The Day the Dam Broke

Fourteen years later, grief hasn't left, just matured.

Mary Ann died on June 14, 2010. When this blog post popped up this year (2024) in my Facebook memories on the anniversary of the day I first posted it shortly after her death, I was already experiencing the amorphous feelings of sadness that sometimes come with those anniversaries. Rereading the post was therapeutic even as it took me back to the pain when it was still raw. As anyone who has experienced such pain knows, it is there for a reason. It testifies to the value of our life together. I am grateful that the forty-eight years together from the first moment I fell in love with her are not lost but are a present reality. Yes, I can remember the pain when it was still raw, but now it brings along with it, not only affirmation of our love but a kind of quiet joy that remains in the sadness. The joy outweighs the sadness by far. What we experienced together, the best of times and the worst of times has value beyond measure. After reading the post, I decided to take the risk and share it here.

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From my blog The Caregiver Calling, the following is a post dated June 23, 2010, shared just 9 days after her death.

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The Day the Dam Broke is the name of a movie and what happened at our (my) house last night. I set the stage in a way that would allow it to happen. I needed for it to happen.  It changes nothing. It just needed to get out.

After finishing writing last night, I did a few chores and then got out the box of letters I wrote Mary Ann. I put on the CD that had brought me to tears months ago when we first realized it was time to call in Hospice. I read a few of the letters. Actually, the letters did not tap my emotions. They are pretty boring. I ramble on about Greek tests and singing groups and learning a recitative for someone who couldn’t sing the solos at the last minute. Each letter so far, and I am sure all of them, end with declarations of love in as many different ways as I could figure out to say them. I have read eight of the letters so far. Understand, for three years, except for summers when we could see each other, I wrote her a letter every night.  (No wonder I have gotten into this blogging every night business.)

Remember, I was nineteen or twenty years old and very much in love. They sound like something from a bad romantic movie. The only redeeming element is that I really meant what I was saying: “I don’t know how to tell you just how much I love you and miss you. I can hardly believe it myself.  I love you.” Then another: “Even if you didn’t love me — I love you enough for both of us.” I will spare you any more for now.

It was not the letters. Certainly, the music lowered my defenses and helped me let go of my control. I just pulled down a picture of the two of us from a year or two or three ago. It is the one that was cropped for the obituary. I looked and I remembered the indignity of it all. I remembered what she endured looking from the outside in rather than from inside the struggle. I could not tolerate the thought that she is gone. I spoke out loud because I couldn’t not speak. In a moment of self-pity, I asked “Why did you give her to me to love and then take her away.” I was angry — not out of control angry, just angry. “It’s not fair that she should have had to suffer so — she did nothing to deserve it.”

Please understand, I realize that God doesn’t like death and sickness any more than we do. I realize that God understands death from the inside out and the outside in. God didn’t wish for Mary Ann to suffer, for me to be in pain with her. What God did was hang in there with us through it all, never letting go of us. Understand also that God’s relationship with us is strong enough and intimate enough to allow anger to be a part of it. I needed to be angry at that moment. Read the Psalms some time and see just how many are laments spewing anger at the unfairness of life. Pastor Mike addressed this matter at the funeral.

Noisy tears flowed. The dam broke. Every time I looked at her face and remembered, the tears flowed. In an earlier post, I mentioned that I used to count how many times I had cried in my adult life. The first time was after I got the phone call that my Dad had died. I was 42 years old. Until last January, I had not yet run out of fingers on one hand to count the times. I have stopped counting and will never do so again.

I guess there was some part of me that still thought it was a sign of weakness for a man to cry. I knew before and I know still more certainly now that crying, actually letting the pain in far enough to feel it, is an act of courage that is demanded if wholeness and healing will come. Running away from it or pretending it isn’t there or encrusting it in some sort protective casing is hardly the path to strength of character and the ability to endure whatever comes.

There was an interesting coincidence at our Spiritual Formation group this morning. The lesson in our discussion booklet for this morning was entirely devoted to the need to let go, to die, before we can rise to new life. The last of the four discussion questions printed at the end of the readings was, “What role does the reality of death and the deaths of those you love play in your life?”  Talk about timing.

Today was a busy Wednesday, as they often have been for some reason. It started with the Spiritual Formation Group on the deck. While that was going on Landscaper Sheila was doing her final maintenance of the landscaping she put in this spring. She will return in the fall to do some clean up and prepare it for winter. I am on my own for the rest of the summer.  Those plantings are in great jeopardy!

In the mid-morning, Dave came over to get a couple of death certificates and obtain the signatures needed on a variety of forms for the financial issues following a death. Then Kristie came over to do the monthly house cleaning. Now the house is not only empty but empty and clean.

I did some overdue posting in the computer check register while she cleaned. It will take a while to get my bearings in that arena. Everything seems to be on course. I have configured the online emails from the Caregiving Spouses of those with Lewy Body Dementia so that I have to go to the web site to read them. As a result, the hours I have spent checking emails have pretty much been eliminated. I just can’t read those emails at the moment. It takes me right back to something from which I need a break for now.

I had leftovers from the funeral dinner for lunch and dinner.  Next, I will start on all the containers that Lisa put in the freezer when food was coming in faster than we could eat it. It should be many weeks before it is necessary for me to exercise my culinary skills.

I decided it would be best to get out of the house for a while, so I made a quick run to pick up a couple of things. One is a zippered cover for a pillow. No amount of soaking in Oxy Clean or spraying with Spray and Wash is able to get the stains out. Mary Ann was taking Plavix and Aspirin to thin her blood because of her stroke. Often her gums or nose would bleed a little during the night. The pillow is certainly clean, and now it looks that way also.

The house is becoming very neat and orderly and boring. I still hope to at least get my office, which is a complete shambles, cleaned up. That happening would be right up there with the Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes. Actually, I suppose my problem is that I have the twelve baskets of leftovers and nowhere to put them.

This day has come to an end.  As I mentioned to Son Micah, the challenge is to manage the pause and stop button on the video running in my mind of Mary Ann’s most difficult days including the last one, so that there will be minimal flooding from the broken dam.  Today was better.

The Destination is Now,

Peter