Category: Loss

Raw

On By Mary LennoxIn Conflict, Grief, Loss, Therapy2 Comments

(or In Session, with Cancer)

The long-awaited text had finally arrived.  “Can you do Tues at 1:00?”

The text had been sitting on my phone for more than two hours before I saw it.  I stared at it for several minutes, trying to make sense of what I was reading, trying to get my brain to take in what this really meant.  I checked my calendar, then responded “Sure.”  It was the only answer I could give that captured my mixed-up feelings of anticipation and dread.  I wasn’t feeling a “yes” or “absolutely” or “I’ll be there.”  I definitely wasn’t feeling anything punctuated with an exclamation point.

I had been waiting for weeks for this moment to occur.  Of course I would be happy and relieved to see my therapist, but I was also feeling anxious and sad and scared and overwhelmed.  I hate it that our relationship has to be confined to the four walls of her office.  And that the only way I get to make physical contact with her is in that space.

About 30 minutes before I needed to leave for my session, a headache emerged.  My entire head hurt, as if some invisible and unrelenting force was pushing down squarely on the top of my head, but also down the back near my neck and towards my forehead.  I probably should have taken something before I left my office,  but I was hoping it would pass.  On the subway ride downtown, the pain intensified, my head hurting more with each jerk of the train.  By the time I arrived, I was in full-on headache mode.  Not the best way to arrive at a long over-due therapy session.

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Left Behind

On By Mary LennoxIn Grief, Loss, Love, Therapy, Time2 Comments

(with Unfinished Business)

It’s been 15 days (and counting) since I last saw my therapist.  The last time I saw her I was still functioning under the illusion that she and her doctors were working, slowly, methodically, through a long diagnostic process.  Initial signs, along with a family history, pointed to MS, but in order to diagnose, they had to work down the MS rule out list.  There was a long list of possibilities to test for and that would take time to get through.  I did not sense any urgency.  It seemed sensible to remain calm and carry on with these rule-out tests.  Cancer was in the mix, and mentioned, along with the caveat that it seemed unlikely.  At one point, less than a month ago, there was even talk of just needing back surgery, with a mere 10 days to recuperate.

So I wasn’t worried.  And I wasn’t prepared when the very next day, the cancer diagnosis was made.  I had no time to prepare.  I didn’t know we’d be heading into a long, traumatic break.  When she took a 3-week break last spring, we had time to prepare and plan and find ways to explicitly stay connected.  This time, the bottom just fell out.

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Fill It Up Again

On By Mary LennoxIn Grief, Loss, Love, Therapy2 Comments

(or You Can’t Always Get What You Want Need)

One of the ideas rattling around in my head before the election madness took over had to do with routines and the impact of disruption to these orienting, centering, reliable constructs that make up most of our lives.  As a parent, I know I bemoan any disruption in my children’s routine, be it a snow day, a holiday break, summer vacation, even the weekend.  We all know that children usually thrive on routine, when they are fully aware of plans and timings and expectations and what comes next.

I suspect many adults also function better on routines, but for some reason we aren’t allowed to openly admit that.  As adults we are somehow expected to better withstand the changes in routine, to be able to adjust the sails and keep the boat from capsizing.  Even if it’s a tricky maneuver, we must try to make it look easy and effortless, even in the face of gale-force winds.

I’m likewise certain that the recent election results are unsettling to so many precisely because we are entering unchartered waters, and have no idea of where we are going, or how we will get there or what the ultimate outcome will be.  The routine of life as we know it has been completely disrupted and we may never settle into a new, predictable routine again.  Responding to rapid changes may become the new norm.

For me, the theme of therapy this year has been disruption in routine.  It started back in April when my therapist took a much-needed sabbatical abroad.  I didn’t begrudge her (too much) this time away, but I did anxiously count down the 25 days she was gone.  Then we ran into a 21 day stretch at the end of June when I was away and another 20 day stretch at the end of the summer when our vacations misaligned.

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Upset

On By Mary LennoxIn Anger, Blogging, Conflict, Finding a Voice, LossLeave a comment

(or The Only Thing We Have to Fear is…?)

For the past few weeks, I’ve been in a state of emotional paralysis.  It started before Election Day, when the pundits and media were still re-assuring us of a Hillary victory, even though I feared, back then, that they weren’t telling us the whole truth.  I clung to the New York Times and FiveThirtyEight and Rachel Maddow.  I remember a feeling of relief well over me – relief! – that Rachel was hosting a show on the Sunday night before the election, so that we only had to get through Saturday without her calm presence and analysis and experts reassuring us that it was all going to be okay.

Since Election Day, I feel like I’ve been trapped in the opening sequence of the movie Groundhog Day.  Every morning I wake up and it’s if my mind has to re-learn the fact that we have, actually, for real, in all seriousness, elected Donald Trump to be the next President of the United States.  It’s as if my brain so completely cannot wrap itself around this fact that I have to forget it each and every night in order to go to sleep, then am forced to re-learn it every morning when I wake up and am confronted with this new reality.  It’s everywhere and can’t be avoided – social media, old-fashioned media, the distraught faces of my fellow citizens of these great Northeastern States of America.

Before the election I had several blog posts in the works.  Ideas, musings, even some sentences loosely constructed and strung together.  But those thoughts are all blocked, and I have to get my thoughts on this election out before anything else can emerge.  I’ve read and reacted to the thoughts and reflections of so many of my friends, who all make up my own “bubble” of kind, empathic, moral people.  But I wanted to leave my own thoughts here.

