It Was A Dark And Stormy Night

It was a dark and stormy night. 

It was a dark and noisy night. 

Tethered to a CPAP machine humming quietly beside me, I dreamed I was snorkeling in the middle of the Atlantic - drowning, actually. No one snorkels in the middle of the Atlantic. Suddenly an alarm went off and a voice yelled, “FIRE!” 

Strange. How does one catch fire while drowning in an ocean? The next thing I knew, I was standing in my kitchen, looking for flames with no idea what to grab on my way out of the house.

But there was no fire.

There was no smoke.

There was only a voice every five seconds, filling the room with its warning, “FIRE!” and the ear-piercing sound of an F-5 smoke alarm losing its mind.

At 2:30 in the morning. 

Malfunctioning.

I still don’t know how I made it to the kitchen, disconnected from my CPAP machine.

There’s almost nothing worse than a smoke alarm that lies to you, unless it does it from the ceiling above your bed in the dark of night. I didn’t know what to do. Should I run out into the front yard, call the fire department, and let them and all my neighbors see me in my mismatched pajamas? What if, as I suspected, there was no emergency? I would be humiliated for absolutely no good reason. And would I have to pay them for showing up in the middle of the night for a fake fire?

I paced through the noisy house, listening to every single nerve in my ears die a violent death, and begged God for help. Maybe he was going deaf, too, but I had to give it a shot. I don’t have my own personal firefighter anymore to restore peace and quiet. My ceilings are too high for me to reach a spastic alarm without the use of a ladder, and I don’t even try stunts like that in the daytime, when I’m not drugged up with melatonin.

Finally, God got tired of all the racket, too, and the overactive alarm shut up.

I didn’t trust the silence.

After thirty minutes and no more adrenalin surges, I went back to bed. But I did not sleep. I stared at the defective smoke alarm which intermittently glowed red above me like a little red demon. I knew it was laughing at its insidious prank. And I knew in the morning I was going to get a baseball bat and beat the crap out of it.

Instead, when the sun rose, I reached out to my daughter, Katy, who was headed out of town with her firefighter husband. Of course. I have the worst timing. She asked his sister to stop by to analyze the problem. His sister is not a firefighter. She’s an engineer. And she figured out what the firefighters I contacted in the meantime could not. It was not a bad battery. It was not a bad smoke detector. It was a bad housekeeper. She arrived at my house with a can of compressed air and blew the heck out of that miscreant piece of machinery. I didn’t even feel bad as I stood there watching globs of dust float to the floor. It had it coming.

“It glowed red,” she told me, “because it wanted you to know which of your two alarms had gone off.”

Oh, I knew which one had gone off.

What I don’t know is how that dust got up there. Who knew you should carry compressed air in one hand and toilet bowl cleaners in the other when you clean house? I still think a good whack with a baseball bat would have shown that thing who’s boss.

All was quiet for a few weeks thanks to the engineer who came and saved my sanity. 

Until this week.

It was a dark and stormy night.

It was a dark night. 

There I lay nestled all snug in my bed while visions of sugarplums danced in my head. And then one of them went off. At midnight. When all good sugarplums should be sleeping.

I am sick and tired of alarms going off in the middle of the night and ruining my floor shows.

“Nooooooo,” I moaned, rolling over and covering my head with a pillow. It was weird, just like before. But this time I heard a series of steady beeps that slowly sped up, scrambling all the neurons in my brain while I tried to figure out where the sound was coming from. No one said the house was burning down, so that was something. I slapped every electronic thing on my nightstand, but the beeping continued, taunting me, daring me to get up to investigate. But if they weren’t yelling “FIRE” or “DUST”, I wasn’t going anywhere. Stubbornly, I stayed right where I was, listening to the faint cry of surviving ear cells threatening to go AWOL.

Thirty seconds later, the beeps burned themselves out and silence reigned. Relieved, I lay there, groggy, trying to figure out how I managed to build myself a brand-new haunted house.

I began to relax. My breathing slowed. I may have gone deaf but I was asleep and couldn't be sure. And just as I dozed off, a distant memory floated through my mind—the image of a tiny, black plastic clock in my bathroom. An item I had dusted earlier in the day. With little black buttons no one can read, including the one marked, “alarm.”

No matter what I do, dust always wins out.

It was a dark and stormy night.

But I didn’t care.

I can’t hear anything anymore. 

You Are Here

I’m so lonely. It’s the hardest thing to deal with. It comes on me so often in the twilight, just like tonight, when I’m tired and need Rob. I need Rob. I’ve always needed Rob. When I was sixteen and we fell in love and I knew in my bones, in the bones of my soul even, that I felt safe with him, I needed him. I was protected by him. Seen and loved by him. His patience was a safe harbor for me, one I’d never experienced in all my life.

