I have spent my days readying our lives for a future without Philip. My brain is on board but my heart is not buying any of it. It is sequestered away. Fifty times a day I ponder the inconceivability of Philip’s gone-ness. I purposefully go back to our last hours to convince myself. I picture our last embrace but there is no convincing. It is all too impossible. The truth is hard to swallow. The pit of my stomach churns in an effort to spit it out.

So, I thought, perhaps, if I write down our last hour together, maybe I will convince my heart to move on… 

That last hour begins in June of 2020 when  Philip received a diagnosis of Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia. He treated it like it was no big deal but I was an explosion of fear so we gathered our boys. We would face it together.

Fast forward to December 31, 2020. Philip had continued to work and bike the whole chemo time. He was a fit fighter with excellent tumor reduction and we were looking forward to the scans that would prove he was cancer free. We greeted the New Year with celebration!

Two days later, after a hunt with friends, he came home sick…He was admitted and then intubated 2 weeks later.

My sister, Sally, so sensitive to the Holy Spirit, came out to hold me up on February 4. The next day, the boys and I had plans for our first in person visit with Philip since he had been hospitalized a month before. Sally and I had just finished dinner when the ICU called. We needed to come. It wasn’t good.

Joe and I went in first. Sweet Joe wore his Prime baseball hat and brought another for his dad. We turned it inside out to make it a Rally cap; something the baseball team did when they were behind but determined to win. 

Dave and Pete came next. We were only allowed two visitors but our lovely RN “S” made an exception for us. Heidi and the grandkids were there by phone. After a time, the boys made plans to return in the morning. I stayed.

“S” in her beautiful compassion encouraged me to stay as long as I wanted, (also not the rules.)

As Philip’s oxygen levels dropped, I rubbed his back, head and arms. I hugged him. I read him letters written by David and me. I read him the incredible texts from his family and friends throughout the month of struggle.The playlist I had created to sing myself through cancer, I now sang to him and then, I sang him into the arms of Jesus as I let him go. 

He was gone shortly after midnight on February 5.

I did not want him to go but it was the right thing to do even if it was going to happen with or without my consent.  Of course,  I cried so hard, my abdominal muscles spasmed in my core until I could physically cry no more.

I remained silent for a time, holding his hand, grateful his suffering was over. Living in a kind of bereft nothingness while, at the very same time, feeling the immensity of the gift I had been given. The gift of saying goodbye; of being present at such a lovely, sweet, gentle passing.  

After awhile, I wasn’t  sure what to do next. How long do I stay? Will I regret it if I leave?

When I looked up it was 1:11am. It’s what I have always called my party minute or triple Pillars two dots. In college, we would take that one minute to party before going back to work. It was just like him to go in time for his ultimate party minute. 

I picture him tossing a penny into the hand of Jesus and with his brilliant smile and a wink telling Jesus “Well done, Good and Faithful Servant. Thank You, Jesus, for Your service.”

Anne

March 24, 2021

It’s a cloudy day in the neighborhood. The sun is playing hide and seek, birds are singing with vigor and Philips’s Mountain is shining in the distance. The wind kicks up and the dogs run wild with glee, chasing bunnies that are really just tumbleweed bags blowing across the field. It is a promising beginning.

Whenever I hear birds like this, I think of the garden of Eden. How glorious the bird song must have been. It was a promising beginning as well, and we know how that turned out. 

I’ve been reading C. S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. In the forward, his stepson, Douglas Gresham says “all human relationships end in pain-it is the price that our imperfection has allowed Satan to exact from us for the privilege of love.”

I’ve been pondering this and today in my own Eden of sorts, I think I see. 

When humans love, it is a glimpse, however imperfect, of God’s love. But our tendency to sin, to do things our own way instead of God’s way, has a price tag; that price tag is separation from God or death. And we live this out in our love relationships when death comes. The painful tearing of the sacred was not part of God’s original design but because of our imperfection, it is our reality. 

But wait there is more, God says! It is, also, a peek into what belief, what our amazing God offers us: a completeness of love that is never torn away.

In a way, the pain of loss points me directly to what, to Whom, I long for most: the neverending love of God.  To grieve is to touch the very heart of God.

My grief is inexorably connected to my deepest longings: to love and be loved; to belong and offer belonging.

My grief can have positive purpose. 

Now that is a good beginning.

Anne
March 23, 2021

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.”‘ Jeremiah 29:11

Baseball, once an island of competence, now an outlet for grief it seems. I’ve always thought that we pick comfortable, trustworthy spaces to vent our angst because they are safe. The eternal hope is that we will be loved even if we are unhappy. 

I can only pray this is so for Joe. I suspect baseball is a way to work out his feelings of what is fair in the world. His dad’s death could easily be translated into the injustice of life. Some see baseball as a metaphor for life; books have been written on such, here we are living it.

This grief thing is not for the faint hearted though it sure has a way of making me want to faint away. But You, Lord, You offer me hope and a way through.  I am confident You will defy all my expectations with Your mind-boggling beauty as You work in my family through this incredible time of dread.

