grief arrives before dawn

Sometime I have struggled to stay away from this blog becoming a place for me to reveal the darker side of my reflections. But since August, I have been going through another phase of grieving and despair about more than personal issues have crept in, usually arriving during the darkest part of the night, after about five hours of sleep but well before I want to awake.

This morning, after Mark got up and returned to sleep, I awoke with the now familiar flutter in my stomach and mild feeling of panic. I seem to have to work through all of my affirmations, memories of Naples and Napa, California, Florence and Rome, Italy, letting more recent memories cascade forward--of last night's community conversation in Marana, of yesterday's reading Chapter Two of The Sorcer's Stone with 5th graders at Pueblo Gardens, of Kevin and Nicole working me through my steps at Physcial Therapy, all those thoughts as I try to breath slowly, reduce the fluctuations in my metabolism and then I come to grief.

My chest tightens and I cry silently under the bedcovers. I cry for Mom, who died last August but who began to leave us a couple of years before. I seem to be retracing her final behaviors with my own: focusing on my physical changes, leaning on my husband for attention, nudging my son for emotional contact. I see her in me and somehow feel reconnected. But it's a false impression because, after a year now, I know she is really gone, except in memory. And, in August, this year, I thought I was going to lose Dad to breast cancer and that episode through me into Alice's rabbit hole where I still go in the dark of night, needing to wake early to reassure myself I am still here. Dad hangs on, living somewhere between euphoria of chowing down on fries with a McDonald's McRib sandwich, preceded by his morning walks and the suggestion of suicide he makes between sandwich bites to end his life by not taking his prescriptive pills. I listen to his meandering between these emotions and just hang on for the ride, as long as it lasts, knowing I will drop into the abyss when he dies.

And I grief for the loss of my relationship with my sister. Never an easy one, even when we played together on long midwestern winter days in the chilly basement/playroom of our house on McClure. Adulthood brought more bumpiness and estrangement, briefly rebraided through our early days of shared motherhood. Then torn apart again twelve years ago when she was hospitalized. As she struggled to regain an equilibrium of control through medications and other choices I can only guess at, our gap widened. It was partly due, I think, to our different responses to mom's dementia and to the challenges we each faced as our child/children grew into adulthood. Now, through a bumbling step I made on this blog, the fragile thread of sisterhood seems broken. We do not speak. She has not responded to my last email. The holidays beckon and we are apart.

My mother's brother died two weeks ago. Mom loved him very much. He was the only person I knew that she let call her by her given name, Jessie. At some point in her young adulthood she dropped that name and became Carolyn, her middle name. I don't know that story and I wish I did because I bet it cost her some pain with her mother. But she did it, became a working gal during the war, smoked cigarettes on the rooftop of Woolworth's, and went to dances at the YMCA where she met my dad.

As I grew up, there were many times I wish she had left my dad and taken me away from his anger and fierce love. I know now he grew up in an alcoholic home and suffered physical and emotional abuse which he passed on to me. My sister didn't get the physical hits but she suffered as a bystander and paid/pays her own price. I thought, for these past twelve years or so, that I had bypassed the compulsive behaviors that crippled my dad (and his family), that my sister adapted to and lived her way. Even though I came to acknowledge, following my son's spiral into unhealthy adolescent behaviors, that I had learned enabling from my mom, learned how to control and try to fix others' problems, and, in my head, recognized my own "stinkin' thinkin'" as a compuslive disease, somehow, I kept the deeper parts of the disease in a manageable place.

But in April, when unexpectedly, a ladder fell on me, dislocating and shattering my ankle, something else snapped. Right before the accident, I had gone through my third year of repeat/more imaging for my annual mammogram. I have lost a good friend to breast cancer during those three years and know two more diagnosed with it. Each year for the past three, I felt the sword of Damacles hang over me. Then, when I thought this year I had dodged it again, the ladder fell. And among my feeling of shock (which I did physically experience as well as mentally and emotionally), I also felt relief that here was something real, not anticipated or feared, remembered and hidde; here there was a real injury I had to pay attention to. So for almost seven months now, that has been my focus: healing my ankle. It delayed, I think, a normal pattern of grief for my mom. It diverted me from getting too involved in my son's circuituous life and tugged me away from other places where I could have slipped into too much helping.

But, as I have recovered and healed from the accident, I have slipped back into old patterns: too much involvement in "fixing" my community, too much worry about Dad, too much fear about aging (mine and my sister's--will we, like mom, have minor strokes, be misdiagnosed, face dementia with increasing isolation and confusion). And so, here I am today: waking up at 4 a.m., trying to use self-talk and memory, succumbing and surrending as the light breaks, to grief and tears, stretching my ankles and standing up, coming to the safe space of the written word and putting it down. Somehow, like writers before me, and after, I hope, the order of one word coming after another is similar to the rhythm of ankle recovery I have learned at PT: how walking is not about going in a straight line but zigzaging, back and forth, up and across and down. This is how we walk, how we live, how we grow. And we do, often, regain balance, find our center, heal and lean forward, into the dawn.