Sometimes a series of events seizes you, shakes you hard,
bewilders you. You search for words to comfort those who have lost a loved one,
but words sound hollow. Like a snake chasing its tail, your thoughts circle,
with no resolution and little rest.
It started with a pet, a sweet, companionable, blue-eyed cat
who was losing weight. No problem, I’ll intensify my efforts, take him back to
the vet, try this, try that; I’ll nurse him back to health.
I know how to give
TLC to a cat.
Instead, he continued to decline over weeks before my
disbelieving eyes. On a Friday another trip to the vet reassured us that his
blood work was okay, but over the weekend he spiraled downhill. By Monday we
tearfully made the decision to end his struggle.
Helpless. I was sure I could mend him, but I was powerless
to save him. Some would say he was just a cat, but when he looked into your
face, there seemed to be a soul behind those eyes. I stroked him for the last
time as the vet put the needle in Blue’s leg, and his big round blue eyes
closed.
A friend of over 15 years, Jim, who sometimes picks up a
day’s work with my husband, dug Blue’s grave while we took the kitty for his
last trip to the doctor. Jim is empathetic that way, and was glad to help out.
Days later, Jim’s wife, Lillian, took her own life with a
shotgun blast to her head. The scene was so awful that seasoned police officers
cried. Lillian left behind children, grandchildren, and a shell-shocked
husband.
Words come out of your mouth, but you know they are no
comfort. Or pitifully inadequate comfort. But you say them anyway. Jim’s
previous wife had died of cancer, and now this.
A few more days passed, and a neighbor, 36, went out alone
on her paddleboard in the afternoon. Extremely physically fit, she somehow met
with an accident. Sheriff’s deputies and another neighbor in his boat found her
body floating in the creek hours later. She had drowned. A phys-ed teacher, she
was a wife and a mother of two children under six-years of age.
A week passed, and a former student, Frank, who visits about
once a year, stopped by to see me. He’d lost a lot of weight, and told me he had
bad news. Oh, no, the cancer, I thought, knowing from his last visit that he’d
had a biopsy. But the shocking news was that he had lost his wife of 35 years
to a botched routine surgery at the end of June.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen like this,” he said. “I was
supposed to go first. Why am I still here?”
We chatted for a while, and as we talked about religion and
the possibility of life after death, Frank mentioned that he’d read Proof of Heaven: A Neurosurgeon’s Journey
into the Afterlife, by Eben Alexander.
Strangely enough, I had also purchased that same title, but
hadn’t worked up the courage to read it—I thought it would undoubtedly make me
cry, thinking about my own lost loved ones, even if it gave me hope to think
that a formerly disbelieving doctor had experienced death and returned
convinced of an afterlife.
I did my best to comfort Frank—he’s a “no b.s.” kind of guy,
so the normal platitudes were quickly dispensed with as we talked about death,
and how a healthy woman can die with a careless slip of a surgeon’s blade for
the simplest of procedures. Frank blames himself, too, for not listening when
his wife said she didn’t like the doctor.
Frank has grown children and a couple of grandchildren who
have rallied around and give him emotional support. I was impressed that he had
come to school to tell me what had happened; it seemed to be a difficult
mission he’d worked himself up to perform. Perhaps it was a station on his road
of grief.
My heart ached for him in his sorrow, but after all the
other recent deaths, I was also somewhat numb. My midlife wisdom, often a comfort, let
me down. My efforts to understand why
all these tragedies were happening to people in our circle were futile.
Intellectually I know that difficulties do converge at
times, but it’s hard not to feel broken when so many are suffering in every
direction. Just like when I was trying to nurse Blue back to health, I want to
make it all better, to mend the broken friends, to mend myself. I used to have
much more confidence that I could make it all better. Part of the lesson here
seems to be that not even a smart, capable midlife lady with all the good will
and determination a woman can muster, has the power to fix broken hearts. The
owner of each heart must fix his or her own.
No one else can do the work.And it can be slow, hard, messy, lengthy work.
