Not hearing from my Resource Center supervisor of whom I asked to if I could come in before the spring term begins at the end of January, I will probably be home the rest of this week.  I’ve taken it very easy for the last two days and besides putting away Christmas and doing some errands, I’ve read, taken naps, ran a few errands and met Julia at the bus.  I’ve also gone to bed when Julia goes to bed and as a result have fallen asleep early and woken up early.  (David had a morning habit (I almost wrote ‘practice’ which it may have been) of early rising to write.  It was how he wrote three novels for the most part.)  I’ve decided if I wake up before 4, I will put on my guided imagery for sleep and try to catch a few more winks but if it is after, I will get my fingers moving.  

Yes, I’m rested and refreshed from the holiday and a few days of gentle living!  I have a heap of resolutions to dive into and a long to-do list.

Through Facebook adoption friends, I’ve been hearing about two little girls who are very ill and fighting for their lives.  Both are heart babies from China, adopted after their grave conditions were known.  I read about their progress on blogs their parents keep, knowing the blogs tell part of a story, and that brave and prayerful postings to some extent mask the fear and sadness that faces them.  Without commenting, because they both are receiving many comments on each posting, I send them support and strength in the days ahead, but I see that  I come from the “other side” now.  I have lost profoundly and I will never be able to have the completely optimistic outlook of the rosy outcome.  I cannot look at their chances for survival and imagine that they will be in the percentage that lives.  

David’s chances of surviving for a year after his transplant were 80%.  Those were pretty good odds and we never, for a moment, believed that he would be part of the 20% that died.  I took the miracle of surviving for granted.  The assumption protected me at a time of incredible stress from understanding how much my life would change when David died.  

I am feeding this observation with words and not truly explaining what I feel.  Maybe it is  is merely that my heart has been opened to the wonder of life.  The opening, however, includes the possibility, no, the reality that if living another day is a miracle that I should celebrate and make the most of in many ways, not living is only a breath away.  Death is close and ever present.  It is not the scary monster behind the locked door.  It is not even the end.  It is just there, unknown, to be sure, but as present as the bowl of oatmeal that Julia was eat in another hour.

I was not so much scared of death, it was more that I did not consider it.  I knew and heard about it from my Catholic upbringing, I experienced it when my grandparents, my niece and my dear friends died, but I did not carry it around like I do now.  I miss those people who I loved who died.  There are times that I still want to tell Jon Jones something  or pause to realize that if Jennifer had lived how old she would be right now and what she might be doing, but I could also put those losses aside, not have them enter my consciousness for days or weeks at a time, and push on.  I could hold the mistaken belief that I could not be torn apart from almost everyone who held me firmly to this earth.  I could not believe, did not fathom, that my life could be absolutely shattered and that I would need to make a conscious decision to hold firmly to this earthly plane.  I did not consider it when David was diagnosed, when he found out that he needed the transplant, as we waited for a new heart, as I waited during the transplant, as I watched recovery, even as I called 911 the night he was taken back to the hospital because of the gall bladder infection.  I assumed that he would be healed and we would be living a long time together.  For all of my years and life experience, I was so utterly young.

Now, I cannot hear of life threatening conditions and not imagine death.  Months ago, I heard the news that Dick Chaney needed a heart transplant.  As the radio announcer told us about the 80% survival rate during the first year after a transplant, all I could think about was that 20% and felt awfully guilty for thinking so.  It was as if I was condemning the man, who I didn’t know and never liked, to die on the operating table.  I felt awful for even thinking of the 20%.  But I see that I was, for the first time and with a completely stranger, just looking at the whole picture set out before me.  

And now, I am thinking about the friends who counseled me before David died to get our finances in order, to make sure documents was available, to do small things that would make that profoundly awful time wash over and through me without the practical bumps.  We did those things and it helped.  I think about the constant friendship offered by the women who called, sometimes daily, to check in with me, the food offered by friends, the garden cleaned and the sidewalk shoveled, the people who drove hours to be with me for David’s memorial.  I’ve done that for others but never understood it.  

This last paragraph moves on from where I started, and I don’t want to go there right now.  I want to write that there is something in the mystery of life and death that I have taken into my everyday, pedestrian experience of living.  It makes living every day and loving my beloveds and reaching out to more people much more precious, but as powerful as the preciousness of life can be, the understanding makes death a partner with life.  Perhaps that is maturity.  I know I have lost innocence.  There are conversations that I did not have with David.  It would have been good to talk to him about these things.  I can’t regret not having those conversations because we did not know how or what to talk about.  It was a mistake that I will not make again.