Author: Jennifer Ohman-Rodriguez

Isn’t it funny how certain emotions are viewed as weaknesses? Funny maybe isn’t the word. Perhaps odd fits this scene better. Or even tragic. And before you resist my thoughts here, think about it a minute.

Another person’s pain mirrors our own. Not as an exact replica, per se. But as an unspoken acknowledgement only with one person feeling profoundly more than the other. The one feeling less standing in a form of emotional recognition called compassion or in its lesser cousin called empathy. Or posing in opposition to compassion as avoidance or dissociation. If called compassion or empathy, the one feeling less takes on the responsibility of pain’s witness. Holding the world accountable for another’s suffering. But if avoiding or dissociating, the witness asks the sufferer to take on the witness’s discomfort, adding weight to an already heavy heart.

We all know pain. We all know some form of broken-heartedness. We all know the ravages of grief, distress, and suffering upon our souls, in our hearts, and running rapid throughout our minds in the silence of night. We know because we are human. And even if our pain and grief remain small in comparison to another’s, we recognize how deep this pain called grief can go. Our imaginations take us there in quiet moments when no one is looking. When the future may seem full of unexpected traps. Life presenting once more as out of our control.

And we don’t always want to go there, to these dark places within us. To past traumas, both resolved and unresolved, or the possibility of future ones. The mirror of another’s grief unmasking the vulnerability we carefully protect with layers of busyness both actual and manufactured and other forms of protectant donned as costume, masquerade, or illusion.

I remember a man in Bermuda shorts standing next to me on the beach at Peck’s Landing as we waited for the dive team to find Tony. An older man, heavy set with a voice betraying his allergies. His voice an impetus to my aversion during my months of shock of certain voices in a certain timbre. “There’s really no hope, you know,” he said.

I turned quickly away from him searching out my point person on the first responder team. Someone who’s name I no longer remember. My mounting emotions mingling with anger. “Who is that man?”

“He used to have my job. He just retired.”

“Get rid of him or I will implode.”

My vulnerability became my voice on the day I met grief. And while it has taken months for me to say vulnerability no longer poses certain risk factors to my well-being and that of my sons, I still claim it as the beginnings of a new kind of inner courage. One born out of the moment when all the unnecessary layers of life vanished. Washed away beneath a dangerously unmarked treacherous river as I shook from within. Falling into a fragility which kept me company for months.

I say, there is an incredible strength in grief and beauty worn in mourning. The kind of strength called courage. Mourning which can only be called love. To apply weakness to this time and to these feelings is to shame the throbbing tenderness of life itself.

Another first responder, someone who tried so very hard to bring life back into Tony’s beautiful body, said goodbye to me with tears in his eyes on that day which changed everything. And then he hugged me with a fierceness I will never forget. Showing me the other side of courage. Giving me his vulnerability in his eyes and in his arms. Sharing a moment of unmasked emotion as I recognized in him what would become my truth.

*Art courtesy of Pixabay

Some scribbled thoughts from our first year of grief. Drafted May 10, 2017 between what would have been Tony’s fifty-fourth birthday and the nine-month anniversary of his death.

We live simply now in this time of grief. Simple food. Simple schedule. Simple wants. The heaviness slowly lifts. The agitation calms bit by bit. It is almost nine months.

In July of 2016 I wrote a blog piece on church spires. Steeples directing my way home point by point as I wound my way through small Iowa towns in waning summer light. I never posted those words. They lie in wait. Neglected. Unrevised. Upended by all that was to come in August.

Now I think people do. Point us home that is. To however we now define home. A place of refuge and therefore a source of strength. A place of solace and of love. “Where we do the hard, emotional work of relationships,” as Tony used to say although maybe in more casual language.

Yesterday Paul had another endoscopy, this time with a pill camera. I had a long hour wait, alone in the starkness of a recovery room, its sterility surrounding my vulnerability. One of the many, many, many times I miss Tony just being a few miles away at work. Available if necessary. Waiting as a form of prayer for a call of “all went well.”

