Heads and hearts, loss and dreams and looking away

[scarlettina]

In my last post, I mentioned that this past weekend I'd received news of a death. The death in question was that of my brother's best friend's wife. While this may seem like a distant connection, it's closer than you may think for reasons that will become clear.

My brother and his best friend have known each other since junior high school. They've never had a fight, not even a mild disagreement. This friend, Russ, loved my mom like his own, and was with us through her illness and death--a rare form of cancer that took her in the space of two years when we were teenagers, in the most excruciating manner possible. It left us orphaned (we'd lost my dad when I was 11) and without much in the way of family support. It wasn't until I saw him the weekend of my brother's wedding two years ago that I realized that Russ had been like a second younger brother to me, and our interactions fell into that pattern quickly, especially given the news that his wife had been diagnosed with stage four ovarian cancer. They have two teenage sons, and all I could think, upon hearing the news, was that Russ's boys would go through what my brother and I went through, the horror of losing a parent in the drawn out torture that is the disease's progression and treatment. Nancy passed away in the wee hours of Sunday morning, and Steve got the call hours before dawn, the way we had when my mother died.

I didn't know Nancy well, but I knew her for years. My heart breaks for my brother and for Russ and his boys, for Russ's family and the social circle they've been a part of since high school, a clique known in their larger community as The Guys, a part of which Nancy became very quickly. My brother made a post on Facebook after he got the call about Nancy's death, something that I could have written almost word for word. He wrote:

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I got the call. The call I first remember getting at 8 years old when two men showed up to tell my mother that my father would not be coming home...the call came again at age 14 when I learned that we would not be seeing our grandfather again. At age 16 the call came, like tonight...in the early hours of the morning. Mom had gone home. The call come again years later when my uncle left us...and now it visits me again. I knew that The Call would be coming. I suspected it would come this weekend. It's the old friend I never wanted...it's been with me my whole life. The call comes to us all but, now, it's gotten too close...to personal, now it has come for my dearest friend...now he has to know it...now his children know it...now so many of us do. The call is here, tonight and I can't sleep with it in my home...again. So here I sit and type... I love you Nancy Asch....you made such a difference for so many of us....you'll always be a part of our lives...ride on ...we will all see you again
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We knew Nancy's death was coming. She'd been fighting like a tigress this last year. She went into hospice about two weeks ago and then, on Friday, told Russ she couldn't deal with the pain anymore. Silversteins know this pattern in the fiber of our beings; we hate it, and I don't mean that in the way one means they hate lima beans. She was gone within 24 hours.

Sunday morning, as I mentioned in my last post, davidlevine, kateyule and I had brunch with jaylake and radiantlisa. With Nancy's death fresh in my mind, over that meal we talked about Jay's illness and other family concerns. He talked about someone's open heart surgery in a kind of detail that gave me a couple of hard minutes of vivid flashback to markbourne's surgery and the things I saw in its aftermath, a kind of evidence of the trauma that experience left behind that I haven't completely acknowledged yet. This death comes in the wake of a year that saw the deaths of three of my friends, two of them especially close. I've been reading Jay's blog every morning, walking that terrain with him remotely, as so many of us have been. Other changes have been happening around here that I haven't written about that are . . . challenging. Ever since Nancy went into hospice I've been having bad dreams, dreams about limbs being sliced up and about being lost in seas of body parts and about people being lost, about people dying. I am a vivid, sometimes literal dreamer. As you might guess, it hasn't been restful.

I've been thinking about changing my reading habits in the morning. I read LJ at the start of each day, but I'm beginning to think that the things I'm reading in the morning are opening up wounds that never really heal for me and it's beginning to feel like I'm slicing myself to pieces bit by bit. I once had a therapist tell me that I have all the symptoms of PTSD when I talk about my mother's death; I never took it seriously until I was treated for PTSD, a treatment that I have had to acknowledge hasn't stuck mainly due to repeated exposure to new trauma. About the Boston marathon bombing news, suricattus posted on Twitter, "Reminder: if you're feeling echoes of past Bad Stuff, reading the news out of Boston, it's ok to look away. You're not letting anyone down." I'm feeling echoes of Bad Stuff. I may look away for a while. It's not a lack of love or strength. It's a matter of self-preservation.

PS--I don't want condolences upon Nancy's death; I'm serious about this. While her loss is painful, I didn't know her well. I'm mourning more for what her husband and family, and my brother are experiencing because I'm empathetic to their experience. And I'm dealing with the cascade of stuff that's been triggered by her death, especially in the context I've described above. I wrote about all this mainly because it's a way to start addressing it. We deal with things one day, and one word, at a time.

Comments

[jaylake.livejournal.com]

Ah, me. Yes.

[scarlettina.livejournal.com]

Love you, my friend.

[joycemocha.livejournal.com]

Hugs--because working through this stuff is horribly hard. It is not an overnight resolution.

You do what you have to do to keep yourself safe and not hurting. I completely understand.

[doranna durgin (from livejournal.com)]

You know, me too--when it comes to Facebook. It's just too...riling. It makes me get tangled up in whether more bad things are happening, or whether this social networking puts the same kind of bad things in our faces all the freaking time, or am I just losing the ability to cope?

Next up--separating my RSS feeds (where I get your posts) into news and funnies. For the same reason!

[prettyshrub.livejournal.com]

*HUGS* Take care of yourself.

[varina8.livejournal.com]

Re: ptsd. Someday we should talk about this. What I was told is that each new trauma involving loss has the ability to put me right back to those emotions because the events are always "live" not processed the way normal memories are.

[shadowdaddy.livejournal.com]

I have little of value to offer other than confidence that one day, one word at a time will help you find strength and a way through.

[garyomaha.livejournal.com]

Yes.

And I do hate lima beans.

[e-bourne.livejournal.com]

I understand. Nowadays, I only read LJ maybe once or twice a week. It's too much, and look away is fine.

FB I often just find annoying. There is plenty of stuff to be angry and upset about, and indeed, we should be. But I don't want to feel like I've been beaten with a stick from reading the Internet. I really don't. So I try and tread lightly as much as I can.

Because trigger events suck, and the call is always waiting in the wings, whether we're waiting for it or not. And it's a motherfucker.