One Year Gone

I’m here in George’s boyhood home, actually sleeping in the room he used as a child. It is one year since he passed away in the hospital at St. Barnabas.

Its been a big, scary year. Awfully long and shockingly short. So much I’ve had to do. And the clock runs so fast. I can’t get enough rest because I’m exhausted… Creating a whole new life in one year is a crazy proposition, but its what I’ve tried to accomplish. The days are short as I tackle one problem after another, but the nights are long. Dreams… the awake kind where I plan for our future. The sleeping kind where I address my losses one by one. Loss of love. Loss of security. Loss of a parenting partner. Loss of the free and easy intimacy George and I had developed. Loss of happiness. Loss of the identity I once enjoyed.

Lily, Sara and I have struggled to find a recipe that works for our new life. Yesterday Lily came into my room carrying Simon the bunny. She was crying. “I don’t want him to die! He’s just one year old and he only has ten years left. They fly by! I can’t live without him.” She got me to snuggle in the bed with  her. “I can’t lose him mom. I can’t lose him too.”

We haven’t really talked about this being the anniversary of George’s death, but she feels what is going on and she doesn’t like it. She’s easily upset. She wants a lot of my attention. She is loving her new school and is really diving in, looking for back up family. It will take a lot of people  to make her feel the loss of George less acutely. There is a nice dad who brings his boy to school each day. Coming to pick her up I met them in the hall as Lily asked the dad, “Can I come have a play date at your house today?” I leaned over and whispered that it is rude to invite yourself to someone’s home. She turned to me, “I asked yesterday and he said I can come over. Don’t mess this up!”  She’s desperate for male attention and I’m hoping to find some people to help her feel better. Maybe at the school, maybe somewhere else. She needs to feel there will be a man in her life again at some point.

What I’ve learned this year is that everyone is going to go through something like this at some point in their life. Since George died, several people I know have started their own journey into grief. It makes me sad to see them struggle to find peace and acceptance. Up to now, my life has been fairly free of death. You start to think its something that happens to other people, and when you hear about a death in a family you roll it over in your mind, examining what you know of the circumstances, find it is very different from your life and are comforted. Its what we do. We look for the reasons why one person’s tragedy could never happen to us. We distance ourselves from death as quickly as we can because we don’t want it to get on us. When someone dies for health reasons we comfort ourselves that we don’t have that health issue. When its an accident we tell ourselves that we wouldn’t have behaved the same way and would not have been hurt. We would have anticipated the problem. We would have survived.

This underlying rejection of death has slapped me in the face over and over again as I live through the aftermath of George’s passing. I’m hoping that I will never again numb out when dealing with death. I hope I can look death in the face… its randomness… its cruelty… its mystery, and realize that it comes for everyone. No matter how careful you are, how clean you live, blessed, lucky, special, happy, kind — none of this is going to save any of us from death. I for one would like to learn to see it for what it is, an inevitable end to everyone’s life. There’s nothing to feel superior about when death comes for someone other than you.  Joy. You should feel that. But arrogance, no.

So now I plan to try to get through this trying and confusing day, swimming with Lily, taking her to the Wizard of Oz exhibit here in and town, and letting her pick where we go to dinner.

Sara and Cathy are here and will help us leap over this next big hurdle, being a real, whole, excruciatingly long year away from the man we loved best.

He was our special person and we loved him. For all of you out there missing a special someone, I am crying for you tonight as much as myself. We are a vast group, mostly unknown to each other, and I think we need all the support we can get.

I know I do.