July 17th, 2023
I’m trying my best not to get down in the dumps today. Trying being the operative word.
This came in the mail today.
One day you have a husband, a soulmate…
Two months later, you have a certificate of appreciation and a little box.
Long before I lost my husband, I knew he wanted to be an organ and tissue donor. We had talked about it at length and we both had already registered as such before we ever met. I knew that, one day, if he ever left this world before me, this is what he wanted.
He wanted to do the same thing he spent his life doing when he was here, as a veteran and a nurse: he wanted to help people.
Because of the sudden nature of his passing, organs weren’t an option for donation. But other parts, tissue, corneas, cardiac valves (which are considered tissue, not organs, even though they are part of the heart, and even bone could be harvested in order to provide someone who is still here with a better quality of life.
I know he would be proud of all of the people he was able to help. We don’t know how many people that is yet, but they told us that around the end of this year we will get a letter telling us what they were able to give to someone; we’ll know how many people Scott helped in death. The number of people he helped in life is innumerable.
I should be feeling happy, some kind of pride, for the fact that his wishes were upheld and that this would make him happy. I should be feeling so glad that other people are benefitting from something that he no longer needed. I know I should…
But I don’t. I can never tell when the anger is going to pop up, when it will rear it’s ugly head, let out a loud, throaty battle roar, and come charging at me to hijack my day. Anger, sadness, depression, devastation… none of those guys fight fair and they’re never going to give you a head’s up before they attack. I suppose that would be counterintuitive to their intent to lay you out like a boxer, knocked out cold in the ring.
I wish it would knock me out, though. Beats the chaotic turmoil that screams in my belly right now, the cacophony of all of the not-fun emotions trying to take center stage. Sometimes I think it feels like dying…but it doesn’t. It feels like living…
I’ve been on a “good” streak the last few days so this attack came quite out of the blue. I realized I hadn’t checked the mail box since some day last week. There are a lot of things around here that should be done but aren’t. I’m getting a better handle on it sometimes but others just feel like, “Ahhhh, why bother? What’s the point?”
When I opened the mailbox (which I’m glad I checked because there may not have been much room for mail today, oops) this little box and a separate, large envelope were inside and the matching return address on both of them was a beacon, shouting to me that I was entering the danger zone, a lighthouse warning brightly: Jagged rocks ahead!
Scott had already shed his earthly body before I agreed to let them take him away to the donor center. He didn’t need that stuff anymore. It was of absolutely no use to him whatsoever because he already had a new “body” of some sort. He already had the eternal kind.
But I miss the one he had here so much. I miss his “voice box” and how he had a high pitched laugh when he got really tickled about something. I miss his amber eyes that could be brown or almost golden at times, even though they were also always red, much to his dismay, because of allergies. I miss holding his hand. I miss his bald head. I miss hearing his heartbeat when I would lay my head on his chest, the sound that he always said belonged to me because he would never, ever give it to anyone else. I miss…just him. I miss him.
And so I do not regret the decision to help others with his gift. I just regret what made it happen now. I regret that it was so soon. I regret that our plans, dreams, adventures, and hopes were dashed in an instant…in an unexpected instant. Somehow, even now, I just don’t know what to do with all of that.
I don’t cry as much now usually. It’s almost like your body becomes conditioned to what the day-to-day heaviness, sadness, loss feels like and it just doesn’t respond the way it used to anymore; the tears just won’t even come most times. In the beginning, I cried so much that it felt like if I blinked to hard, plop…there would go my exceedingly dry eyeball rolling across the floor because it just got inadvertently squeezed out by the normal movement of my eyelid. Now, though, it is a blessing and a curse to have adapted to this “conditioning,” I suppose. I’m not as likely to embarrass myself in the middle of the pickle aisle, but it also means that a lot of stuff just seems to live inside of me, instead of escaping to the outside. I’ve apparently just grown accustomed to feeling this way…sort of.
I’ve been staying busy writing. My novel has had me tied up for a little while now and I’m 1/3 of the way finished already. I think that knowing Scott really wanted me to do this, that he felt strongly about the fact that it was something I should do, that it was a calling for me…that seems to have punched the time card on my purpose meter. I was able to suddenly write a full outline and know exactly which direction it will go when I’ve been trying to figure out where to start, what the plot was, where to create drama, etc., for literally years now. And so writing is what I do all day when the kids are at work. I’ve had some “good” days; I use quotation marks because good is relative. Good for me now would have been complete misery in The Before. Funny how your perspective changes.
Writing helps me process emotions and, now that I’ve blogged all about how much it sucked rocks to open these, knowing that they are just another symbol of the brutal finality of it all, I’m getting back on a relatively even keel and will return to my authoring tasks.
God is in the Outcome 