There, but for the grace of God

A few days ago I ran into a lady I know, and I found out that she recently lost her husband. Her husband had cancer, from asbestos. They diagnosed him last December, he passed in August. She’s doing what any of us would be doing in her place, she’s going to work, going about her daily activities, doing what needs to be done, she’s holding up, she’s… surviving…

But she’s devastated, she looks terrible, she’s aged, and her eyes are sad. Her eyes are vast pits of sadness, I could barely stand to look into them, such was the loneliness, the hopelessness, the unadulterated, boundless, inexplicable, all-encompassing despair.

Seeing her didn’t so much as take my breath away as it quite simply sucked it so violently out of my ribcage I wondered if I would ever breath again. I had no words, no comfort to give, nothing to offer that could possibly make her feel better, because, let’s be honest nothing will make her feel better for a really, really long time.

And all throughout this brief encounter, as I let her talk because talking about it seemed what she needed in that moment, as I looked at her, tried to show her support, tried to express something, anything that would show her I cared, a teeny voice whispered in my ear… “there, but for the grace of God, go I”.

Linking up today with Shell at Things I Can't Say

And the windows of the heavens were opened and rain fell upon the earth

Last week in Genoa, six people died due to rivers overflowing. Some were children. It’s hard to believe that something like this could happen in this day and age – people died because it’s raining. It’s humbling isn’t it? 

No matter our advances in technology and communication, no matter how evolved we are, how large our brain stems, nature is always stronger, faster, and mightier than we will ever be. I’d like to comment on how people reacted on the news (negatively, and oh so stupidly) to the events, but I won’t cause otherwise it seems I’ve always got it in for Italians and I really don’t, many more people were altruistic, helped out, made intelligent, compassionate comments and generally behaved decently and like human beings. There are always a few bad apples, right? So I’m going to focus on something else related to this tragedy.

The thing that amazes me about Italy is that (as far as I know – I’ve been accused of generalizing) they don’t do an awful lot to prepare people for natural disasters. I remember when I was in school in America we had fire drills, and talks about what to do if a hurricane or a tornado hit, if there was flooding. Parents were encouraged to make emergency plans with their kids, where do you go, who do you call, establishing a family meeting point – I don’t know if schools in Texas still do all this, but I think it’s pretty important.

Granted there are no tornadoes and hurricanes in Italy, but there are earthquakes and there’s flooding and I’m sure there are a whole host of snow related emergencies in mountain areas and yet they don’t teach kids (or adults for that matter) what to do. Schools don’t even have fire drills. Sure, all buildings here are made of cement or brick and mortar not wood, so there are fewer fires in general, but it’s not completely unheard of, I can’t even imagine the panic that would ensue here with no plan in place in case of a fire in a public building.

A mother and two children who died in Genoa last week ran into a building when they saw the waters rising thinking they’d be safe. When rivers flood waters rise very quickly, so they ran into the closest building and closed the entrance door. But they didn’t go up. So the force of the water blew open the door and (I’m assuming) they drowned. Some kids tried to get to safety by going in a basement.

Six (or seven, reports are sketchy) people died. Many people in the media here (and on the street) are blaming the government, blaming the rampant unregulated construction. It’s true, surely these things are somewhat to blame. In fact, did you know that in Italy most people will build without a permit and then wait for something called the “condono”, which basically is something that happens every few years in which the government says oh, ok fine, here’s your permit for this building, house or whatever you built with no permission, pay a fine. Ridiculous. Everyone just does whatever the hell they want and wait to get approval post factum. This is related because unregulated construction is part of the problem with flooding rivers apparently.

Anyway, back to the flood. A host of different things could have been done differently to prevent this, but it’s easy to point fingers after the fact. Natural disasters happen, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, fires, damns break, lighting strikes… shouldn’t the very first step be teaching the population a few basic survival techniques to face them? If there’s flooding go up, don’t sit on the bridge with your iphone filming it. Talk about it in schools, write articles on what to do in the event of this or that apocalyptic scenario, talk about it on tv. And have drills because when people are in danger, they panic and often don’t think straight, or they sit and stare incredulously at what’s coming at them without trying to get the hell away, but if they know what they’re supposed to do they at least have a fighting chance against nature. That’s what our government can do for us. People need to be taught how to react in case of emergency, any emergency, and they need to be taught to listen to the authorities telling them what to do when in the midst of one instead of just doing whatever the heck they want. 

