The Grieving Room: Everything looks perfect from far away

"they will see us waving from such great heights, "come down now,"
they'll say but everything looks perfect from far away,
"come down now," but we'll stay..."

Hi – this is actually exme.

Please bear with me through tonight's diary – I've actually cheated a bit and revisited a post that I made almost two years ago. I will warn you that my content may be too graphic – if grief is too close at hand, or Death stands too near,  you may want to avoid my repost tonight.

I went back through some old diaries to see if any of my internal, inner workings had changed and I stumbled across this. Thought it might be an appropriate revisit for the Grieving Room series, though I've reworked it some, and edited bits and pieces to fit. Let me know what you think, and jump right in with anything you want to share.

We welcome anyone who is new to The Grieving Room, as well as our old familiar friends.  We meet every Monday evening.  Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you.  Share whatever you need to share.  We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.

Unless you deal with death in your job or live in an urban area with street violence, or live with a loved one dying at home, death is not always familiar and present.

......

I have an admittedly layman's experience of death. Family members, some friends, pets; I've seen death in several stages - sometimes as it enters a room, a body, the life of a family group, and also at the moment it closes the door on a soul.

I've seen death hover in the room, quiet and present and waiting.

Years ago, I went under hypnosis to stop a nasty habit and in the final session, a very physical dark presence leaned over my right shoulder. I couldn't rise to consciousness enough to acknowledge it, and it pressed me heavily into the chair with a massless weight. As I was counted out of my mesmerized state by the hypnotist, the figure disappeared.  I knew it was Death.

I saw my father in an open casket at his funeral when I was eleven. At fourteen, I stood next to death in the bedroom where my oldest sister lay dying after an unsuccessful cancer surgery. Death came to visit nine years later, but decided not to stay, that time, as my mother became a successful lung cancer survivor, living another twenty years after surgery.

I became the instrument of death the day I ran over my new dog. Unaware that day that my new dog had escaped from the backyard, I backed out of my driveway with one of my daughters in a car seat, intent on dashing to the store for more diapers.  As I moved down the drive, I could hear my neighbors yelling across the street, not an uncommon sound, and I had no idea they were yelling at me.

There was something terrible in me, sometimes at night I could see it grinning at me, I could see it through them grinning at me through their faces, it's gone now and I'm sick.
William Faulkner

I heard a thud and realized I had rolled over something. Thinking it was a toy, I pulled forward, shut off the car and set the parking brake. There, behind the left rear wheel of my Ford Taurus station wagon, was Winston - just three months old, a miniature pinscher/beagle mix. He was on the ground and he was twisted, his head canted at a horrible angle and the front of his little, robust body broken and bleeding.

I can't fully tell of the way my heart hurt, and still hurts as I write this. I picked him up and realized that he was still alive and in such pain and that there was no way that rushing to the emergency vet was going to make a difference. I've had some tough decisions in life over the years, but I still tag the decision I made at that moment as the most difficult - in some ways more difficult than a later in life decision involving death.

I wrapped my hand, the hand that put the car in reverse, the careful hand that strapped my children into a car seat, the nurturing hand that lovingly fed those kids, and at that time in my life, the wifely hand that stroked my husband's face in love - I took that hand and placed it around Winston's neck and squeezed the breath from his body. It was mercy, to relieve his pain. Death again and I had summoned Him to hurry. It was over twenty years ago and I can still feel my gut as it roils up to clench my broken heart.

Clocks slay time. Time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little wheels; only when the clock stops does time come to life.
William Faulkner

It's been five years now, that I welcomed Death again. My mother was a fighter of immense strength and if she was terrified of anything, it was Death. She feared Death the most, as only a superstitious Welsh woman can. I don't know why; she met and lived with Death far more than I have, or anyone else I've known.  She buried two children, a grandchild, and a beloved husband well before it should have been Death's time.  She fought off death before, as I mentioned, one of the few good statistics of lung cancer patients in the early 80's, when the lung cancer mortality rate was around 95%.  I, and my kids, arrived at the hospital in Oregon City where she was in CCU, driving from Seattle in a record time two hours and ten minutes. Death rode in the backseat on the way south, but kindly ignored my reckless speeding.

My brother and I spent the afternoon, the night, and into the early morning of the next day together with my mother as she lay in a coma, induced by congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema. My deeply responsible and caring brother is an eye doctor and his way of dealing with his intense grief, the previous months and years of stress and frustration and fatigue of responsibility for a failing parent, was to periodically check her vitals and the state of her eyes. An eye doctor knows when the patient's eyes have no functioning brain behind them. The son had a harder time with the loss of the mother.

If you are familiar with final stage congestive heart failure and pulmonary edema, you know that a patient inevitably dies from drowning and progressive organ failure. The heart muscle flops inside the chest with each sloppy, ponderous beat; now like weakening gelatin and not the strong muscle that once was there.  The breathing is not breathing, but hard labor that draws the strength out of a body with each breath, until there is no structure to support the in and out of air. The rattle, the gurgle, the deathly white color of the skin that has no oxygen in the blood, the gaping and wounded mouth that is so dry and cracked as it tries to pull in air.

Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than recollects, longer than knowing even wonders.
William Faulkner

The sounds are the worst of all, so much worse when set against the hum of machines that are attached to the body of the one woman to whom such indignity and struggle should never have been rendered.

We requested the removal of the saline, morphine and the oxygen tubes. The blood pressure was 60/40, then 50/32, then 48/30 and then it stalled and Mother struggled on. No brain function, but the will to survive can be stronger than death's impatience, can't it? I saw my brother's torn heart and hollow eyes and thought, "do I look the same?"  Everyone always calls me a younger, female version of my brother who is Clark Gable handsome. Which leaves me as a woman...well, I'm not certain where that leaves me.  I took my hand (that hand) and held my mother's face and started whispering to her. Go ahead, mother. It's time to go. Daddy is waiting. Go ahead. Let go. You don't have to work this hard. We love you, Mom. It's time to go.

It's a phenomenon of Death that a white room will fade dimly to gray, even when the lights are still on. I sat with my mother for quite awhile. There is no other texture or feel like the cold of the skin on a body in which there is no beating heart.

Other family and other people over the years. I hope my reminiscences have not been too hard to read. You'll note the way in which I write appears somewhat detached, perhaps a bit dry. It is much the same way that I verbally discuss my family members who have passed, and some find my demeanor off-putting, rather removed.

Make no mistake, this is a shield. We do what we do and how we do it, in the ways that we can. I like to think that even with death and grief, the best defense is a good offense – and meeting Death directly gives a body and a soul power, even a small power, to cope and feel. And breathe.

And grieve when it becomes necessary again.

(This diary has been modified from the original:Who could do such evil things to being save a being?)

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Here is a link to all the previous Grieving Room diaries.