I Saw It Coming

In a week’s time my husband and I were to have been with my family celebrating my parents’ 70th anniversary. A staggering accomplishment given current divorce rates. Instead, after several back-and-forth conversations with my father and sister, wherein the “no choice” choice was made to cancel the family dinner, photographer, and flowers, we’ll stick to the flight plan and hold vigil, virtually and in person, for my mother, whose health and life have been seriously compromised by taking Ozempic. She is the second person in my close circle who has recently suffered a life-threatening bowel obstruction from this much touted, so-called weight loss miracle drug. Here as I type, she is with my sister in a hospital 30 minutes from home, the closest facility able to provide the CT scan needed to determine the impact to her bowels and life, while my father, bearing a week’s weight of worry for his wife, collapses with fatigue at home. (Another story, the sorry state of health care crippled across my country.) Thankfully, my sister is an RN, astute in her holistic perspective, clear and courageous in her advocacy, compassionate in her care.

In the last twenty-four hours I have learned of two friends losing their life partners. Before Christmas, another. And I wonder, will my father be losing his? For an hour today of personal respite, I attended a silent writing circle. After introductions, the host set a 45-minute timer wherein we muted ourselves, turned off our video cameras, and wrote. “January, the first month in a new year…its first days always bring an undercurrent of unease…for decades I’ve stepped across its threshold, yet this time feel days darker with melancholy…a bone deep sadness, its source clearer with each passing day.”

“Epiphanies,” I wrote. “Three wise men bearing gifts; the anniversary of our arrival 43 years ago to the prairie province we call home; the sudden death of my young, never-known grandmother, shrouded in secrecy, and leaving behind her toddler child, my mother, now holding tenuously to her own life. And today, dawning stark cold and bright, like winter’s belated arrival, the realization of how intergenerational trauma has shaped and coloured my stepping into most every new year of my life, tarnishing it with inchoate anxiety and grief.”

I’m as OK with all of this as I can be. Intuitively, instinctively, even presciently, I’ve been naming and writing here about crossing the threshold into this hard next life chapter – the eldering landscape where death and illness, failing health and loss become its “leitmotif;” where unapologetic grief becomes an even deeper expression of my love for my life and this world.

Sustained by those few near and dear kindred friends, my community of walkers, a monthly check-in with my therapist, my beloved and our quiet sanctuary of a home; and the ever-present beauty a step outside my door, I’m OK.

By the time this post drops, I may find we need to shuffle flights to arrive earlier, and I pray my prayers of comfort, grace and gratitude carry me and us through. Too, being held by forces seen and unseen – the angels, ancients, and ancestors.

I’ll borrow a poem from Mary Oliver to sign off:

“You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen

to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.

And anyway, it is the same old story –
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.

Mostly, I want to be kind.”

Much love and kindest regards, dear friends, and thank you for yours…