Dear Betsy,
I miss you. I’m not alone in missing you but I feel so alone without you. It’s hard for some people to wrap their minds around what our lives were like, as unusual as it was. For so much of the 36+ years we were married, we did so much together, so little apart. Almost everything I see, everything I think, everything I imagine, shows me the dizzying vacancy in my life that was you. I’m watching the knee jerk reaction that pops up so many times a day now in me of wanting to show something to you, share this or that with you, ask what you think. It just brings tears. Not much transpired in our inner or outer lives without sharing it with each other. And, boy, we each sure delighted in that sharing.
The girls and I are supporting each other well as we navigate this phase. Like me, a piece of them is missing and they’re still trying to make sense of losing you. It doesn’t make sense - we don’t know anyone who was more conscientious than you about foods, environments, energies, and even music, that were nourishing versus toxic. Your discipline in the face of desire was outstanding (with the exception of dark chocolate). And it doesn’t make sense to the girls, or to me, that such a loving, embracing, engaging, nurturing mother could disappear from being physically present for them. You were such a core part of our lives. We all hurt. But we’ll be okay.
Yes, we take solace, as they say, in knowing you are not suffering any more. And, oh, what suffering. Speaking for myself, the proverbial stages of grief twist and shout inside my experience. And, emerging out of the sadness, anger at that suffering is getting the spotlight oh so often. How could you have been put through such a torturous existence, with its salvation being no existence at all. What a cruel progression rewarded ruthlessly by a fatal secondary gain.
As you’ve heard me say so many times, I believe the universe never throws anything at us that is against us. It only gives us experiences to grow from. As much of a challenge as it is to make sense of that now, I’m working on understanding the growth for us - the girls, Phil, and me - to have been there with you going through such physical and emotional suffering, being so helpless to move you anywhere closer to the life you so turbulently wanted, and in the end only to lose you.
I’m reminded of what I used to refer to as the Job Syndrome, wherein, in years past, with so much together in my life, everything would somehow come apart, leaving with something akin to nothing. I’d build my life back up again, even better than it had been, only to have it happen again. After that happened a third time, I equated that pattern with Job from the Bible. But in my case, it was the universe seeing me having enough faith in myself that it wanted to test me to
see if I could maintain that faith in the face of being reduced to having none of the external validations that my faith had earned me. Once I saw the pattern that way, it never repeated and I’ve lived with unwavering faith in myself and my abilities. Is it my faith being tested now? Did the “universe” need to show me that I’m capable of rebuilding my life, my sense of self? Fuck that. I’d rather just have you back. So, it seems I just need to give myself time.
While these past months have been the hardest period in my life, now that you are gone it’s just a different color of pain. This pain is one of anguish, but it somehow has warmth and love and closeness. I feel those things and it brings me more pain which brings me more warmth and love and closeness. I appreciate it, like it’s my own transitional world, a bubble I’m suspended in. I feel hungover. This is an emotional hangover. I want to go back to bed.
My grief has a life of its own and I’m making room for it along with all its inconveniences. It is flowing and I welcome that, even as it undoes me. The “witness” in me is fascinated by the ease in which I can fall apart, even in public places. Cassidy took me to a consultation for my hernia and having gotten over there early we went into the Goodwill you and I used to go to when we lived in Venice Beach. There, seeing a basket you would have liked, a scarf that was different shades of orange, a little bag you’d have added to your collection, I fell apart. It’s so easy to miss you. Everywhere I want to go, I no longer want to go, not without you.
After having to hold in the pain of watching you suffer, I am letting it out. The grief is not simple, not like you simply died and I’ve lost you. It’s a complex grief with as many tentacles as that octopus which Dr. Hardy described was in your brain. Yes, of course there’s losing you, but I’ve been through a nightmare, through hell, through being ripped apart every second for months, and THEN I lost you. There’s not having in my future the person I did EVERYTHING with. There’s the suffering you went through, physically and emotionally, and being helpless to help you. There’s knowing viscerally how much you looked forward to being a grandmother for Story; and the pain of seeing you lying there when one of us would hold Story like a carrot being dangled in front of you, motivated with good intention to give you that much of the grandmother experience. There’s your delusion or denial or dementia or whatever which kept us from being able to connect authentically through the last 3 months. There’s the cruel lack of closure that resulted from that. There’s having to hold back from shaking you out of your delusion, supporting the path of comfort you had locked into, while knowing it was keeping us from truly connecting and having closure. I grieve all these things. And, separate from that, getting back to “my life” is a also not a simple thing. The activities within the trajectory of the life I’ve had were shared with the partner I no longer have. There is no way to move forward without the phantom limb that makes everything I do feel alien and alienating.
When your mother was diagnosed with congestive heart failure I shared the story with you of my very first unsupervised ambulance ride. It was Meredith and me as EMTs in rural Connecticut, in the middle of the night. The patient was an very old woman who had congestive heart failure. We let her frail elderly husband ride with us to the hospital in the ambulance. She died there in the emergency room just a little while later and I offered to take her husband back to their house. He sadly chose to walk home alone and I watched him walk across that asphalt parking lot into the night. That’s how I feel now. Where is home without you?
There’s picture I took that I never showed you. Just a day after we came to Los Angeles from La Jolla, as I was sitting next to you lying in the hospital bed here at Jess and Phil’s house, I heard a thud on the window. I got up to look and there, on the ground beneath the back door, was a bird, dead on its back, that had just flown into the glass door. Sitting next to it, waiting for it to get up and fly, was its mate. I knew back then that that would be our fate and wondered if you, too, knew that. But after you had taken on the believe that your tumor was gone, that you were free of cancer, I could not longer talk with you about the what-ifs, about your fears, about mine, about life and about death.
It’s such a heartbreak for me that, given how connected we were through our life together, we didn’t have to opportunity to bond through having those conversations at the end - to go through the special, sacred, end of life phase of doing life together with you consciously and with deep connection. I’m sorry for our kids that they didn’t get to have that bonding with you. But I don’t blame you. You were the ultimate victim in this cruel creation of chaos called cancer.
We’re planning on having a little ceremony for you on your favorite beach in La Jolla with just the people who served you directly in these past months. Then we’ll do something for the whole community around your birthday in early October. Our thinking about that is to have something here for people to attend and to have it on Zoom, too, for people who can’t attend. …Video, slides, pictures covering your life. Your favorite music, which some of us know very well. I love you and always always always will, Jimmy P.S. Show me a sign. Tell me you’re in a good place. Tell me all this suffering was worth it for you.
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