He was always my safe harbor. Always the voice of reason and calm. He never jumped to conclusions. Never held a grudge. He wasn’t superman. He had his faults, thank goodness, or we could have never even been friends. But he was my hero. I was so lucky to be his wife and the love of his life for forty-six years, all told.

I was thinking today that if, whether by magic or miracle, he would return to me suddenly, that after all these months and months, three and a half years, of being forced to live without him, I’ve probably changed in ways I’m unaware of and he might step in and start telling me how I ought to do things his way because “it’s easier,” and then the fight would be on. It made me feel sad. Like I’m in this in between space of waking up and breathing every day, seeing familiarity develop as each year goes by and I have to do life without him, making memories without him, and yet longing for him so much that I can’t stop the deep ache in my heart. I'm doing the impossible, moving forward against my will. But it would be worth fighting with him just to be in his arms again.

I can’t stop it sometimes, the longing for him. I can’t “be grateful” most of the time. I can’t “put a positive spin” on it ever. He should still be here. He should still be here.

It must be a tiresome thing to be a friend to a woman like me. Deeply mourning her soulmate, well past the time most people think it should take to be over him. I will never be over him. I’ve written about this so often, using every word picture I can imagine to describe what it’s like to lose half your body and, to both your surprise and sorrow, still find yourself breathing. How tiresome to touch base with me or read my recent thoughts in a post and discover that the tears still fall every day, my life is still completely changed, and I don’t know where happiness is anymore. And that if you truly want to know what it’s like to be a widow, you will eventually realize you can never fix this.

How tiresome to keep coming back for more of that. How tiresome of me not to change my thoughts and make my life better and think to myself that Rob “would want me to be happy.” No one knows what Rob would want. He never got the chance to tell us.

Surviving the loss, the untimely death, of your person takes the rest of your life. How ironic to call it surviving, then. We think surviving is the victory that sets us free to live. To move on. Go forward. Find your way. There’s no finish line for this kind of survival, though. Never before have I had to work so hard to get through one painful breath at a time as I do now in moments like these. To be honest, this happens in moments now instead of every other minute as they did for the first entire year or more. But when these moments happen, when grief comes to the surface again, I am swept away once more in a tsunami of sorrow. It’s true that the waves of grief become further apart as time goes by, but they are never less intense.

People are ashamed of grieving. Embarrassed by it, whether it’s their own or someone else’s. There is a vulnerability inherent in grief. It plays no favorites. It reduces a person to their most basic self, stripping away pretense, washing away dreams and priorities. You find out who you are in grief. Do you believe that God is still good or will you spit in his face and run from him forever? Of the friends who remain when the storm ceases to roar, which ones have learned to see you and hear you and which ones have taught you how to do the same? Of the magnitude of blessings that remain in your life, are you able to wrap your arms around them and see their pain in this loss, too? In a world divided between those who still have and those who have not, can you be glad that they still have what you don’t? At least for now? Can you hold space for yourself, hold space for the empty space left behind by your love, feel the ache that never goes away even while you laugh and spend time with someone who loves you?

We see through a glass darkly, not yet face to face. We are not entitled to answers. Perhaps because we can’t handle the truth. We don’t speak the language of truth. We can’t see what’s waiting for us in a dimension we’ve never experienced. We’re in the waiting room, and it might be a long wait. A long time before we see our beloved again, face to face. What kind of roots am I putting down right now, how far do they stretch into the earth while I desperately search for stability in the aftermath of being violently shaken? I don’t know.

I don’t know.

There were long stretches in my life when I thought I understood how life works. How God works. I had answers, but no questions. Now I have questions, but no answers. And as time goes on, and I gain more experience in carrying grief, a thing that cannot be fixed, I realize a map has been drawn leading from where this began to where I am now. Others are beginning to need that map. Others are beginning their own journeys along this inevitable road, and I am sorry. So very sorry. I’m sorry that I once thought a scripture verse could stop the bleeding in someone’s broken heart. I’m sorry that I thought grief and loss were contagious and kept my distance from those in pain. I am sorry that I didn’t know or practice the art of simply showing up.

Grief was once my enemy. Grief is now my friend. It reminds me that I once loved deeply, that I was once loved deeply, and that missing Rob is temporary.

Grief holds space for our reunion.

With thanks to Jonathan Sureau for the wonderful photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: Tourist Map of Hazelbrook and Lawson | Notes: compiled and d… | Flickr

Detours

I set the timer for twenty minutes this morning and did a feelings dump on a document destined for deletion with as many painful thoughts and worries as came to mind. I’ve written more, but it’s an exercise I haven’t done for a while so, this morning, two typewritten pages in twenty minutes helped a lot. I don’t know if it cured me physically, but if stuffed emotions are what’s fueling the discomfort I’m experiencing, I know I unstuffed some stuff. And that was good enough.

