Seventeen Small Reflections

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash

Today while reorganizing my work computer’s documents I found a document called “Horste — Medical Timeline” which I put together in order to submit a request to be withdrawn from an in-person finance class last year beyond the usual deadline (I missed a month of classes last year due to how long it took to “resolve” losing a baby). I read it (all ten lines of it, it’s not a long document at all) and all of a sudden I was right back in it, and I am sharing my thoughts in real-time with you because many of you have said that this continues to be helpful and because most of it feels good to say out loud. Please heed a trigger warning for some in-depth discussion of grief and loss. A few things stand out:

1. I tried so hard to be better before I was better. This document is horrifying in retrospect, not least because it includes things like “1/29/2018: Return to work half-time per doctor’s orders”, which were only my doctor’s orders because I begged for them, to be allowed to go back to work rather than sitting in grief. I wish I had listened. I wish I had been able to hear.
2. When I tried to go back to work earlier than the doctor had authorized, my boss immediately said no. I was angry at the time, and now that anger seems very unfair. I wish I had been better able to see, while I was in it, the ways that other people absorbed my anger — which is, of course, itself unfair. “Nothing about this is fair,” I wrote the week after it all happened. It would take me a very long time to understand all the layers of truth in the words.
3. When I finally did come back to work, the first thing I did was try to assess whether it was still possible to truly pick up exactly where I’d left off, and I remember vividly feeling very weak for needing to drop this class. I wanted to finish what I’d started so badly. I remember reading chapters I’d missed at 3am and hoping so badly I’d be able to figure everything out in time to catch up. In what world??
4. During that same week, a student in an org I advise came to my office and had to apologize for delaying a project due to some family stuff, and I looked at this student without any self-reflection at all and said: don’t worry about it, sometimes life gets in the way. I went home that same night and read three finance chapters in a row and got so angry at myself for being too dumb to remember what I’d been reading. I wasn’t done taking painkillers yet. In EXACTLY what world???
5. I kept up with my online class, and journaled at the time that it was because I felt “like I couldn’t let this make me lose everything”. I remember being afraid to include this in my late withdrawal documentation because I didn’t want people to think I was making everything up.
6. This document includes things like “Early Sunday 1/21/2018 (~2am): Emergency surgery…”, which represents a time that I’d thought was going to be dedicated to recovery, and instead everything just somehow got even worse. This time in my life taught me that it is a dangerous thing to wonder whether things can get worse. They always can, no matter how unbelievable.
7. This time in my life has, in retrospect, also taught me that things can always get better — no matter how unbelievable.
8. There has never been a time in my life where people have been so reflexively kind to me.
9. There has never been a time in my life where I have been more unable to ask for kindness.
10. When I finally re-took that finance class, I crushed it. I have taken a lot of classes in my life, but I’ve never been prouder of a grade than I am of that one.
11. Throughout all of this, I spent a lot of time denying how much everything hurt (there are a lot of ways to experience pain and each one of them is deeply resonant in that sentence). I say often that I’m more or less better now, and what I really mean is I can talk and think and write about it without crying. Today I looked at “Horste — Medical Timeline.pdf” and realized that although I’ve spent a lot of time learning to think about what I lost without crying, I still have no real ability to think about how much it hurt while it was happening. When I read through that documentation, all I wanted to do was gather my 2018 self up in my own arms and say: holy shit, I forgot how hard that was. Good job. You did it. That was so hard, and you did so well. It’s not fair. I’m so sorry. I sometimes forget that in addition to being able to mourn what my husband and I lost, it would be very helpful to allow myself to mourn how badly it hurt.
12. Mary Oliver died this year on the anniversary of the day I started taking chemo to end that pregnancy. On first glance, everything about that sentence is awfully unfair: Mary Oliver lit my entire path that year, and to lose her that way on a day that I’d already dreaded for ages felt almost gratuitously painful. On looking deeper, I am grateful that she was around to light my path, and that she still lived in the world while I was learning to live in it as this new self, too.
13. I’ve spent a lot of time these last fourteen months grappling for a metaphor, and the nearest I can come is that this has felt like living with embers inside of me. I am so often uncomplicatedly happy, and still: every once in a while, the wind blows just right and the embers move from a tiny glowing warmth to a sudden rage and all of the grief/shame/sadness/anger swells up in me to remind me that it has always made a home in me — but it never swallows me up. It always dies back down.
14. We can’t control how and when the wind blows.
15. We do not need to control to be strong.
16. It is okay to be proud of strength, of having done well, without being grateful for the pain. Because I am not grateful. But I did do well, and I am proud.
17. That’s it. That’s all there is.