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The Missing Piece

On By Mary LennoxIn Complicated Grief, Grief, Loss, Love, Motherhood, TimeLeave a comment

(or Simple Questions, Complicated Answers)

People can ask the darnedest questions.  I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve been asked “Are you going to have a third?” or “Do you want to try for a daughter?”  Usually this comes in the form of idle small-talk and meaningless banter.  I have to hope that the questioners are just naive, and that they haven’t given much thought to the myriad of ways one could answer these seemingly innocent questions.

No matter how often it happens, it always takes my breath away, even for just a minute.  My heart wrenches, a sadness overwhelms me.  I might pause for a minute to think about how to respond – or how I would like to respond.  I usually defer to simple answers: “oh, I think we’re done” or maybe even “you never know.”

Truth is we already have a third child, a daughter.  She was our first and had to leave this human realm before we even had a chance to hold her.  She wouldn’t have survived here on earth, but I have to think she is somewhere, without pain, in the great beyond.

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Free Fall

On By Mary LennoxIn Grief, Loss, Love, TimeLeave a comment

(or A Day to Forget)

I wrote this out last year, long before I started even thinking about a blog.  It was too much for Facebook, and seems more appropriate to post here anyways, this marking the 15th anniversary of that horrible day.

Last night (9/11/2014) as we looked over the river to the beams of light, what I noticed most was the sound of the airplanes.  Lots of airplanes.

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And it made me remember the silence of the city that September night.  It was eerily silent and still, except of course for the steady stream of the sound of sirens.  But even those seemed to fade into the background, leaving the world all too quiet.

I remember the smell.  It’s a smell I would much rather forget, but don’t think I ever will.   It was an unavoidable smell that hung over the city for months – a combination of burning jet fuel and melting iron, dust and ash, flesh and death.

I really dislike the mantra “never forget.”  Many need to forget, in order to be able to move on, to be able to keep on living.

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Change of Terms

On By Mary LennoxIn Loss, Therapy, TimeLeave a comment

(or Me vs. the Horseshoe Crab)

I walked into my therapist’s office the other day to find that it was all packed up.  The bookcases were empty, the knick-knacks were gone.  There were stacks of boxes and rolls of bubble-wrap.  She had momentarily left the room when I arrived, so I had several minutes to devise a list of worst-case scenarios.  Was she moving to a new office?  In the same suite?  Same building?  Across town?  How would this move impact my journey?  Or worse: was she retiring?  Closing up shop?  Had she had enough?  Had we all driven her completely crazy?

When she returned to the office I immediately demanded to know what was going on.  She seemed shocked that I would ask, as if walking into your therapist’s packed-up office was completely normal.  No, she was not moving or retiring.  Her office was just being repainted and new flooring was to be installed.  And did I really think she would move or retire without giving me months and months of notice so that we could process it together?

In short, yes.

Certainly a move of office would be a much easier scenario to adapt to than losing her to retirement, but even so, I was uneasy with the thought that anything about this therapeutic environment might change.

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In the Pursuit of Perfection

On By Mary LennoxIn Anger, Grief, Loss, Love, Motherhood, Rare DiseasesLeave a comment

(or So What Did You Eat Today?)

We just got home from a weekend conference where we had hoped that our older son would realize that he is really not so alone in this world.  I’m not sure that this objective was met – it’s hard to get much in-depth emotional processing out of a 6-year-old.  I, however, came away with a whole host of revelations of my own.

But to get to those, I need to start at the beginning.  You see, my son was born with a very rare, very serious metabolic disorder that, if left untreated, causes irreversible damage to the central nervous system.  Or to be exact: brain damage.

It is hard to fathom that the very foods that so many of us eat, and take for granted, are toxic to the hundreds of thousands of people with inherited metabolic disorders.

To protect both his and my anonymity, I’m not going to name the specific metabolic disorder that he has.  His specific diagnosis isn’t all that pertinent, and I hope my own thoughts on this topic apply to anyone raising a special-needs child, far beyond the reaches of our very small metabolic community.

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There’s No Place Like Home

On By Mary LennoxIn Grief, Home, Loss, Love, Motherhood, TherapyLeave a comment

(or Do Turtles Ever Get Homesick?)

I’ve just spent two weeks away from home.   Some would call this a “vacation.”  I don’t mean to sound flippant or ungrateful.  Yes, we’ve been in England these last two weeks… but mostly visiting my in-laws and in the non-stop company of two young, jet-lagged children who don’t really understand where they are or why their bodies are so out of sync.  It’s hardly been restful or restorative, as the word “vacation” usually implies.

What I’ve noticed most about this trip is my longing for home, a home-sickness of sorts, that I’ve never experienced before when we’ve traveled.

Perhaps it’s because it’s been more than two years since we’ve made the journey over the pond.  Or maybe it has to do with being here, during the Brexit vote and subsequent fallout.  I long for the perception and illusion of stability and safety back home, as opposed to the stark reality of instability and unknown that can’t be avoided on this island.  England, or more generally the EU, was always our backup plan.  If things get too politically unstable in the U.S., we always can head to Europe, or so we thought.  Now I’m not so sure.  I want my children to thrive in a global world, not be restricted to small-minded island thinking.

Maybe it comes from so many years of living in a country where I felt so many of the states were “off-limits.”  Sure there are gay people living in all 50 states (shock! horror!), and many did so under repressive local governments, but that’s never what I wanted for myself or my family.  I refused to live in such places and was lucky that I didn’t have to.

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