Directionless

As I continue to move through the days, one foot in front of the other, the motion feels intentional but directionless. It takes a great deal of effort to do the things I must do or even want to do, yet I am inefficient and easily distracted. My current lean professional to-do list means that there is a looser structure to the work week which, again, I am deeply grateful for but I also find disorienting. I often lose track of the days. Throw in spring break and a snow day for the kids, and I have no idea where we are in the week or year.

Except I do, underneath all of the aimless activity my subconscious mind is acutely aware of and busily trying to avoid the important birthday coming in just a few days. I have done nothing to prepare for the birthday. There is definitely something to that and it has everything to do with Chris being a thoughtful gift giver. He had a knack for knowing a person well and connecting this knowledge to a gift that was perfect, not extravagant but always generous. Chris often had clear ideas for our presents and it made birthdays fun. To top it off, he would throw in a prank gift that would make us all laugh and then we would relive that joke for years. Several years ago, Chris and Nathan wrapped up an iPad as a major surprise birthday gift for me but set up a ruse - they tricked me into thinking Nathan had spilled the beans about the gift, "Mom, aren't you excited about that book? Oh, oops, sorry." Surprise, not a book! One of the more recent triumphs was a roll of Trump toilet paper that put us all into stitches when it was opened. I do not know how to do birthdays without Chris. I'm not fun like he was.

Celebrating our children's birthdays without Chris doesn't seem right and I simply don't want to do it. There is a world of pain in revisiting the happy memories of their births when the only other person who experienced those moments and is invested in them in the same way that I am is gone. The only person who loved them more than anything, as flesh of his flesh, in the same way that I do, is gone. I'm grappling with what that means for them, for me, and for Chris. They will turn new ages that he will not see.

The truth is that the kids have already changed in the eight weeks he has been gone. J asked me to answer a question and to tell her the truth, for real, "Does Santa put the presents in the stockings or do parents?" My heart skipped a few beats, and then I told her the truth. Just like that, no more Christmas magic. At least I won't have to play Santa alone; Chris was there for the last time. Even though I filled the stockings, we were in front of the fireplace and lighted garland together. He saw her believe in reindeer and enjoy the most magical night of the year one last time. Like so many other lasts...

The wisdom in doing this is debatable, but I've been spending a lot of time thinking back to the last months of Chris's life and fitting specific memories with the amount of time he had left. My mind is busy wondering what he thought of all of those lasts. Surely he knew it would be the last apple-picking trip, the last Halloween, the last trip to Minnesota, his last birthday. I know for a fact that he did know. I want to go back and ask him about how he managed to keep going because when I look at the pictures on my phone from those events all I see is gentleness on his face and love radiating from his being, not despair. I also cannot help the mental calculus. At the orchard he had only three and a half months to live. Trick-or-treating, only two and half months. Visiting family in MN, now just two months left. At Christmas, only a handful of days. I remember thinking on one difficult December night that Chris was in the last of his days and estimating that at best his life was 99.8-99.9% over. It was such a bleak thought. Like so many others from that time, I did not know what to do with the truth in that thought. What would I do in the last 0.1-2% of my own life? I did not have an answer. Even at the time, there were flashes of feeling like I was in denial because I didn't know how to process the thoughts, but I don't think that was the major thing going on. The truth was that Chris was in rough shape and had very little time left, and there was no guidebook. Nothing I or anyone could do would change those sad facts or prepare to deal with the aftermath. It was horrifyingly sad and I did not know what to do, period. 

The train that had been set upon the track those eleven years ago chugged along quietly, then gathered steam and headed steadily toward us. We felt the vibration of it far before we actually saw it coming, we heard the deafening alarm whistle, we braced for impact. And yet, as it slammed into us it seemed to be in slow motion and there was only disbelief that it was actually happening. Now the engine has fully blasted through, sending splintered debris of our treasured life flying in all directions. The train has come to rest, but the air is thick with choking dust and smoke.

I still don't know what to do. It is overwhelmingly sad.    

I don't know how to do any of this without him. He is gone and I feel the weight of being the solo captain of our family now every single day. There is no consultation, no encouragement, no laughing over the mistakes, no debriefing after bedtime. It's up to me to decide whether a child needs to see a doctor, I alone have to clear the snow off the roof and driveway, it is up to me to decide whether to fire a lawyer or stay the course, and nobody else is going to set up the coffee when it is late and I'm tired. The kids and I can go look at a dog and seriously consider bringing him home because Chris is now not there with his allergies, and I am the one who has to deal with the deep disappointment of that dog not being the right one for us.

It is all so different. Even despite that unfamiliarity, it doesn't feel real that Chris is gone. I can go from being factual about his absence and having a few better days to completely devastated by seeing his picture and things, realizing that he is not coming back. The return of anxiety, shock, and despair over his death is showing itself to be somewhat of a pattern. Wait, did that actually happen? Why? What do I do now? Come back. I love you. I MIIIISSSSSSS YOU. We need you!

Directionless is not a state that I am comfortable with. In my teens and twenties, there was always the next goal to move toward, the next milestone to look forward to. One of the things I said in the Health Story Collaborative interview with Chris was that there was a period of time after his diagnosis where we had to just "see how things were going to be" before having a second child and I was not good at just living in the moment like that. We did it, though. This past year I did much better at this living in the present approach. I knew it was important to be with Chris fully and I managed to do that, I think. I do not have regrets about the beautiful time we had together in 2018, especially over the summer and fall. It's okay if there was an element of denial underneath that as long as it helped me be present to him. Now, though, there is a lack of purpose to my directionless state; it is very different than living in the moment with Chris. That had a meaningful purpose.

There are no easy answers tonight. It is just going to take a long time of seeing how it is going to be before finding a purposeful, comfortable direction. In the meantime, when a jolt toward a temporary direction is needed there's always the funny memory of that baseball dad cheering "DO SOMETHING!" to fall back on. It sticks in my mind and it makes me smile, and it just might be enough to kick my tail into buying some birthday presents tomorrow for my boy.