More real than real.....

A year ago, we were in full battle armor. Jeanne and I had a single focus: to do everything and anything we could for Tom. If that meant calling Hospice nine times in one night, so be it. We took on intractable hiccups, and an arrogant pharmacist in sweatpants who tried to demean our efforts to stop them. We learned to lift and carry someone bigger than both of us, and eventually how to keep from running a wheelchair into a door jamb. We laughed and sang and pulled up every trick we had to put a smile on his face, make light of the unthinkable, and keep ourselves in one piece.

I know we did a good job. I know that the troops who joined us in the last few weeks were stellar - heroic, strong, competent, the A team. The A+ team. We stayed up for days, taking shifts, spelling one another. We had one goal: to love Tom.

Now, a year later, I look back and realize that we were also numb - with exhaustion, repressed sorrow and grief, and the need to ignore the full impact of what every task meant, what every day was leading to.

As we lead up now to the anniversary of Tom's death, those days come back to me uncensored. The full emotional impact rests heavily on my chest, and I am stunned that I didn't throw myself on him and beg him to stay, or collapse in a corner, weeping uncontrollably. Instead I called the funeral home, and we washed linens and returned medical equipment. We threw away boxes of hospice medications in their cruelly impossible to open plastic containers. Exhausted family members took down the structures of a life at its end, and returned the house to normal.... whatever that meant now.

In five days it will be the day, and already I am disabled, a crumbled mess of tears and sorrow. I keep wondering what's wrong with me, as if I don't have the answer staring me in the face. If I were in some other culture this anniversary day would be considered the end of something. I would take off my black clothes and come back fully into the company of the living. But since I'm here, where we face the stages of life with no guidebook at all, I'm just left wondering what the next year of mourning will look like, and if the massive emptiness of life without my brother will really be changed even then.