Resignation syndrome

I’ve discovered a strange thing about writing a newsletter. Well, two things, really. The second thing is that, because I usually write while sitting on the upstairs floor with the cat, I have to bend my arthritic knee. Otherwise it’s quite painful when I try to get back up.

But the first thing is that I feel some unrealistic pressure (from myself, not from anyone else) to be upbeat and optimistic about the grief journey when I write. That’s because, I suppose, I want to be encouraging to others. But one paradoxical way to be encouraging is to tell it as it is. Grief isn’t much fun. The post-loss life isn’t a walk in the park — not during a February in Wisconsin, it isn’t; hypothermia stalks the land, seeking whom it may chill.

I’m in a not unexpected emotional slump this month, because within the past two years, I lost my beloved wife, and my favorite brother, and my father. My mother died some seven years ago, so I’m the last one standing; and at times it is lonely, though I have friends, who rarely sit on the upstairs floor with me and the cat, likely out of an unwarranted fear that arthritis is contagious. It’s not; but try telling my friends that.

I read the other day that a danger for many people who struggle with loss, or illness, or just aging, or a host of other ills to which humans are heir, is that they will reach a point where they feel like giving up. I’m not referring to suicidal ideation, though that is actually common in early grief; for the first few months after Diane died, I battled with that terrible enemy, but it’s gone now. No, I mean a sort of feeling that settles in with a sigh, making one ponder with respect to one’s current life, “Is this all there is, all that will ever be?” Life isn’t terrible any more; but I come from a long-lived family, and could see as many as seven thousand more days before finally going home to glory. Sometimes, the thought that they’ll all be like what today is shaping up to be is very demoralizing.

I’m not, of course, “waiting around to die”, though that sometimes happens to people in deep elderhood — not, thankfully, to my father, who somehow managed to live a meaningful and productive though sometimes sad life until his recent death at age ninety-four, despite the sad loss of his soulmate who, as mine was for me, was the making of him. He too, had a cat; I don’t know about the state of his knee joint, never having thought to ask him. He was a lifelong learner, and loved to read, and take pictures, and play the guitar, and sing in the church choir, and debate important topics like whether squirrels can think (answer: they mostly think about other squirrels). I’m so much like him in many ways; and in a way, that gives me some hope. If he could build a sustainable life out of the wreckage of the one he had before, well, so can I. After all, the kumquat doesn’t fall too far from the shrub.

But on bad days, I sometimes feel like one of the leftover people, and I have to fight the thought patterns that then arise. My faith tells me — and woe to the culture who abandons the insight I’m about to offer in the remainder of this sentence — that all people have unalienable worth and dignity, because all are created in the image of God. We all can’t be Tom Brady or Gisele Bündchen — thankfully; Diane and I used to ask each other sometimes while grocery shopping, “If all these power couples can’t keep their relationships from breaking apart, why don’t we struggle with that?” Well, we knew why — a threefold cord is not easily broken. But death separates the strands — I doubt if anything else ever could have.

I’ll likely never remarry, but I at times wish I had the opportunity to tell someone that I’ll never ask her, so I could see a look of mild regret in her eyes that would make me feel that I still have some charm. Sometimes I go up to random women I’ve never before met at the grocery store and say to them, “It just wouldn’t work out!” Thankfully, there are many competing groceries in the tri-county area; in time I’ll have run through them all, and then will have to subsist as best I can on roadkill and grass clippings, but until then, I still have options. Where I live, there is a Kwik Trip on every corner, so I’m not unduly worried about this. I worry about many things, but not this. A new one is built every week; resistance is futile.

So I am working on relinquishment, which is different from resignation. Relinquishment is tinged with hope, vague though it be, that an unknown future could perhaps be better than a drab present; and no purpose of God’s can be thwarted, so if I am willing to let him have his way, and to rest in that, I can perhaps come to trust more deeply that his plans for me are for welfare and not for calamity. Yet humans are born for trouble, as the sparks fly upward; and in this world we have tribulation. So I can’t look at the world through rose-colored glasses, which I don’t own, anyway; they would be irritating. “Why is the sky so pink this morning?” Likely, it’s because I magenta fellow.

Each day brings blessings, though, even in February. The cat is purring with deep contentment (she sees my charm, undoubtedly). My coffee is particularly good this morning. The pastel sunrise was especially beautiful today; and that’s far better than a morning in which one awakens to find that the earth has spiraled out of orbit and is now lost in the unremitting blackness of intergalactic space. And my knee remains bent — even I can learn from experience, however slowly and reluctantly. This is the day that the Lord has made — I’m going to try, as best I can, to rejoice and be glad in it.