We mark the time with calendars. Holidays and weekends, “the time we went to...”, start and end dates. Every year life is filled with New Year’s resolutions, lists of what happened the previous year, plans for the future. We celebrate the going out, the coming in, give it weight in how we plan our lives, what we wish and hope for.
Death becomes a different calendar, illness a different kind of resolution. After loss, our calendar shifts: no New Year’s Eve or Day, no holiday season, encompasses the time we keep to ourselves. The Before ended the day of the death; the New Year began just after. A new life without them, and our resolutions become about getting through the day, about not breaking down or floundering helplessly. Even if we don’t want to, we still keep time that way: It was this time last year that I lay in the guest bedroom, listening to her cry in pain and fear, while outside the neighbors blew off fireworks and yelled “Happy New Year!” This time last year she was in her final chemo, shrunken and waxy and haunted. This time two years ago we found out she had cancer after six hours of surgery.
Every Wednesday night I find, unbidden, that emotionally I am in a hospice room, begging my sister not to die. It's hard to sleep that night. My internal calendar knows it was the day and marks it for me, without my wishes. The calendar doesn’t hold meaning for me other than how I date my checks; instead, my months are numbered by their relation to the illness and death. New Year is now March 9: before there was a life with my twin; after there was the new year, new life, new world.
Resolutions aren’t made for the new year when someone you love is ill. Resolutions come with the news. We will fight the cancer. We will find a cure. We will get through treatment. We resolve to survive and have a positive attitude and feel better someday. Like all new year’s resolutions, they are a lie, and rarely accomplished. But lists make us happy. Resolutions of how we will bear the illness make us feel like we can do something, that it isn’t in the hands of negligent medical people and creeping time.
Time is your enemy and your friend. Time will let you forget, just a little, eventually. Some day. At least, we have to believe that, just like we believe our resolutions. But time moves fast in illness, and the calendar pages get ripped off, faster and faster as it progresses, till suddenly there is no time left. Only the backing of the calendar pad remains. It’s a new time, your After. No fireworks and party hats and champagne. This new year isn’t celebrated. But it’s marked, forever after, always in your mind even if you aren’t aware. It’s a calendar only you carry with you, and it has no holidays or weekends off.
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2 comments:
That last line is dazzling, and crushing. So often your posts make me reconsider my well-intentioned messages of cheer. How can they serve, in this brave new world of which you are a part?
I so understand your calendar, and the way time has shifted. It's something I've lost some track of (though for nearly a year I could tell you how many days it had been). And the way you write about it is beautiful & sad.
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