To Love Someone While Looking Straight into the Eyes of Impermanence
Unforgiving floodwaters eclipse my little vessel. Today the wave is the flu that is ravaging my husband’s body. He’s had it for three days now. A fever of 102, even while 400 mg of fever reducers are coursing through his bloodstream. He’s in the back room moaning in agony. “Oh God…please…no…no,” he says repeatedly.
My bloodstream responds. I feel it race around and then slow down and settle into an ache that leaves me frozen on the couch. This happens when he gets sick.
Perhaps it’s simply that I have this virus too and my immune system is kicking in telling me to rest, I can’t tell. After 22 years of marriage it’s hard to know where his experience ends and mine begins or where mine ends and his begins. What I do know is that it is unbearable. His pain induces a trauma in me.
Perhaps it’s due to the fact that the last time I heard him moan like this he had C-diff, an especially virulent and antibiotic-resistant bug known to kill people, and had to be hospitalized for a week, and then had 3 reoccurrences in the 9 months it took him to clear it. Or maybe it’s that the time before that, he had routine back surgery and the doctor nicked his sciatic nerve and left him with excruciating leg pain that has abated, but has never gone away. Or perhaps it’s that I know sickness and hospitals as intimately as my own breath because my Mom had a blood clotting disorder and lived in hospitals and in pain. Perhaps it’s my body trying to reconcile the fact that I chose him because he was the safe one, the not sick one, the ground of unshakeable stability I needed to live well.
Perhaps it’s my cells still trying to arrange themselves into a belief that I should be able to make it all better.
Perhaps it’s simply what it feels like to love someone while looking straight into the eyes of impermanence.
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