I’m pretty sure our public schools and our public television can spare some resources to educate the public on safe emergency procedures, after we’re done, you know, talking about whom our prime minister is sleeping with of course.

Natural disasters happen, whether we provoke them or not, the key is being prepared. So let’s hope we can stop the finger pointing long enough to educate people and coordinate our resources so that, not if, but when this happens again the casualty count will be zero. There will always be damage to property and infrastructure when things like these happen, but I’m pretty sure we can count ourselves lucky if no one dies because it rained too much. 

So, Italian Government, please, do something to educate us, to prepare us because knowledge is power, even over nature sometimes.

No woman no cry

The original title of this post was “Heartbreak, a little piece at a time” but then I went and got inspired by the king of reggae of all people. This post has been a weeklong work in progress, so if it sounds fragmented, well, it’s because it is. Let’s just say it reflects how my feelings have evolved throughout the week.

My chest hurts. It physically hurts though there is no physical reason for it. My sternum feels like it’s been whacked repeatedly, it feels bruised; it hurts at the slightest touch. I debated with myself long and hard about whether I wanted to write this post or not, it’s almost too personal for my personal blog, but at the same time the reason why I started blogging was to have a place where I could write what I couldn’t say out loud. That’s why I don’t use our names… but then I went and told everyone I know about it and now I find myself wondering whether I can talk about whatever I want or not cause I’m not just communicating with strangers, I’m also communicating with friends and family. The conclusion I came to was that I’m thirty five years old and I need to be able to communicate what I need to communicate without having to worry about anybody’s opinion, or judgment. It just means that my friends and my family may find out something new about me, because at the end of the day, those people who judge will judge me whether I speak my mind or not, so I might as well vent in the process.

So let me tell you why my chest hurts. Many moons ago a Chinese doctor told me that the center of the chest, the sternum, represents our emotions, our feelings. It’s where we send (or more precisely, block) all that emotional energy that we don’t want to, or simply can’t, deal with. I’m a huge repressor of my feelings, I always have been, so my chest has often hurt, off and on. Obviously lately I’ve had to keep it together, be strong, be centered, and you can’t do that if your emotions are all over the place, so you repress them. And that’s why my chest hurts. And that’s why I don’t want to talk about the husband’s illness this time around.

I’ll write about it till my finger’s cramp, but I do not want to talk about it, because I’ll start crying and I won’t be able to stop. All this to say, don’t ask me about the husband, please, again, I will keep everyone posted. If you really can’t help yourself, send me an email but don’t make me talk about it cause I can’t.

What prompted this post? What’s so personal that I can’t talk about it?

Well, Sunday was our last day together, we celebrated Easter, we spent a gorgeous day with absolutely beautiful weather together. And the husband packed his bag. As he was packing his bag he started quietly crying. Now think about this for a sec, you walk into your bedroom and your husband, your man, your rock, your soul mate is packing his bag for the hospital and he’s crying. He’s crying because he doesn’t want to leave his family, he doesn’t want to be ill, he doesn’t want to be shut up in a sterile room for a month, and then another month, he doesn’t want to feel like shit run over again, he’s scared and angry and afraid he’s never going to get better. And tell me, tell me if it doesn’t feel like your heart is going to implode in your chest.

There is nothing I can do. There is nothing I can say to make him feel better, to make it easier, and it breaks my heart.

The unfairness of it all has no explanation, no meaning, nothing that we can cling to and say if we do this or that everything will be alright in the end, because we have no way of knowing. I guess what’s different the second time you hear the doctors say leukemia is that you simply don’t go in with the same blind hope that in the end everything will be alright, because, quite simply, we have no way of knowing.

