You are there

Making peace with last-day-of life traumas

When I was a child, in the rural and small town school systems where I acquired my first eighteen years of education, we had a weekly “movie” afternoon. All the elementary kids would be herded into the school gymnasium (which also served as our lunch room and on evenings the gathering place for some community events), where we sat on the hard, glossy floor and tried to see (and hear: the small speakers were barely audible, especially with the echoes from the large room). The movies were on reels, threaded through the projector and always black and white.

Among the films we watched en masse, a series featuring Walter Cronkite from the mid-1950s, “You Are There,” enriched our history awareness. If you are of my generation or older, you may remember the series. The opening was always the same, with the insertion of that film’s unique historical event and date.

If I close my eyes and click the video above, within seconds I am back at Emily Elementary School. It’s 1975, although the film was produced more than twenty years earlier. And now, fifty (can that be possible?!) years later, those memories collide with reality. All these years later, I remember what it was like in great detail.

Today it’s been a year since Claudia lived her last full day of life. I say “lived,” but being attached to life support systems is not really living. In reality, we lost Claudia nine days earlier when her significant brain event occurred, and not even the skills of a neurosurgeon could bring her back to us. But in some way she was yet with us, although not as we knew her to be.

A year ago at this time, our children and grandchildren who could had visited with her, said their goodbyes, and we were readying ourselves for the decision I had made to remove the life supports. By this time there were no longer doctor’s visits to the room, the ICU nurses were necessarily less engaged, most of the equipment had already been removed from the room. A once crowded ICU room was now nearly bare, only the sound of the respirator wheezing in the background.

There were no longer visitors, and so Claudia and I spent a peacefully quiet day together. I busied myself with email and text connections from family and friends from across the country, occasionally reading other materials, glancing from my seat to the corridors of the hospital, hearing other recovering patients as they gradually were restored to health.

I was more than a little resentful, hearing the gravelly voice of an elderly man, a stroke victim, attempting to respond to a nurse’s inquiries. He was, after all, an old man, retired for years, naturally closer to death than my wife should have been. In the larger, cosmic sphere, I wondered what the universe was thinking allowing him to live and consigning my productive, much younger wife to linger in non-responsiveness.

And how, I wondered, does a loving spouse meaningfully say “goodbye” in such a moment? What was my most appropriate response? How could I make peace with the impending rift and its consequences after nearly thirty years together? I know that well meaning and considerate people told me: you need to do what you need to do in this situation. But that’s just it: people in those situations don’t have any idea what to do.

So I did what I thought I should do. I held her hand, I talked to her (although not excessively), I sat in the quiet and reminisced and then, at the end of the day, knowing my children and grandchildren were assembling at my home, I said “goodbye” as I walked out of her room. I had already begun to say goodbye over the previous days, but now I was anticipating a final goodbye the next day.

There is something about trauma that so attaches itself to one’s soul that it cannot be easily shaken away. When I close my eyes and remember, in a second I am there, back in the ICU room. The vidid details of those ten days a year ago return to me again and again, and while I have made some peace with those gut-wrenching moments, I suspect it will take me more time to reach a fuller sense of peace.

All along, I have found it healing to be honest with myself and others; I do not want to descend into denial. I have relived those moments with my children (I don’t impose it on them, it is a mutual discussion of shared angst). I have prayed and meditated and continue to seek Love’s kindness. All of this helps, but most of all this journey requires fastidious patience and deliberate openness to what Love wants to whisper in my ears.

The grief journey is such an interesting experience. It’s one we don’t choose, yet one we are compelled to address in one way or another. I’m discovering it’s the kind of thing where my understanding of time collapses in upon itself.

I was there a year ago. I am still “there” a year later. I may likely be “there” in some sense or another for the rest of my life. It is ineffable moments like these that I have to step back and breathe in a renewed awareness that beyond myself there is One who tends to what I understand as time in eternal ways I am not privy to.

I was there a year ago. I am “there” a year later. In time, I trust that I will be able to leave “there” there, but I’m not quite in that place yet.