A Real Winter

A foot of snow, at least! And it's still coming down. Yay. Hot cocoa, the wood stove, and finally, a long, hard cry. But not before a good breakfast and a game of RISK. After my cry a hot shower helped me get composed again, but I'm still feeling the after-shock of it, I'm wanting to shout out, "Tell everyone that you love them, damn it! Don't you realize we could drop dead any minute?!?"

It's cold out there. We don't often get blizzards, but I think today's conditions in central Virginia might have met the definition. Everything has that cold, bluish brightness; it snowed for a couple of hours with tiny little flakes whirling in the air so thick I could barely see the houses across the street. I shiver just to look out the window, but I stare at it; it's so unusual and at the same time utterly common, water falling from the sky.

I'm enjoying the stories and jokes and the encouragement from ya'll. Thanks.
xxoo

I mailed the letters to the recipients of David's organs today. LifeNet health will get them, read them for appropriateness, then forward them to the men who are living with David's organs. I hope they will find my letters interesting; I was able to give a littel information about David and our family. I hope they will want to meet us. I hope to give them each a hug and hear about how David's gifts have helped them.

The man at LifeNet Health said that most often recipients choose not to meet, for many reasons, chiefly a thing called survivor guilt. I hope this is not what happens with our recipients. I hope they feel fortunate, yes, but not guilty, I hope they understand that knowing David's organs have helped them makes it easier for us to bear losing him. We want to know that David's life mattered in a way that will go on and on. With his big heart beating inside a man who works with needy children, I know he is still making a difference. This helps me.

I still haven't cried since Sunday. I feel like there's something rising in my throat and chest area- like a tightness building up, warning me that this calm isn't going to last forever. I was talking to Heather and she said that when she lost her husband so young and suddenly she would also experience the sudden, seemingly unsolicited waves of shocking grief. She calls it the "Mack truck effect" because it feels like you've been hit by one. I know it's coming; I can hear the rumbling of it, but for now, I'm able to focus on grades, the new semester coming, the snow we're going to get this weekend, chores, and other regular every-day stuff.

Someone asked if I feel guilty, like I've dishonored David's memory and loss, in the moments I am happy or laugh with my friends. The answer is no. I feel guilty when I'm not happy and enjoying laughter. I'm sure David wants me to know that he is still looking after us and wants us to carry on, tough as it is, with a resilient spirit. If I can still laugh with friends, this will be the best way for me to honor David's memory.

So dear Friends, if ya'll want to help me laugh, have at it. Email me some jokes or funny true stories from your life (kfetty@comcast.net), call me and come over for a beer; please don't be afraid to help me have fun. I need it! That's what David would want me to do... with all my spare time...hahaha.

xxoo

Okay, so I just wrote the letter to the recipients. We'll see what happens with that. It was harder to do than I thought, though not emotionally, just practically. It was hard to make it a letter to "anyman"

In the meantime I'm getting a little reprieve from the heaviness of the past two weeks. Maybe it's the hope for snow, I don't know, but I haven't cried since Sunday. I'm thankful to be able to smile at my colleagues for a change.

Grace is busy these days with admissions offices, scholarship interviews, and even recruiters! I don't even want to think about the empty nest. Yikes. Not going there.

I think I'll go to bed.

xxoo

This One Point

I am aware of repeating waves of emotional extremes. Often I feel panicked. I want to run and hide, to another country maybe; I even checked the expiration date on my passport- almost as if this reality might be escaped if I could just do something- quick enough. Then other times I feel a quiet peace, almost hopefulness, in an awareness that since I must create a new construct for the future, I might as well create a cool positive one.

What an outrageous set of extreme emotions in one day. From stumbling and crying and snotting through wood-hauling, in my now-familiar stunned state (it's the way I am when a dose of the reality prescription hits me), crying great streams of tears and wailing embarrassingly, bent over in the back yard, to the breathtakingly sweet moments I spent watching Stephen tenderly care for and play with his little girl at his house (while the Saints won the NFC championship in overtime.)

I have lost a treasure and I will not be comforted this loss. But I also still have treasures. I have friends and family who give and pray and share and work and who are bright and generous and creative and loving and fun. I have a job that allows me to hang out with eleven and twelve year-olds and teach them science all day. How cool is that?

I have a warm house and the ground under it doesn't shake. There are no bombs falling in my town. I am not hungry. Of all the women in the world, I am one of the fortunate ones.

Dear God, please remind me of my blessings when my eyes open in a few hours, on a Monday dawn, and my heart's ache begs to stay in bed with a box of tissues.

xxoo

Dear Friends,

If you are still out there, please continue to pray for me. Most of the time now I just want to run away and hide. Perhaps it is a natural phase of grief or my imagination, but I get the feeling that people think I should be "over it" by now and are annoyed by my continuing sadness. Some people won't look me in the eye anymore, like they've lost respect for me. I know I'm never going to get over this, so everyone will be disgusted by me eventually, I guess. I wish I could disappear. I wish I could stop waking up. Morning is just a time to figure out how to cope with a walking nightmare for another day, to figure out how to pretend there's not a knife in my heart, so I won't make everyone else uncomfortable.

The other challenges of life: paying bills, keeping up with home-improvements, dealing with the boss, etc., are just too much. It seems like the universe is trying to snuff me out. The IRS is coming after me unjustly, the mortgage company is threatening to foreclose justly, Grace is applying to college and I can't even give her the application fees (it's somehow wrong that TEACHERS can't send their own kids to college, isn't it?) I feel guilty that I'm not more help to my other kids now. It even seems like they are avoiding me. Do they think I don't love them as much as I love David, since I'm so preoccupied with losing him? I should be able to help them cope right now, but I'm too sad and they seem to wish I would just stay away from them. They don't even want to talk to me lately.