Now this post has been in the making for a few days, it’s been read, and re-read, written and re-written and what I can say at this point is that now that he’s in the hospital both the husband’s mood and my own have improved greatly. Dreading something is much harder than actually living it. When you’re weathering the storm you’re too busy to worry about the water seeping under the doorframe, so to speak. Whereas when you’re waiting for it, sitting in front of the weather channel going “oh shit, the hurricane’s coming” it feels like the worst thing in the world. So, here we are in the middle of the freaking hurricane.

You know, many months ago I read a blog post where the author was talking about a friend who was fighting cancer or something like that, I can’t remember, but what stuck to my mind is an idea she put forth in her post I think it may even have been the title of the post: “It’s better than chemo” and the sense was that we complain daily about hundreds of little annoyances but really if we compare them to having to undergo treatment for cancer they really start to seem insignificant.  And so I started saying it to myself, in my head, occasionally: “the baby kept me up all night… well, it’s better than chemo”, “I have to work late again, eh, it’s better than chemo”, “the car won’t start…”, “that asshole cut me off…”, “I lost my keys…” most things are actually better than chemo, except possibly the alternative to having chemo if you have cancer (i.e. death). It really puts a lot of things into perspective.

I guess that my long and rambling point is that cancer sucks, it sucks that the husband is back in the hospital, it sucks horribly that he’s not yet forty, has two small children and a wife who loves him more than even she thought possible (that would be me) and he has such an aggressive, recurring, crappity crap pot leukemia that won’t leave us the hell alone, it sucks beyond what is humanly imaginable that he has to go through the whole treatment again after less than a year but it sucks infinitely, monumentally less than the alternative, doesn’t it?

So there you go, despite my best intentions of writing a sad, sad post, it seems that the silver lining is always lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. I guess this is what I want to leave with you today, as a sort of hat tipping to my dad and to the husband, the two most optimistic people on the planet, there is always some good to be found in hardship. And that is what we must grab ahold of with all our strength, because in the end, thinking of the good is what gets us through it.

My heart breaks every time I see the husband in pain, or upset, or dreading the chemo, the endless transfusions, the loss of his hair and his strength and his will, and yet we treasure the time we get together when I visit in the hospital, quiet time, just he and I, to talk and dream and plan our future together whatever and whenever it may be. Because though it’s true that we’ve lost the blind hope of the newbies we still need to hope, believe and have faith that in the end “everything’s gonna be alright” because that’s what life is all about (or so Bob Marley says).

Faith

Faith is a funny thing, you either have it or you don’t. My parents were both raised Catholic, neither one in particularly religious homes, just your run of the mill, church on special occasions, no meat on Fridays Catholics. Due to a slew of reasons I’m not going to get into, my parents decided not to baptize me or my younger brother. They instilled a certain amount of respect towards the Church, and most of our values are Christian values, but religion was never really a big thing at our house. And right now, I’m not sure this was a good thing. You see, I was raised without the church (a church, any church) so I don’t really feel the need for it now, I have almost no relationship to it. I have little patience for some of the more, let’s call them “old-fashioned” views the Catholic church holds, and I simply feel no need for organized religion. I respect it, my parents taught me that much, in fact, I respect all religions, I am fascinated by how deeply religion and cultural heritage are intertwined. In fact, I kind of miss it, and sometimes wish my parents had made more of an effort to bring religion into our lives. You could say that I’m an agnostic of sorts, I really don’t know what’s out there, if anything, I like the idea of there being a “God”, but I can’t honestly say whether I really believe in him (her, it) or not. I don’t have faith, and I wish I did, in something, anything, cause sometimes in life you need it.

This is why I decided to baptize my kids, we live in Italy, so there isn’t much choice, Italians are catholic. But I didn’t really care which religion my children were raised in, compatibly with our culture, of course, I just wanted them to be part of something, some sort of community, an ideal. My parents are Catholic, my husband is Catholic, so my kids will take the sacraments and go to catechism and learn about their religion, I will take them to church and hope that they learn to have faith in it, in God, in something. Until the day that they are old enough to decide what they want to do with their spiritual selves, the important thing for me, for now, is that they learn to have faith, that they nurture their spiritual selves and when they’re grown they’ll decide. Because, unfortunately, I don’t have faith and I honestly believe it has a lot to do with the way I was raised, I wasn’t taught it, it wasn’t part of my life, and it’s not something that comes easily (or at all) to me. This is a difficult post to write, I’ll explain what prompted it, maybe it’ll be easier for me to get my point across (there is one, a long-winded one, so bear with me!).

