A Tale of Two Days
It’s Wednesday afternoon, around 4 p.m. I am writing now because I want to make sure I accurately record how I feel. Here it is, dull, listless, aimless, joyless. It’s a reiteration of a theme played right after my wife died: she’s gone; she’s never coming home. Except this time, it’s played as, you’re sad; no happiness will ever come. Why am I feeling this way? Some things happened this morning, which under ordinary circumstances, simply would be normal, shrug them off events. But life, as it bumps up against the raw spot left by my wife’s departure, tends to generate emotions all out of proportion to the event. Nothing is normal.
Please don’t take this as a cry for sympathy or even help. I really intend it as a dispassionate recording. The downside of the upside I felt just 72 hours ago when I concluded a wonderful weekend of music and companionship with my friends. I was fairly confident the high wouldn’t last, I just was ill prepared for the depth of the drop. Life these days is a lot like riding a roller coaster blindfolded. You know down is coming, you just don’t know when or how fast you’ll fall. Luckily, I’ve done this before. So, I know the drill. Get busy. Do something. So, I worked in the yard, hauled bags of dirt, trimmed deadwood. Did things. By morning I expect to be on the mend. We’ll see.
Thursday, 5:45 a.m. A good night’s sleep following a drive to the hills south of town for the sunset, and I am restored. As this point, normally, I’d throw away the first two paragraphs and start over, but that would be sugarcoating the reality of what I felt yesterday. Even though it might be called a tweak or the twinge of an old injury, the emotional impact was pretty intense. So, I’m sticking to the plan. I want to remember the depth of the hard valley and what I did to escape so I can do it again, only faster. Obviously, there was work, but I also realized as I watched the sun go down, that all I had to do was turn around, look to the far horizon, and I could watch it come up again. All I need to was wait.
John W. Wilson is the author of The Long Goodbye: A Caregiver’s Tale