My anxiety swirled, lodging in my pained arms and in my inability to breath. I texted two friends. But loving words encapsulated in bubbles were not enough. I wanted a human voice. I called another friend. She talked me through my fears even as her aging father held a tantrum in the background. Her father and I bookending her giving soul in the heavy emotions of my grief and his growing dementia.

The grabbing of hands, giving and receiving hugs, making eye contact, hearing voices over the phone, sharing thoughts transformed into words, brief smiles exchanged, sometimes even a laugh or two, these are the points which lead me in healing day by day. Often moment by moment.  Holding me together when I don’t know where my life’s destination truly is.

Today I rise early mixing waffle batter for Paul’s breakfast. I would rather hide in bed with my words and green tea and dark chocolate nursing my spring cold. But I force myself to parent. Because I wasn’t very good at it in the beginning of our trauma. My mind and body raging with shock. Lost between points in an abruptly chaotic universe.

I hope the boys forgive me when they are older or perhaps now. For the food that wasn’t cooked or even in the house. For the many hours I took refuge in my bedroom. For the words I did not have to share. For not understanding what they needed in their own pain. For putting my oxygen mask on first and theirs second. For so many things I know about or don’t. The decisions and gestures I left undone.

My point people remind me to forgive myself too. For everything. For last words never said. For not understanding what was happening that day on the beach. For only being able to gasp for breath the year before Tony died, the one filled with all that surrounded Ricky’s then mysterious illness. I lift these along with all my inadequacies up and out of myself each evening before bed. Giving them over to the universe and to the mystery of God. Unable to carry any extra luggage now in this journey called life.

*Photo and image credits: Pixabay.com

It’s eleven in the morning. I’m sitting opposite a Volkswagen service department man at our local dealership. I’m not supposed to be here right now. My day’s script with accompanying task list reads differently. But apparently my writers spent the night in revisions forgetting to send me this new draft at dawn. A draft placing me just about now in this chair off of Highway 1 in Iowa City, Iowa.

We’ve been living off-script since Tony died. Still I create lists, plans, and expectations for each day. Being organized makes me feel all is well. Yet organizing grief is a misnomer. More often than not this multi-layered emotional experience infused with its copious practical matters thwarts my plans. Every seemingly small event includes more paperwork, takes more time now, and lumps up my throat. I’m beginning to believe the trauma expert’s two-year healing prediction offered to me early on in grief when I batted it away, unable to accept the road ahead.

Today’s change, the part of the script in which I was to be zipping down Interstate 80 toward lunch with a dear friend, was replaced with a scene involving the mystery surrounding my defunct email address. I had some head’s up on this one. Knew already the computer people, far more skilled than I, were working on it. So the phone call asking me to come downtown to their shop wasn’t too out of line with my day. A small change to be accommodated. What surprised me on my drive downtown, sent my heart racing really,  was the check engine light glaring at me from my dashboard.

The computer people found all sorts of information about my email domain. Information formed early in the history of The Men’s Center. Information I did not know or really even cared about until now. Standing in the waiting area of their shop I learned how to reinstate my email with the help of a number of people working in far away countries across wireless air waves. The check engine light however forced me to reschedule lunch.

A ten minute drive later I find myself at the service check-in desk staring at the man behind the computer. It’s been all business up to this point. Masking perhaps what he thinks of me. I’ve been clear, maybe a bit demanding, in what I need which is a loaner vehicle. Tony’s classic Mercedes not currently well either. It’s engine light coming on too and the air conditioning ka-poot. Not having an appointment for this interchange may be part of the problem as well. Coupled with what could be construed as my sense of entitlement. Masked desperation (mine) the truth.

The car is under Tony’s name in the service man’s computer. Of course it is. I never did anything with the cars but drive them and take care of some routine stuff like getting gas. I tell this stranger to remove Tony’s name and why. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he says.

Good. He got that one right, I think. The many faceless computer people I spoke to on the phone today forgot this small moment of acknowledgement, a courtesy. Then looking deep into his screen he says, “I sold you that car,”

“The one I’m driving? In Cedar Rapids?”

