Seeing the Blessings: Knowing My Limits

Scarcely a sentence of honesty. But a struggle to find clarity none the less...

I want to write two things:

1) I understand reading this from a distance. In the not-too-distant past I would have been none too interested myself. Cancer couldn't have been Alison's back pain. Life would go on forever. Autumn and winter were myths! Those that believed in those false seasons were Nay-Sayer's, half-emptier's, fire and brimstone types. Their hearts were already sunken.

My heart is not sunken. It wants in this moment, more than it ever has, to feel love and in love. It's capacity for that emotion is now broken. Broken as a container, a box. The walls have collapsed around my love and it flows out as a flood. It floods out but the source continues.

I cannot write that cancer can happen to the one you love the most. I can pray it does not.

I do not pretend to know God. Or His will. Or how the universe works. Or even this world. Or the principle of magnetism. Not really at least. Nor how chlorophyll works. Instead I have only evidence that God has quotas. Quotas for things like hardships, for adversity, and finally - for bringing us home.


Some very thoughtful friends gave me a book tonight: C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed. I cannot wait to read it in its entirety. But he writes, "nothing will shake a man....out of his merely verbal thinking and his merely notional beliefs. He has to be knocked silly before he comes to his senses. Only torture will bring out the truth. Only under torture does he discover it for himself."

I cannot write to any one's emotional intellect. On my best day I can only dance in your notional beliefs. Should I still attempt to?


2) I can write that I am blessed. I have long accepted death as a part of life, and trust that in God's quota system, in His script, He chose wisely. In this messed up story line, so many things went right that I know He was there. Placing pads on my knees. Rubbing the rocks out of my hands after I fell. Metaphorically of course. In very real terms He placed and is placing friends at the right place at the right time. For me AND for Alison. He gave us great medical care, and insurance to boot. He brought us home in time for some dinners and some laughs, in time for some family. He gave us outlets for our thoughts.

In very poignant terms, I was blessed by a two-year heads-up from Him. Not everyone gets that. Not everyone has very lenient employers. Not everyone gets to love nearly as deeply, nor be loved as deeply as I have. I am overlooking several, but I know with emotional intelligence, that if the boat had to sink, we had the most fortunate surrounding circumstances, and we drained every drop of enjoyment from the vessel that we could. Right down to the final breakfast.

Those are my two things. Not nearly as eloquent as they deserve, but like I said: it is only my own expectation.

I have no idea how I'll continue on without Alison. But I will. I trust that I will.