I deleted it all and went to Pilates where my instructor spent extra time with me trying to determine why my body is hurting so much, worked out some kinks, and came home for lunch. Later, I drove to the drugstore for some meds, stopped by Starbucks, remembered the schools were all letting out and took a route home that wouldn’t tie me up in a traffic jam, and arrived home in one piece. Victory.

I can’t help reading license tags when I drive and do my best to decode the succinct messages on vanity plates. I passed a big, black truck whose plates read “xpnd4bl” where the “4” represents an “A” and knew I’d read it right when I saw the giant skull on his back window reinforcing his message.

Ewww. Some plates don’t need to be deciphered.

Another one made me think it was a scripture reference and would have been Josiah 31:8 but there's no book in the Bible by that name. I think there was a king but, as far as I know, he never published anything. Just my brain trying to make sense out of the senseless. Right away, another scripture plate drove past but even though there's a book called Jude, I dismissed JUD 3YF because it only has one chapter in it, so what would the 3YF refer to? My brain went down a rabbit hole at forty-five miles per hour, just like the SUV I was driving, where I sounded out the YF part, came up with “wife,” and suddenly I was transported to a cabin in the woods in northern Arizona where Rob and I lived for five short weeks.

The synapses in our brains are incredible. All of this happened in about three car lengths’ passage of time, and from the memory of our cabin in Heber to the word “wife”, something I’d deleted on this morning’s twenty-minute feelings dump floated up from the abyss and waved at me.

Trauma, like synapse, is an interesting thing. I journaled today about the trauma of letting Rob go be with Jesus when it was the last thing in the world that I wanted to do. Despite all the confusion and disconnect between his hospital room in the mountains and covid restrictions that kept me from being with him and dealing with doctors directly, we did everything in our power to help him make it but failed. We’ll never know why I got well and he didn’t. And here’s another interesting thing. We so desperately want to make sense out of the senseless things in life, if no one has an explanation for any catastrophe that comes our way, we will take the blame ourselves.

From time to time, I blame myself for everything that led to losing Rob. All the changes around us, all the changes we made ourselves, all the inconsequential decisions that I have second guessed so many times now I’ve lost count. And as I journaled this morning, all of that came up again and led to a new heartache. Our life together was interrupted by Rob’s death. There were things we never got to say to each other., business left unfinished. He couldn’t even talk to me that last day when they finally let me be with him. I worried that he was upset with the medical treatment I’d agreed to on his behalf and wondered again if he felt abandoned while he fought for his life. I’ll never know. But if one plus one equals two, then the sum of those two questions equals this—did he still love me at the end?

I know that’s not logical or pragmatic. But I’m a writer. I’ve also given speeches. I know that the most important part of any story, after its beginning, is the way it ends. Its impact is what the reader or audience remembers most when it’s all over, especially if the book was lengthy or the speaker longwinded. Our story was forty-six years long and what I remember the most clearly is the ending. It wasn’t a happy one. It was a tragedy filled with questions and uncertainty at a time in the world when everything was upside down.

Rob tried to answer that final question for me in his last hours. He couldn’t talk—imagine that heartbreak for a Distinguished Toastmaster—but he mouthed the phrase, “I love you,” to me. I recognized what he was trying to communicate. But as time goes by, with all the adjustments I’ve had to make living without him, his silence now is fertile ground for regret and fear in my broken heart.

Synapses and trauma. They surface together and connect all those dots in our memories. As I drove home today, I casually pondered the license plate in front of me, YF, thought it could read “wife,” and suddenly remembered. A couple of weeks before we were hospitalized, as he set up the computer in our Heber home office, Rob was changing all his passwords to ILMW.

I Love My Wife.

He still loved me then. He still loves me now. If I’m honest with myself, at this very moment he’s loving his life like crazy and is probably astonished that I ever feared he blamed me for anything or will ever stop loving me.

Knowing that “the body keeps the score,” I journaled some of my soul pain this morning in an attempt to relieve some physical pain, an exercise I’ve done many times and which has scientific support. And then I deleted it all because stress journaling works best that way. Unless you’re a writer, and then you publish some of it in a blog and second guess that decision later as you are prone to do about everything you write.

I feel alone. A lot. That’s new to me. But I am not alone. The spirit of God lives inside me, he knows my innermost thoughts and cares about my feelings. It was no coincidence that I drove to a drugstore this afternoon following a painful morning, detoured to make an order at Starbucks, re-routed my trip home to avoid school traffic, and passed anonymous cars with personalized plates that triggered memories which answered a fear I wrestled with eight hours ago thinking no one would ever see or read my deleted thoughts.

I was surprised by love again. Just when I think there is no healing for wounds as deep as mine, the wounded Healer shows up with a message from Rob.

He loves his wife.

With thanks to Tom Woodward for permission to use the perfectly detoured detour sign seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: Detour | Tom Woodward | Flickr