“Tony was a counselor,” he states looking up at me.

“Yes. It was unexpected.”

Days later I remember. I wondered aloud, maybe even complained about having to look at a car on the north side of Cedar Rapids, ninety miles from where we were living at the time. But Tony felt he was getting a better deal out of the area and really liked the salesman. I acquiesced. We desperately needed a new car. Bugs having taken up residence in the back seat of our station wagon. Feeding off the crumbs deeply embedded in the universe existing underneath where the cushions meet forming a crevice. Multitudes of food particles leftover from the early childhood years of our children.

Now our former salesman turned service department guy clicks away at his keyboard. His eyes reading the screen. Yet a shift in his face muscles and posture, almost imperceptible, shares something with me as the room’s air parts for just a second. I take an instinctive, singular, sharp breath in. Through my mouth. Sucked in with a bit of noise from the wind of it. Realization flooding me just prior to my intake of oxygen or perhaps a recognition of something deeper than words.

He assures me my car is safe to drive until the scheduled check next week. Maybe he is less business like now. Maybe softening. Hoping if necessary there could be service people of all kinds willing to work with and for his loved ones in his stead. Or maybe I just imagine all this. Once again wondering if molecules of emotion are to be trusted or not. But then knowing they are. Floating human truths to be paid attention to.

Nothing else runs on schedule for the rest of my day. I throw it all to the wind. Go car shopping all by myself for the first time ever. Find finally what I want which is really not to see another check engine light until I’m way out of seminary. Along with heated seats and a white exterior because Tony was so very safety conscious. And I can’t bear to hear his admonishing voice in my head if I pull out of the car lot with any other color. Then I shop at a different grocery store, the one Ricky works at on the weekends. Get lunch giving into my hunger for once, and buy hot, homemade Mennonite pretzels for Paul. Once home crawl back into bed writing on my day-off from words and during the afternoon hours instead of my usual early morning reverie.

But what stays in my heart this particular day, one of so many in our ongoing complicated grief, is this: Someone Tony knew for just a brief blip on life’s timeline saddened knowing he no longer is here on this plane of existence. And I take great solace in this small knowing and others like it. Glimpses of others’ sense of loss and possibly their own approaching mortality. Their emotional release, although often cloaked, creating a molecular communion of sadness of sorts swirling in the air.

My doctor hurries. I persist. Grief emboldens me. I cling to my agenda. Pointing to my forehead I ask,”What is this?”

A scabby, bumpy thing popped out of my forehead sometime during the months before Tony died. The months in which I kept wondering if after the death of our dog, the death of Ricky’s dear friend, and the ongoing downward spiral of Ricky’s health what could be next. No time or energy during those trembling months for attending to myself.

The growth lives right in my very Swedish receding triangular hairline. The same hairline some of my first and second cousins have both male and female. Some families get identical tattoos. We just use our hairline to mark us as clan.

I pick at it in the beginning of this pain, in my ongoing angst. Sometimes ripping it off in anger only for it to grow back. Mocking me with its presence. Now at ten months into keeping grief my thinking clears enough helping me plan ahead once again and think about my own health.

“Looks like a basal cell,” she replies.

“What’s a basal cell?”

“Skin cancer,” she says as if this is a non-issue, “We’ll get you a referral.”

Shit. The last thing I need is skin cancer. But I look like the token poster child for the disease not interested in excessive use of sun block and hats until about two years ago. Skin cancer and osteoporosis popular among we fair-eyed, northern European types. So I suppose it is to be expected. Then given the stress inherent in grief, my cells are doing who knows what. Still skin cancer belongs on the list of things I do not want and cannot imagine adding to my long roll of issues to cope with.

Once home I call every dermatologist in town. Pleading. Begging. Pushing. I’m waitlisted everywhere. Still I persist, grief making me more adamant especially when my health may be compromised. Magically while trying to find an appointment at the University’s clinic, a space opens on the scheduler’s screen. “Oh!” she says, “I have an appointment now available tomorrow at 9:00 with Dr. So and So.”

