Looking back on it now, the bright curve of my life turned gently downward after my daughter was born, fell sharply as my husband was diagnosed with a stage IV cancer, and waggled as we fought his illness for a year.  After the second surgery, through the fourth and fifth chemo regimens, my line flattened into a basin. After he died, our hearts grieved the loss, and we struggled to adjust to everyday life.

Caregiving and anticipating loss were, in a way, worse than the pit of grief. Adjusting and struggling for air in the year after his death were very like that horrible period of desperate blindness and denial that we took on during the final, rapid, unpredictable, often petty depredations of a horrible disease.

So it’s hard for me to say in what part of this low period it was when a trusted friend helped me see some light. She cut through my fog by saying one of the darkest, least supportive things you can say. Maybe it’s tough love: maybe it’s just sharing an honest view with someone who really wants her eyes to stay closed.

But it was a single phrase that entered my tired ears. She might have started with “Hang on a minute:”

“It’s NOT going to be ‘okay.’”

I blinked.

“You won’t come out of this experience just fine, and neither will your little girl. This will have a huge effect on your lives. It will change you both and you will never be entirely ‘better.’”

My ears hurt. How dare she tell me that the platitudes I’d been spouting a moment before, the hard work I was doing to keep myself afloat, was not valid? We won’t be okay?

This woman knows me very well. I trust her authority in the ways of humans. I sat there, eyes smarting, shocked silent.

“What I mean is, this is a major loss. It’s not simple and it’s never going to go away. But you can affect how you’ll come out of the experience. You can develop the tools to survive and even flourish, you’re already far along in creating and using them. And at this point, you have to do it for yourself and for your child. But it’s not going to happen on its own.

“You’ll have to do it, and from now on, you’ll have to do it on your own.”

My face smarted. “But I’m sure we’ll be okay, I mean… surely we’ll heal…? Things have to get better.”

“Yes, things will get better. Your life will go on, and you will probably be happy again. You might even be stronger and better off. But nothing will be the same. An event like this will leave scars. Your injuries have been hurting you for years. You can’t just ‘fix’ them. Don’t you have some scars now — a big one on your arm?”

“Yes.” I started to exhale and concentrated on listening. I was even being led to my own story, a chance to speak.

“Can you remember how you got that one?”

“Yes.”

“Does it still hurt? Does it hold you back now?”

I remembered that yesterday was only one thing. Today, the scar was nothing, a vestige of a lesson, but over. “No.”

This momentary exchange was a fulcrum, one of several tiny thought shifts that changed everything. My friend’s first words shattered all my comforting rationalizations, forcing me to see that our future would be shaped by my choices and my actions. I became conscious, for the first time, that I deeply believed someone would stride up one morning (but after coffee) on a great white horse and save us.

This belief lasted through my husband’s illness –The FDA could approve one of the two drugs in the pipeline! Or maybe, we’d score a miracle! – and past it, during the months and months (at least 24 of them) when all I could do was sleep, eat, take basic care of my family, and show up at a few appointments designed to keep me afloat. Therapy, support group. I was waiting for someone else to do the hard part, and I had no idea what that would be.

Remembering what a scar means and how it lasts — hearing that there was no way out without injury — helped me discard any fantasy about a hero or even his trusty steed. I was alone and still responsible for my daughter. I started to imagine what I could do if I stopped waiting.

Sometimes, you do need to rest in order to heal. But that time was over for me. Who knows why I was able to listen that day. I don’t recommend being so uncomforting to your friends.

But somehow the smack-upside-my-head of these hard words opened my ears to what was already around me. I started to hear new ideas from my peers at support group, other folks living with grief and raising children with no time off: Viv started a new workout, Elena took an evening out with girlfriends, Frank wrote a personals ad. Options, small steps, maybe tiny: each and every one of them was possible for me, too.

I could feel myself starting to climb the hill, neglected calf muscles again pumping good blood to my heart. I didn’t know where I was going, but it hurt so much that I knew I was moving up.

Robin Moore 2010

Tags: anger, Depression, guilt