People say God will never give you more than you can handle. I used to believe that. I used to believe it was my guarantee that I'd never lose a child. Obviously, I was wrong. Maybe I don't understand anything about God. Maybe what I thought I understood was all a fabrication of my own ego and imagination. Maybe God willingly gives some people more than they can handle. Lot's of people lose their minds with pain and anguish, don't they? Maybe He's made it so that I will "handle it", as in, it won't physically kill me, even though it would be easier for me if it did. Maybe He just makes some of His children suffer so others will be grateful it's not them and praise Him. Whatever. I just know that I don't really know anything and was a fool to think I ever did. Maybe God's just showing me how ignorant I am and is punishing me for ever thinking I knew Him at all.

Dead of Winter

The solstice may be the shortest day of the year, but it's not the darkest day of winter. For me, winter's at its bleakest sometime around the middle of January. The holidays are spent and spring is still too far away. The maples aren't even thinking pink yet.

We've gotten off light here in Virginia the last couple of years, but this year we got an arctic blast, after all the storminess of November and December. It seems the very atmosphere is upset, right along with me.

The ground was saturated when the freeze came, so now the top few inches of earth have been crunched up with the expansion of the water. Geologists have a name for it (it escapes me at the moment) but when spring comes with her heavy rains, there will be a fresh load of sediment in the streams; ancient bits of rock and organic matter will be loosed and finally get to travel again. I expect it will be easy to put the garden in. But for now, I'll dream of tomatoes and peppers and expanding the garden with new vegies for Jordan, and I'll stack fire wood.

I've been avoiding this journal and Facebook and even personal email for a couple of weeks. I've tried to focus on school and the long-neglected chores of home. David's absence follows me around, no matter what I'm doing or where I am. It's funny; when he was alive, we'd often go for a couple of weeks without talking to or seeing each other and I wouldn't be bothered or miss him too terribly much. But now, knowing I won't see him again until my own death, I can't stop thinking about him.

My ADD doesn't help. I'm in the middle of class explaining how the sun makes Pacific Ocean water into Virginia snow, and without warning I see David playing in the snow. Like moving with a broken bone, I'm suddenly caught by the pain. I tell myself to save the memory for later, I swallow, breathe, and go on with the lesson.

I remember the picture I took of the three oldest boys - still little- about two, three, and four years old, the three of them piled up on a sled, with David on the bottom, then Mark, and Stephen on top, all bundled up, red faces and bright eyes shining out from under their caps, tolerating Mom staging the shot, deliriously happy with the new joy of snow and sledding. I'm sure this was a day the wood stove was kept stoked, play clothes tumbled continously in the dryer, and cocoa steamed in little cups, making little brown mustaches stretch wide above all-day smiles. I remember Papa had come outside to play with us, explaining the how-to's of winter fun the old-fashioned way; he pulled the boys on the sled behind the tractor. I can still hear them all laughing. It was Utopia.

So, by God's grace this kind of joy is ahead for Stephen and Jessica, and my other children as well. The deposit they will pay - that any parent pays, is the certainty that days of sledding with little ones will fade into memory, a definition of bittersweet, an image and a scent in the vapor of life. No matter how brightly an event is burned into a mind, it will be only there, trapped, if one is lucky, in electrically triggered brain cells, until the body is left behind. I wonder; may we take our memories with us when we go? I hope so. I hope David can revisit these happy days of his childhood. If I close my eyes, I can be there with him.

xxoo

New Year

So we have a new year and a new decade, a new direction for our economy too- or so the analysts predict. There's a new reality for our family and for us, as individuals. I think of resolutions.

My grief has been often accompanied by a constantly heavy heart, an emotionally weighty thing that must be toted from place to place, with no escaping it. Well, truth be told, that weight isn't just emotional. It's chemical. It's more potential energy waiting to be burned, waiting right there between my chin and my knees. Meanwhile, my jeans don't fit and I won't buy new ones because I don't think I deserve them.

So if anyone needs a resolution, it's me. I need to set a fresh course, line up my sight with points ahead, ones of my own choosing. I need a strategy for living through the next two years and making it a time of growth instead of decay. What would David have me do? If David has an enhanced perspective now (I believe he does) what would he advise me to do with my new year?

One piece of grieving advice that is consistent is that we should continue to talk to the one who has died. So while we were all at the beach, and David seemed so close, I asked him, "What should I do with myself now, Son? How am I going to get through living all these years ahead with this huge whole in my life and heart? " Then I just opened my mind for what David would say. He said, "Take care of yourself, Mom. Do what's best for you. Don't let sadness pull you down. Keep living and enjoying life and don't worry, I'll be around. I'll check on you from time to time, like always. We'll be together again before you know it."

"Okay, Son. I will. Love you."

"Love you too, Mom."

While we were all together at the beach house I would sit on the sofa and close my eyes and listen to a game at the table, a conversation, or the sweet, high-pitched squeals and coos of the baby. I watched Mark and Stephen working in the kitchen, preparing a feast of fresh calamari, rockfish, and trout. It was great.

This morning I walked with my friend Jan. She's another one whom I can be away from for many months, and then when we talk again it is as if we were never apart.

I am so fortunate.

Dear God, thank you for so many blessings. Help me to better care for myself. Help me to not be too sad, but to enjoy life to its fullest, one moment at a time. Amen xxoo