July 10th, 2023

GRIEF TRIGGER WARNING: scroll on by now.

Today is the 10th again. The second 10th that has come along since he was last here on Earth. I don’t know if I’ll ever pass by a 10th again without remembering.

I don’t mean remembering him; I’ll obviously always remember him. I actually take comfort in the fact that, even if I end up with dementia someday, I’ll likely always remember him. If that happens, don’t remind me that he’s gone; just tell me he’s gone fishing in the Keys and he’ll be back soon…I’ll probably wonder why he didn’t take me.

No, I mean remembering 𝘪𝘵. Remembering the night he died. Remembering the events, the snapshots that make me think I should have photographic memory since they won’t go away. Remembering the absence of breath, the people with the code cart sliding into the room, the ineffectiveness, being escorted to an ICU waiting room when I would never see the ICU itself because he was never coming. I hoped, oh, I hoped against hope. But even as I prayed in cries and tears and anguish, even as I spoke life for him, I think I knew he wasn’t coming back. There were whispers in my spirit to prepare myself. Preparation didn’t come. I just already knew they were too late.

Being a nurse doesn’t make you good in a personal emergency or tragedy. It’s like someone turns off the switch during the trauma but then they save it so you can watch the replay later, like boys at football practice looking back at plays they missed in the last game. Enter the newly added grief stage of “guilt.”

I wasn’t “the nurse,” his nurse, I know. In my more concentrated moments I know that there was nothing else I could have done, personally, to save him. Still, places in my brain scream at me that should have, should have found a way, should have thought of something, should have helped him fight harder, should have stopped it from happening…somehow…

I spent ten of my nursing years in an ICU trying to pry people away from the grips of death. Trying to fight off the grim reaper like a vasopressor and vasoconstrictor-armed Navy SEAL trained with special tactics in Code Teams, calling doctors to the forefront of the mission for backup. None of that helped me in the moment because I was a wife, a “visitor,” on nursing turf that wasn’t my own and, at the moment, out of my element because he was mine.

When you’ve spent your life trying to stop people from dying, you have certain expectations of yourself. I imagine that if I were a police officer and had watched someone I love get shot in slow motion, I’d feel responsible even if there was truly nothing I could have done. If I was a paramedic arriving on scene only to find my loved one there an was obviously not going to make it, I would still feel like I should have done more to stop that from happening.

I think that is human nature. That is why guilt was added onto the grief package, like an extra amenity for your trip. We ask all the why’s and how’s and then, when all sensible answers evade us, we decide nonsensically that it must have been something we did or didn’t do.

Scott’s death 100% was not anything I could have stopped. (You are now speaking to the day shift manager of my brain who is inordinately more logical than the creepy night shift guy who is always such a Debbie Downer.) The end of Scott’s story was told by other narrators because otherwise, if I had told it, it would have been a fairytale like our life together always was.

God is still in the story, though. What happened to my husband in a hospital room is not the end of the book. It’s the end of a chapter. In this saga, the last chapter is already written and there, inevitably and irrevocably, the good guys will emerge victorious. The Bible already says so. The epitome of a good book has intrigue, a love story, dramatic climaxes, terrifying chapter-end cliffhangers, soaring victories, and a hero who changed it all. Jesus already did that and takes the cake for all heroes ever.

I’m still going to cry over this scene even though I’ve already read the book-become-script-for-a-blockbuster-movie (all the good ones do.) I’ve read the ending already. Good wins over evil. Period.

I know how it goes but I’m still going to cry over the tragic middle pages. I still cry every time I read OR watch The Notebook when they break up, even though I know it ends beautifully. (Yes, yes, they both die in the end but they get to be together; don’t rain on my allegory. The point is that even sad stories can have endings that aren’t exactly what you hoped for but are beautiful nonetheless.)

The story of Jesus is like that, too. Adventure, surprises, love, pain, and tragedy…but with victory three days later. The ending justifies the heartache. When I watch The Chosen (an interpretative telling of the story of Jesus), I cry then, too, while already knowing how the story is going to end.

Today, yet another milestone on this journey I’m forced to walk, I will cry a little. Then I’m picking myself up by the bootstraps and reminding myself that the ending has already been written and who knows what the chapters will look like between now and then? There may be mystery, intrigue, joy, laughter, and heart-warming anecdotes revolving around family and friends. Reading the first page of the next chapter doesn’t mean leaving the last one behind because, as you read an entire book, the whole story has to pull together as one big part to fulfill the overall plot.

Whatever chapter I read now, he’s already an integral part of everything I’ll read going forward.

A few quotes from The Notebook bring it all together:

“The best love is the kind that awakens the soul and makes us reach for more, that plants a fire in our hearts and brings peace to our minds, and that’s what you’ve given me.”

“I am nothing special; just a common man with common thoughts, and I’ve led a common life…But in one respect I have succeeded as gloriously as anyone who’s ever lived: I’ve loved another with all my heart and soul; and to me, this has always been enough.”

“It wasn’t over. It still isn’t over.”