This morning I found out one of my neighbors passed away. She was in her late fifties, had lung cancer, did the chemo and seemed to be in remission. I didn’t know her very well, but she was the first neighbor I met when we moved here, she was the first person to welcome us to the neighborhood, she always went out of her way to say hi, and have a quick chat, whenever I ran into her, she was a genuinely nice lady. I saw her a few weeks ago and she was in great spirits, she thought she had the cancer beat, whenever she ran into the husband she would say to him “you’ll see, we’ll be fine, you and I, we’ll get better”. And then she found out the cancer had spread to her brain, and yesterday she passed away. Another neighbor came by to give me the news this morning, and she apologized, because she didn’t want to be giving me bad news after the year we had. I thought that was strange, everyone has bad years and good years, and last year was certainly better for me than for my neighbor’s family that is now dealing with this terrible loss.

So anyway today’s news prompted me to start counting my blessings, of course, and during a phone call to a friend I mentioned all this and added that I wasn’t so upset anymore at having been up all night with a sick baby, because I got to cuddle the girl and hold her and breath her in and that’s a blessing in itself, and we forget how lucky we really are when life, with all its minor inconveniences takes over. And my friend mentioned how it was strange that life’s little inconveniences still take over and we forget our blessings after all we’d been through.

And finally I get to the point of this. This afternoon the husband came home early (we were supposed to go to Tai chi) and announced that the hospital had called, and his last bone marrow biopsy turned up a small amount of malformed cells. So the doc suggested we go in and have a chat. I felt like my blood was freezing in my veins. And then I went into panic mode, followed swiftly by anger mode, followed swiftly by fear mode. The husband stayed surprisingly calm. And this prompted today’s little mental loop on faith, because throughout his illness everyone said to me (even I said to me) we have to have faith that everything will be alright. But you see, I don’t have faith. And today I managed to put into words what’s been at the back of my mind this whole time, I have no clue whether the husband is going to get better. Days like today make us feel like this illness will never end, will never go away, that he’ll never really be better, that we can never relax and plan for our future because we have no clue whether there is a future to be had at all. But the thing is, we don’t know because we can’t know. We can’t plan for our future with absolute certainty because there is no certainty. You can be fine, be perfectly healthy, leave for work and die in a car crash. But this doesn’t mean you stop planning, you stop living. I’m writing about faith today because I wish I could convince myself that there is a higher power, a grand design, a puppet master of sorts, but I can’t and it makes me a little sad. I don’t know if the husband is going to get better or worse, no one does, but I wish that I could hold on to some sort of faith system that allowed me to believe he’ll get better, because it would make this time easier, because sometimes believing something will happen is enough. As I’m writing more things come to mind so I’m thinking this post will be one of a series, cause if I keep writing this will become less a blog post and more a tome and I don’t want to put anyone to sleep quite yet. For now I ask you this, do you have faith and does it help you get through the rough patches?

Living with Leukemia. The other side of the story: Anniversary of T.W.C.O.A.T

Thursday the 23rd I was moseying along, minding my own business, doing my thing when the husband comes up to me, mid-morning, and says: last year right now I thought I was healthy and my life was great. And my reaction was: Gulp. Crap. The anniversary of The Worst Christmas Of All Time starts today. And since the husband was on his way out the door to go to the hospital, the sense of déjà vu became almost oppressive, and I didn’t want him to go, cause what if they kept him there like in some weird time/space loop, where last year repeats itself over and over again à la “Groundhog Day”? But then he said, stop being crazy, I’m fine, I’ll see you later. I’ll. See. You. Later.

