’t even know about.

But when it came to this hand, this last hand we were dealt together, no useful moves could have been played.

I’m walking out of jail today. I’ll have to do some work to retrain my brain to resist the condemning thoughts that have kept me imprisoned all these months, but I know the truth now. I’ll keep re-reading it and reminding myself of it.

God doesn’t want me in jail. Nor does Rob or anyone else who knows and loves me. I still have to walk through this Valley of the Shadow of Death, a journey I didn’t ask for and am not enjoying, but God is with me. His rod and His staff, they comfort me.

And, just for the record, I’m giving up tennis. I’m terrible at it anyway.

With thanks to Dave Schumaker for permission to use the photo seen above. The original can be viewed at the following link:

Get out of jail free card | I figure that Gizmodo's Jason Ch… | Flickr