Anne
Monday: 3/22/21

“I’m going off the rails on a crazy train…”

Ozzy Ozbourne

Walk- up baseball song

I am scattered and unfocused. Can anyone tell? I feel like I am wide open for all the world to see, laid bare, vulnerability leaking from every pore. My heart is somehow more raw than usual. I feel frail and shaky. Magnified sadness relentlessly building up all day.  My sensitivity quotient off the chart.

All conversations pierce me. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s just regular conversation. 

“Talking about someone who divorced her husband after 25 years; so much time training him only to trade him in? You must be out of your mind to give up after 25 years”

…unless you are forced to…

“But how lovely it was to spend a bday by themselves; in a bed all to themselves”… lovely because they choose it; only because they can go home to their love

I am so raw, a quivering mess. Some days, I just wonder how this could be my life; missing Philip more than ever.

Anne

“In the past God spoke to our ancestors through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days He has spoken to us by His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, and through whom also He made the universe.”. Hebrew 1:1

And sometimes His Son then speaks through unexpected gifts like the show Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. My friend told me about it. How Zoe hears people’s inner thoughts expressed in Broadway show-like song and dance numbers. 

I, myself, think in song especially now during Phillip’s passing. I created a playlist after his cancer diagnosis full of songs that reminded me of him. And now since his death, I find myself processing most everything through those songs. 

The show, when described, seemed a lovely, even perfect, lighthearted, positive escape from my own reality. How was I to know that instead,  it would be a stepping stone through grief and not around it. 

Zoe, her family and friend, Simon, wrestle with the loss her dad and his. At first I was baffled. Why would anyone suggest to me a show about the untimely death of a dad? But I soon realized I needed this. Zoe and company, address the harsh realties of life with poignancy, candor and tenderness as they mirror some of my own journey.

This has been a perfectly timed balm for the harshness of my own reality.

It is good to see that God is still speaking.

Thank you, Marijo.

Anne
March 11, 2021

It has been a brutal day of erasing Philip from my life, at least that’s what it felt like. I really just began the process of erasing him from our accounts. It’s a hard reality but this farfeneugen paperwork has got to be done whether I feel like it or not.

It went pretty smoothly. Most people sent their condolences and made it easier. The timeshare in Philips’s name, however, pushed me to my dangerous edge. They require court appointed executorship paperwork, next of kin/in the will stuff doesn’t count.

The impenetrability of it was almost more than I could bear as my powerlessness came crashing in on me. “My mantle of Widowhood ought to count for something!” I screamed in my head. “How can you dismiss me so easily?”  I wanted to rant. I wanted to vomit all over the poor doing-her-job gal on the phone but I had enough leftover control to also know it wasn’t her fault even if I wanted it to be. 

I wanted someone to blame as if somehow it would make me feel better, less powerless. In the end and in the nick of time, I recognized that old trick and hung up before any uncertain inflammatory explicitives escaped.

Anne

Grieving is a b*#%!

March 16, 2021

I

And there it is, words for my elusive unknowing of the weekend:

“Do I speak or keep my silence? How do I tell the difference between righteous indignation and a world colored by the irritation of grief?”

Find completeness in Jesus. 

As I re-enter my life, I realize I haven’t been going as faithfully to my dirt field for my daily walks with my penny dogs. It’s clear that my perspective changes when I don’t plug into my power source. 

I still melted down before but then I was finding hope in the struggle as I focused on Jesus. He took the edge off it. Lately, though, I’ve been living under my circumstances instead. 

You know the old joke: 

One friend ask the other how she was doing and she replied, “Okay under the circumstances.” The friend answered back, “What are you doing under there?”

It is good to lament and cry and meltdown; to express all that is in my heart, but it is also good to trust the stability that Jesus gives so that I am not left there.

So, I’ve decided to take a few days off by myself while Barb will keep the home fires burning…

Anne

March 9, 2021

I am cranky and bothered. I can’t wrap my head around issues that melted me down yesterday. Issues that rile up my sense of fairness in the lives of those I love. I feel my discontent rising, expanding, clamouring for a voice…

Do I speak or keep my silence? How do I tell the difference between righteous indignation and a world colored by the irritation of grief?

And Jesus replies:

“LET ME HELP YOU through this day. The challenges you face are far too great for you to handle alone. You are keenly aware of your helplessness in the scheme of events you face. This awareness opens up a choice: to doggedly go it alone or to walk with Me in humble steps of dependence.”

(March 7: Jesus Calling)

And His truth begins to set me free.

Anne
March 7, 2021

When I write and share my story, raw as it sometimes is, my intent is to focus on the process of grief and not on the details of my circumstances. I can see how the details distract and become the story but that is not the intent.

The circumstances of my life are the canvas, if you will, on which to paint a deeper, inner unfolding. They are a means to explore what it means to be the one who survives in the age of Covid and loss.

Please see my heart. I don’t write to condemn myself or others along this path. I write to bring light and authenticity to both the ugliness and  the beauty of the journey.

Anne

March 7, 2021