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Dancing in the Half-Life
Jul. 10th, 2017 06:44 amThere's an EDM medley on YouTube sung by Miami University's a cappella group, Soul2Soul. In it, there's a line that says, "You are the piece of me/ I wish I didn't need..."
I think that's how it was, for my wife and me, during much of our 43 years together.
But in the end, under absolutely brutal circumstances, we came to understand that we were each, in that moment, what the other needed. And that we needed to come together, in that awful time and place, to try to save her life.
In the aftermath of it all, I can't bring myself to say, as the hopeless romantic in me might insist, that it didn't matter that we failed. That what mattered was that we were finally together, in common cause.
Still, I don't know. Maybe that is the truth. Or at least some part of it.
But what I do know is that life in the aftermath, despite the continuing brave and selfless efforts of everyone around me, has the look and feel of a nuclear apocalypse. And that if I can't somehow think or feel or dance my way out of it, I too will die of the toxic half-life still radiating from it.
So what to do? I take small steps to try to get beyond it, to try to live a moment or two somewhere outside of it.
I read books, I write in my journal, I watch my grandchildren play lacrosse and soccer. I've even resumed a few of those things that I'd once loved but had given up because they didn't fit the life which I had in later years with my family.
But it never seems to be enough. Never seems to yield the needed distance from what has so long surrounded me. And I feel myself weakening physically and dying emotionally, day by day.
As I did through the long days of that desperate struggle to save her life, I have a sense that I'm the only one who can save my own. But, at the moment, have no way of knowing if I finally will or not...
LPK
@Dreamwidth
7.10.2017
I think that's how it was, for my wife and me, during much of our 43 years together.
But in the end, under absolutely brutal circumstances, we came to understand that we were each, in that moment, what the other needed. And that we needed to come together, in that awful time and place, to try to save her life.
In the aftermath of it all, I can't bring myself to say, as the hopeless romantic in me might insist, that it didn't matter that we failed. That what mattered was that we were finally together, in common cause.
Still, I don't know. Maybe that is the truth. Or at least some part of it.
But what I do know is that life in the aftermath, despite the continuing brave and selfless efforts of everyone around me, has the look and feel of a nuclear apocalypse. And that if I can't somehow think or feel or dance my way out of it, I too will die of the toxic half-life still radiating from it.
So what to do? I take small steps to try to get beyond it, to try to live a moment or two somewhere outside of it.
I read books, I write in my journal, I watch my grandchildren play lacrosse and soccer. I've even resumed a few of those things that I'd once loved but had given up because they didn't fit the life which I had in later years with my family.
But it never seems to be enough. Never seems to yield the needed distance from what has so long surrounded me. And I feel myself weakening physically and dying emotionally, day by day.
As I did through the long days of that desperate struggle to save her life, I have a sense that I'm the only one who can save my own. But, at the moment, have no way of knowing if I finally will or not...
LPK
@Dreamwidth
7.10.2017
