The is stage

It was a physical sensation, something shifting in my chest, a displacement of weight. Neither a lightening nor an additional burden, but the same weight, slipped into a different place. A physical manifestation of the realization that Sandy isn't coming back. That what I've known to be true since she died last year, I now know at a cellular level to be true.

It was an abrupt change, though not exactly sudden. (How could it be sudden when I've been straddling sanity and insanity for sixteen months?)

I don't know what happened, why I now find it possible to comprehend that we won't be getting our life back. It may have been the election, with the marriage victory here and still no Sandy. It could be the tincture my naturopath has me taking (nasty, grassy-tasting herbal stuff) to even out my perimenopause-challenged hormones. Or it could just have been time.

I have no doubt that Sandy has been very present in my life since her death. That part isn't insanity. And I'm confident that she'll continue to be with me, that someday we'll be together again on a different plane, that she is not lost to me.

Sandy, at Myrtle Edwards Park in May 2010, shortly after learning she had
metastatic breast cancer. She'd been told not to ride her bike because
of the tumor in her femur, so she and Christine went for a spin through
Myrtle Edwards Park before she put the bike away until her leg healed.

But now, on this plane, on this planet, in this lifetime, I still have some things to do. I have always believed that I am in the world to change the world, and that requires energy and intention and presence. It requires me to live in reality. And it requires me to pay attention to my own priorities and preferences.

I wondered at first whether this was a temporary shift. For so long I found comfort in fantasy -- knowing it was fantasy, but still allowing myself to believe that she really would reappear. So I've watched myself, observed the changes. I noticed that I've started referring to "my" house, "my" cats, and "my" garden; sometimes I consciously switch to "our," but it's an awkward decision, no longer my instinctive pronoun. I've started to notice what I want to do, where I want to travel, rather than trying to live Sandy's life for her in some way. I removed everything from the front of the fridge that didn't please me, the things that were there because Sandy liked them. And though each day still ends with my imploring Sandy to come back to me if there's any way she can, it's more of a reminder that I miss her than an expectation that she'll somehow have the ability to come back.

The universe -- or perhaps Sandy? -- is affirming the shift. Synchronicity strikes again. I read The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving last week, a book that had been on hold for months. Near the end of the book, one of the characters tells another, who's grieving intensely a couple of years after a tragedy: "We're past the if stage. We're past the how stage and the why stage. We're in the is stage."

I'm in the is stage now. Past the hows and the whys and the buts and the completely baseless optimism. Sandy died. She's here in other ways, but she's not coming back physically. And I need to make the most of my time here, whether it's another day or fifty years.

Tonight, then, I watched this week's episode of a TV show I watch frequently and it focussed on the story of a man whose behavior was damaging others, all because of his own guilt and grief over a death three years ago. An intervention taught him that he can't change the past, but he can make the future. The same message I've heard from several directions the past couple of weeks.

I'm not done grieving. My want is palpable, and at times I still feel terribly, horribly alone. But I'm no longer waiting for Sandy to return. I've moved into a new, apparently lasting stage, living with what is instead of what I wish were.