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