“I’ll take it!” I scream. Relief floods my cells. Maybe even the ones in question.

The next morning I take off warning my younger son he may be late for school but then again what else is new? University rush hour swirls around my journey. An accident slows traffic even more. I’m running late. Parking in the wrong parking garage, I face what seems like a mile walk to the dermatology clinic through a labyrinth of walkways. The clinic moved since last time I was here with Ricky’s awful eczema which was in truth Lyme’s Disease but that’s really a whole other story and his to tell about.

I finally check in finding a chair to slump in only to realize I left my cell phone in the car many walkways and floors away. Neither son can get a hold of me. And I don’t believe I’ve been away from my cell (just in case!) for more than a few minutes since Tony died. Except for the time in the first fall of our grief when I lost my already battered phone, freaked out, and then found it beneath our mailbox.

My heart begins pounding with worry. For what brought me to this appointment in the first place. For what could happen if I am not just a phone call away. For what happened to us in August of 2016 creating my hyped vigilance in caring, in making sure all is well, in overseeing our grief.

Later after staring at the white walls of the exam room, waiting for eons, fighting mounting anxiety with deep measured breaths and therapeutic self-talk, the doctor arrives. He looks at my growth with a large magnifying glass breathing and making non-verbal communicative sounds under his breath. Finally he says, “I don’t think it’s cancer. I think it’s…(something I now don’t remember and probably could not pronounce.) I can freeze it off or I can cut it off and biopsy it.”

‘Biopsy it! I’m it,” I reply, “I am truly a single parent. Take it off. Biopsy it.”

I also tell him he mustn’t scar me which in the middle of all this angst reveals I am still concerned about topical issues. After I week or so I find he hasn’t to my relief. My skin smooth and clear.  New bits of hair filling in my receding triangle leaving me to wonder if I lost more hair during the shock of Tony’s death than I first imagined.

After a few more days the doctor calls with my results. His typical doctor call etiquette remains non-committal. I hold my breath at the stop light along the river’s construction zone. Finally he says, “It’s a wart.”

“A wart,” my voice pitch mounts as visions of those Scandinavian warty trolls roll across my mind’s eye. “You mean I could have just used Compound W?”

“Well if it grows back you can try an over-the-counter medicine,” he replies.

Another week passes. I laugh at the entire situation until the bill arrives. My procedure not fully covered because of our medical insurance deductible. My wart removal’s initial cost is one thousand dollars!  Obviously I am not emotionally healed yet. The old me would have researched the growth. Maybe even experimented with wart removal first before seeing a doctor. But I am still highly reactive. Measured thought remains a dream away.

More time goes by. The wart does not return. Another bill arrives. The cost of wart removal sinks by two hundred dollars or so. A small gift I think.

However in the same swirl of taking care of myself leading to the wart’s removal, I schedule a bone density test for August. In this week between what would have been our twenty-second wedding anniversary and the first anniversary of Tony’s death, I am upgraded from osteopenia to osteoporosis in my wrist and hip. My doctor puts me on medication to strengthen my bones. The ravages of my grief finally rearing an ugly head now at twelve months. Grief taking hold somewhere in my body playing on an already weakened area. Physical and emotional health responding to one another. Playing off each other. One a pinch. The other an ouch. Not so separate as we all tend to think.

Still I’m thankful for good care in all realms of our life this past year. Good care leading to emotional healing, trauma relief, medical diagnosis, and solid treatment plans. All helping us repair, rebuild and live despite it all.

And for me, well with good care there is this added benefit, a “bonus feature” as Tony used to say. One I hadn’t thought of until recently when I almost stumbled into the face of it while rediscovering with my sons the living world outside our grief. One brought home to me by warts and weak bones. A possibility which because I receive good care remains in the realm of my anxious imagination. A thought which when entertained out loud would have made my late and dear husband laugh.

The avoidance of becoming an ancient, warty, humped over troll.