The Last Detail: Part I

This post is split into two parts, which seems appropriate.

Two years ago, almost to the day, Steve had been admitted to the VA hospital with a preliminary diagnosis of lung cancer, which was verified within a week. A bizarre seven months of death and dying ensued, like an unfamiliar script written by Shirley Jackson, directed by David Lynch. It even had the surprise twist ending, though the outcome of the story was simple enough to anticipate.

Life in Sunny Southern California!

I let love guide me through that time. With two people, love's a real good tool for just about anything. But once one of them is gone, love loses its familiar avenues from one heart to another. It spills. It sputters. It overflows in undirected grief. It becomes ineffectual. The love hasn't gone wrong, only astray and underappreciated.

That shell of pure shock can be debilitating. You stumble like the survivor of this blast, feeling for your equilibrium, the world filtered through ringing ears and poorly focused eyes. On the other side of this, people look in and see loss and grief, which makes them nervous, afraid, terrified. Many let the repulsion of death overcome the desire to reach out to the afflicted. At close quarters, grief can be quite contagious. Everyone knows this.

So it's not just the grief and mourning that a survivor has to overcome, but the complexity of placing one's self back into the world, removing your filters and others' fears; not just being of the world once again but in the world. It's a sore process, because you can't do it successfully without taking the time to rebuild faith and trust in yourself. New fords are formed for the love to travel. A form of spiritual budding seems to take place. Death and birth. Death and Birth.

I guess Joni Mitchell wasn't just being pretentious.

Perhaps it's because I signed all the escrow papers this weekend—our house is sold—but I feel the clock is ticking, for the first time in months. There is a finite framework for my move. Shit or get off the pot. Let's have an adventure!

It frees me to take the important parts of Steve with me. He would love driving cross country; I'd have to goose him into it, like when we went to Europe, but he would get a kick out of it. He wasn't so keen on the idea of winters, but I love them.

And perhaps I was ready for this change. It started with a Facebook post of a quote by Henry Scott Holland:

“Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room. Nothing has happened. Everything remains exactly as it was. I am I, and you are you, and the old life that we lived so fondly together is untouched, unchanged. Whatever we were to each other, that we are still. Call me by the old familiar name. Speak of me in the easy way which you always used. Put no difference into your tone. Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow. Laugh as we always laughed at the little jokes that we enjoyed together. Play, smile, think of me, pray for me. Let my name be ever the household word that it always was. Let it be spoken without an effort, without the ghost of a shadow upon it. Life means all that it ever meant. It is the same as it ever was. There is absolute and unbroken continuity. What is this death but a negligible accident? I am but waiting for you, for an interval, somewhere very near, just round the corner. All is well. Nothing is hurt; nothing is lost. One brief moment and all will be as it was before. How we shall laugh at the thought of parting when we meet again!”

It's true: beyond Steve not being here, everything else is intact, and has been since the day he died. That makes me feel solid and real: the change in perception was mine alone. Everything else remains exactly as it was.

I'm starting to think that the mourning process is not for the dead, but for that part of me which was torn away when he moved out of reach. The part of Steve that is part of me I still hold and cherish. It only makes sense that he should do the same with the part of me that has become him.

It may sound insane, but it makes sense to me.

Then I saw this quote from St. Augustine:

“The things over the loss of which you mourn have indeed passed away, for they were in their nature temporary, but their loss does not involve the annihilation of that love … it abides in its own treasury…. Does the miser lose his gold when he stores it in a secret place? Does he not then become … more confidently assured that the gold is in his possession when he keeps it in some safer hiding-place, where it is hidden even from his eyes? …and shall heavenly love sorrow as if it had lost for ever that which it has only sent before it to the garner of the upper world?”

Word to your mother, Auggie.