Great Blessings

 One of the greatest blessings I received in the past 4 years of care-giving was the answered prayer of September 4, 2020.

by thoughtcatalog on Unsplash

I was at the end of my rope that morning.  I don't remember why.  Perhaps because I'd stepped in human shit on my way to the bathroom that morning.  Perhaps because he had wakened in the night and wandered around the house while I tried to convince him that it was early in the morning and he should be in bed.  Perhaps I'd seen evidence on social media that morning of friends having fun without me which led me to immediate thoughts of how terrible I am and how other people, friendlier, better people, would have had so much more support from their friends and family than I have had.  

For whatever reason, I prayed to God that morning, while standing up in front of the office windows that overlooks a bend in the squiggly Deschutes River, and told the Divine, "I'm just done.  I cannot do this anymore."

And later that morning, as I've related  in a previous blogpost, Will locked me out of the house one more time (on top of everything else) and I freaked out - had an emotional overload of rage.  Maybe it was the sound of the door being closed and locked behind me while I was raking needles and picking up deer shit in the backyard.  Maybe, maybe, maybe whatever.  I wound up pounding on the front door and putting my hand through an old, wavy yellow glass panel.  I looked down at my wrist to see it geysering blood.

In that moment, God answered my prayer -- gave me a way out.  I mean, all other ways out were already at my disposal, weren't they?  And in my experience, the Holy offers mundane responses before sighing and bringing out a miracle.  I could have placed Will, as my grief therapist has said, "a million different times."  I had the money to relieve my rage and despair and give it to somebody else.  That money came to me through Will, and through my choice to stay with him and make a functional and largely happy marriage from 1990 - around 2018, when the dementia fully dashed our equality.  

When I became Will's caretaker, I committed to the work and believe I did a good, A-/B+ job, as I do at most things.  I gave myself breaks, at the insistence of therapists and the great Teepa Snow.  I stepped into his world and smiled when he forgot who I was or called me by a different name.  I made everything okay. 

So on September 4th I was very tired.  But it turned out that I wasn't as tired as I thought I was.  As soon as I saw the blood spurting and realized I could die, I slammed my right hand down on my wrist and ran into the street screaming for help.  Because it was Friday before the Labor Day Weekend, people were home and came running out.  My cross the street neighbor helped keep pressure on the wound by wrapping it super tightly (he is a mountain rescuer).  His wife called my Senior Care person.  Other neighbors called 911.  My next door dude watched Will for awhile.  I was rescued.

And since that day I have not had suicidal ideations or cutting ideations.*  I fully believe the Holy stepped into my life and offered me death and then rescued me back into a life.  A life in which I would do the hardest, most heartbreaking work I've ever done.  But it was my work -- to be present with my life partner through mental and physical dissolution to his death.  

The whole experience, in my understanding, was a burst of Divinity into my life, offering me the really, really, real choices - easy death or hard life.  I chose life.

And it was a blessing.

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*  It should be noted that I started cutting myself purposefully in 7th grade and started having suicidal ideations when I was a freshman in high school.  When I was a junior I asked my parents if I could see a psychiatrist because I knew there was something wrong with my thinking and they said "no, no member of our family has ever gone to a psychiatrist."  Within a year my sister Sally had murdered her child and tried to kill herself.  "Always look on the bright side of life."