That night, he turned to kiss me good night and said, see, I’m sleeping here tonight, in our bed. I’m here. And there was relief in his voice. This past year was hard, I’ve said it again and again, but now it’s starting to feel like it’s finally over, like we can start letting go just a little bit.

My Dad died on February 5^th 2006, and when the first anniversary of his passing came around I started freaking out just a little bit… I dreaded February 5^th 2007, because in my head it felt like another ending. For the whole first year after his death I could think, last year today dad was in the office, or last year today we were on vacation together in Rio, or last year today he called and asked me this or that, but once I passed the one year mark from his death there couldn’t be any more last year todays because last year today he was already gone. So I dreaded the anniversary of his death because I would have no more recent memories of him, it felt like he was dying again. But that day came and went and what I had been dreading for a year, losing my father again, wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. In fact, on February 6^th 2007 I started letting go a little bit, it’s not that I magically started missing him less, but it was a little less painful. That’s the grieving process for ya!

How does this little anecdote relate? Well, December 23^rd felt like some sort of deadline too, I had the same feeling of dread, the same negative anticipation…. And yet it too came and went, and we can all truly start letting go now. The husband is doing ok, he’s got good days and bad days, but he is progressively getting better, it’s slow but steady and we’re ok with that.

I’ve mentioned in other posts that we’ve been having ups and downs lately, but on Thursday night I realized that much of the stress we’ve been under was due to this inauspicious date looming over us, I’m not saying everything is perfect now, but our hearts are certainly lighter. It seems strange to invest a date with so much meaning, with so much power, but it’s not something we did consciously, and it’s not easily explained. Suffice it to say that we counted our blessings and they are bountiful, so now when we look to the future we do so with less fear, anger and defeatism and more optimism, hope and faith. What more could we ask of the holiday season?

Loss

Last Saturday we went to the saddest funeral I had ever been too, bar none, and that includes my own father’s funeral. Funerals are always sad, of course, and though I completely agree with the creole idea of celebrating life once you leave the cemetery, the reality is that the prevailing feelings at a funeral are those of loss, and grief and helplessness.  In this case, the prevailing feeling was probably also disbelief. The Husband’s cousin E was my age, 35, she had a 7 month old baby boy, a loving husband of just a few short years, a doting brother and parents who loved her more than anything. She was born and raised in the same small town as The Husband. To say the church was packed would be an understatement of massive proportions. All the seats were taken, and all the remaining space was standing room only. And everybody was distraught. I had only briefly met her once, and it was still heart wrenching. Her passing was completely unexpected, she had a brain tumor, her symptoms started less than a month ago, and she died a few days after the diagnosis. Enough said. As I was sitting in the church I looked at her parents and thought of their grief and I started praying for protection for my kids, please God don’t let this happen to them…. And then I thought, it’s not like E's mother didn’t have the exact same feelings as me, she must have thought and prayed the same way for her kids a hundred times, in fact all mothers pray that their kids grow old, happy and healthy and loved. So, really, what’s the point? Well, I know it sounds trite and unbelievably simplistic but I realized the following: we can really only count on the present moment, so we HAVE TO enjoy it and savor it, and be thankful for it, we don’t know what the future holds so we can’t put anything important off for later, be it a kiss, a hug, a trip, a conversation… so when The Boy asks me to play ball when I’m cooking dinner, I now decide it’s ok to eat ten minutes later and go play ball.

And then I looked at her husband, he was neither crying nor talking, he may not even really have been there. And I thought of all the plans they had, the hopes and dreams for their future, for their child and how now he has to navigate through it all alone. Alone with his baby. Having kids is hard enough as it is when there are two parents to carry the burden, and he has no one who is as invested as him to discuss things with, to share the good and the bad and the great.

It is unimaginably sad. The saddest part is that, as anyone who has lost someone knows, you never stop missing the person you lost. Grief does get easier to handle, it slowly passes and gives way to sadness and hopefully down the line to nostalgia. But still, for the rest of their lives, her husband, and brother and parents are going to think of her and wish she was there, and they will always be sad for the loss. And her son will always pine for the mother he never knew. And that is heartbreaking.