Shattered clichés

Clichés stop us from thinking about the common truths they relate–for all that they represent simple truths. Everyone uses them so often that they begin to lose their meaning. And then some event shatters our complacency.

Sometimes the pain wells up and erupts…

Jane’s death underlined the simple truths that life is short and enormously unfair. She began to feel ill shortly after we submitted the paperwork that announced our retirement 18 months in advance of the actual fact, as required by the contract we worked under. In August, she was diagnosed with NET cancer. Four months later–almost to the day–she died, a little over six months before we would have taught our final classes.

Simple truths about teaching

If you’ve never been a teacher, you don’t know what it demands of you. People see only that the school day ends at 2:20 p.m. and that the school year is studded with weeks off and a long break over the summer months. The reality is 16-18 hour days seven days a week filled with preparation, grading, meetings, and time in the classroom–not to mention enormous amounts of figurative handholding with both students and parents. It is not a profession anyone stays in for long without a sense of calling.

Clichés stop us from thinking…

Jane and I spent our summers recharging our souls, but even summer meant reading the latest discoveries and techniques in our fields. We justified our single week in the mountains as time for us away from the books and articles we knew we had to read before school started again.

Unfair truths

Retirement would have shifted our priorities, given us the time to truly relax, read what we wanted to read, travel where we wanted to travel. Yes, we had books on teaching we wanted to write, but our own lives would be the thing we focussed on rather than other people’s children.

Jane and I spent our summers recharging our souls…

And then, all of that vanished in a hospital room at Brigham & Women’s Hospital. Even after they told us there was nothing more they could do, I half expected a miracle. We had worked together so long and so well that the breaking of that partnership was grotesquely unfair. I cannot describe the anger I hid below the surface the entire time Jane was sick. I cannot describe the anger I felt the next day–nor the anger I have yet every day since.

Truths no one sees

Someone told me during Jane’s time in the hospital that this was God’s way of getting our attention and refocusing us on a new task. Some would say now that the work I have done on raising awareness about NET cancer and donating and raising money for NET cancer research means the partnership has continued in a new and different way than we intended. Part of me even acknowledges all of that as true.

I cannot describe the anger I felt…

But it does not ease the anger or the hurt that I let virtually no one see. It leaks out around the edges, though. Sublimated anger emerges no matter how I try to control it. It is in the odd comment, the strange action. I rarely know I’ve done something until someone says something to me. I apologize, but people get hurt.

Unpleasant truths about me

The result is I find myself increasingly asocial, increasingly taciturn. My focus is on the business that I need to do. When I need a break, I work in the garden, play with the landscape, redesign a room, read something purely escapist, build something–all things I can do by myself. Real human interactions are dangerous–and I increasingly avoid them where I can.

…people get hurt.

I’m fine in situations I can script in advance in my head. If we sponsor a dinner, I can make the rounds of the tables, give the necessary speeches. When I thank people for their donations or their work, I truly mean it. But I don’t trust myself much beyond that. Social spontaneity is dangerous.

Platitudes and truths

And then something happens and I have no choice. I know exactly how useless the canned platitudes are when one has lost a loved one. I know exactly how useless platitudes and the well-worn phrases of sympathy are when someone is diagnosed with cancer or some other potentially fatal illness or injury–or someone they love is.

…I find myself increasingly asocial…

The last few months have been particularly difficult. I’ve lost track of the number of funerals and wakes I’ve been to–lost track of how many people I have hugged and spoken to who wander their houses like an errant pinball bouncing from one memory to the next and not knowing where the hours have gone nor how they are sitting in the room they are sitting in.

Unfair truths redux

Four weeks ago, I had lunch with an old friend. He complained about not remembering former students names when he meets them these days. Like me, he has had literally thousands of students, so I told him not to worry about it.

And then something happens…

A week later, he couldn’t tell time, couldn’t tell the difference between his phone and his TV remote. Next week, he will start radiation and chemo treatments for tumors in his brain. I don’t know a better human being than he is. He takes care of the sick–and now he needs to be cared for. I’ll do what I can for him–we all will. We’ll make sure he gets to his appointments, make sure he has the social visits he needs and that the emotional support is constant.

Angry truths

I’m angry. I’m angry about the woman who lost her daughter and her husband within two weeks. I’m angry about my friend’s brain tumors, I’m angry about the daily struggles I see every day among NET cancer patients to get the treatments they need and the care they deserve, I’m angry about the friend I lost to breast cancer, angry about the people who walked away from her.

I don’t know a better human being than he is.

And, sixty-five months and nine days after Jane’s death, I am still insanely angry about that. There is no logical reason for me to be angry with her, but some days–when I am honest with myself–I am absolutely livid. She promised me she was not going to die–and then she did. I think about all the times I told her she needed to see a doctor–and she didn’t. I think about how I listened to her when she told me to go see one–and how she wouldn’t listen to me about her own health.

Telling truths

I wonder if she had seen the right doctor twenty years–or even ten years–ago if she would be alive today–if we would be planning a trip somewhere or working on a book together. The emptiness eats at me and makes me stupid with grief and anger at her, at God, at the world of people who taunt me with their happiness without knowing they are doing it.

I am absolutely livid.

And then the strange combination of compassion and logic pull me up short. Jane didn’t want to die–she had no choice in the matter. She wanted to be here with me every bit as much as I wanted her to be. She suffered for years with a disease we could do nothing significant about even had we known what it was.

Truths we don’t always see

I cannot see the private griefs those happy faces hold behind them–any better than they can see the pain behind the face I present to the world. To look at me on any given day, no one would know how deeply wounded I still am–and, I suspect, always will be. I put on a face for the world every day the same way Jane and I put on a face for our students that kept our personal issues out of our work and out of their lives.

 Jane didn’t want to die…

The simple truths are these: I am always hurting and always angry. It is the nature of grief. We tell ourselves fairy tales about the first year and about getting over it because otherwise the enormity of the emotions would overwhelm us and leave us incapable of functioning. Every event in our lives shapes us and our future. To an extent, we can attempt to craft what follows–try to create a more positive future for ourselves and others.

Forgive me

But there are limits. Sometimes the pain wells up and erupts with as little care as Vesuvius or Mt. St. Helen’s for the people living in close proximity. On those days, I hate myself no matter how irrational that may seem. Like a good doctor, my first commandment is, “Do no harm.” But I am human–and I fail.

 I am always hurting and always angry.

Forgive me. Some days I really don’t know what I am saying–let alone doing.