Resilience & Reinvention

Recently, on a Monday holiday, I was minding my own business, having lunch by myself, when the opening lines of Dante’s Inferno rang in my head.

“Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.”

I thought, where the hell did that come from?

Then, I sat with it for a minute, to see if it would come to me.

It did, in bits and pieces. Enough so that I went and got a yellow legal pad and pencil and started taking notes.

I love to start pieces of writing by hand. There’s something tactile that I love about the feel of pencil gliding across paper.

But I digress.

The fact that I had the time to sit with this quote for a minute, to ask why it had appeared whole, in my head, is more revolutionary than you might think.

It’s been a long time since I had much time to sit quietly and listen to what my brain or my intuition was telling me.

The truth is that I have spent the last six years or so in a state of slow burning crisis, interrupted, often, especially lately, by intense ones.

About six years ago, Paul was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease, and began what turned out to be a rapid descent into physical and cognitive disability. So much for a slow moving disease. He chose not to be public about it, and, as a result, I told only a few of my inner circle. Because of this, what I now think of as something of an invisible cage, I have written about it only obliquely, referring to it as basically stressful stuff going on my life.

But it was more than garden variety stress.

I can’t speak to how difficult it is to have Parkinson’s. I can speak to the role of the caregiver, and, sparing you the details (you’re welcome, I hope you never have to learn) I can give you the plot: it is devastating.

The last six years, for me, have been full of trauma, triggers to past trauma, loss, the crisis upon crisis that goes with attempting to manage someone with a chronic degenerative disorder, and, also, growth, regrouping, and resilience.

I’ve been flat out working, caregiving, taking care of kids, running a household, fielding other crises (I’ll spare you these details, but let’s just say the universe never fails to deliver) for so long that I have forgotten what it feels like to not be in a state of crisis, to think, to listen to the thoughts in my own head, and to pause, even, to write them down.

Recently, Paul moved to a facility that could better handle his needs. I was at my limit. Beyond my limit, physically and emotionally. So were the kids.

And though life has not been without crisis even with him gone, recently, there are more and more extended moments of…I don’t have to do anything.

There are plenty of should dos. I should do the laundry. I should enroll Luke in camp (he doesn’t want to go). I should clean and de-clutter and go through the mountain of mail that has cascaded from my desk to the floor and probably has a lot of unpaid bills entombed within it.

But, I don’t have to. Not really.

I’m trying to take these moments to experience the quiet, and my own thoughts, and to re-group and figure out what I want to do now. Not what I should do. What I want to do. And on a level that’s not just for the next hour, but for the future. What do I want now?

Enter Dante.

I mean, give it five minutes (I did) and the quote, and why it appeared, wholesale, in my head, are pretty obvious, no?

I don’t usually have five minutes. Today I did. And I took them.

They were not a comfortable five minutes though.

I’m acutely aware that I now lack ease with downtime. It feels foreign, disturbing, and scary. It also feels lonely, and like free-fall. Which is odd, because I’ve always loved being alone and in my own head. I’ve always been fine with my own company.

Now, I guess, I’m a stranger to myself. And I have all this awkward ice-breaking to do, getting re-acquainted.

It has occurred to me, many times, over the past several years that, while it’s freaking biblical that my life should be so heavily laden with such difficult situations—Ted, and now this—that I had I not experienced the first one I would not have been able to cope with this one.

Not that experiencing Ted’s illness and death miraculously anointed me with resilience and coping skills. I made the choices that made that happen. But because of those experiences, I know that I can stay standing despite what the universe hits me with (so far). And I know that if I don’t have the skill set yet for whatever is in front of me, I can learn.

I’m kind of tired of learning, if I’m being honest, but I know I can.

Which puts me in mind of the oft-quote lines from Leonard Cohen’s song “Anthem”:

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

Cliffnote version: My brother’s illness and death could have made me a fragile and broken person. Instead, it gave me the strength to endure more. He’s the source of my crack and my light. And if he were here, he’d probably tell me to get a life and stop talking about him so much. (But he’s not, so I win.)

Also, full disclosure: I’ve never read all of Dante’s Inferno and I’m not a Leonard Cohen fan…I just know a good quote when I see one.

Anyway.

As I sat with my disquiet today, I remembered something. I remembered the horrible time after Ted’s death, when we were dealing not just with the grief of his absence, but the discombobulation of re-inventing our lives.

For eight-and-half years, the entire family had revolved around Ted’s illness and his hospital room. My mother went to the hospital every day, came back, and then we all went back in after dinner. We were there longer on weekends.

My brother, by necessity, was the hub, and we all circled around him. Then he died and we were all spinning, loosened from our mooring, trying to re-invent how to be in our days.

The circumstances we were living with here were not exactly the same. But Paul’s illness did require constant management, as did orchestrating kids’ needs and work, around it. And now we are adjusting to what’s on the other side.

This sense of disorganized time, of not knowing how to be without my time organized around the crisis of a serious illness that trumps all else, that feels familiar. Forest dark, indeed.

It’s not fun. It’s no place I wanted to visit again. Who needs to do this twice?

But it’s necessary. And it’s good. It may be a freaking murky path, but it’s the right one. And if I’d ever actually made it through more than a few pages of Dante I could probably add a little more literary insight right about here, but alas…no.

Today, sitting at my kitchen table, I felt a dawning sense of hope and excitement, that this new sense of space and time was mine to own, and that I could re-invent it any way I wanted to. I remembered what it meant to feel…normal. To dare to want something, to plan for it.

As I sat there, I flipped to a fresh sheet on my legal pad, and at the top, I wrote: “How do I plan to rebuild my life?”

Answers, as you might imagine, were not immediate. There are glimmers.

I’m giving it a little time.