(Still) Keeping Time

Keeping Time

I have to start today’s post with Go Seahawks!  What a fun time to live here!  There were more jerseys and blue and green clothes in worship yesterday than I’ve seen in a long, long time.   And now we are the Superbowl Champions!  Bruce would have been over the moon! 

Yesterday was the 8th day of the month.  On the morning of the 8th of May Bruce walked into my study and said “I don’t feel right” and by the end of the day we were in Seattle in the Oncology ICU at UW.   (If you’re new here, and some of you are, you should know that I write often and candidly about death and grief and leukemia and my Beloved.  If that makes this space hard for you, please know that I understand if you need to skip reading today).   

I started keeping a journal on the 10th of May and on the 12th of May I started writing on Caring Bridge in order to update more efficiently our vast and wonderful network of friends and family.  By that point we’d been through some really harrowing moments and days.  Caring Bridge has also become a sort of diary that I can look back on.

And while I’m keeping time in months, (at the end of this month it will be 9 months), I also find myself, beginning on the 8th day of each month, reliving each one of those days.  Remembering the dialysis machines and the distinct noise they made.  Remembering the friends who came to sing to him and the way the music just broke something open in both of us.  Remembering the days of very warm weather and how much exuberance we witnessed outside of his hospital window, while inside our room and on that unit, so many people were fighting for their lives.  Remembering the comfort it was to have our favorite nurse (shoutout to Kerryanne!) Remembering how hard it was to get him to eat and how Door Dash kept us well fed.  Remembering how I would order the same thing for breakfast from the hospital cafeteria every morning: coffee, orange slices, oatmeal, an egg, and a banana.  Remembering  the way the staff on the ICU advocated to keep us in that room until the very end, because Bruce had a view of Mt. Rainier/Tahoma and he’d climbed her once and it was as though she watched over him as he climbed from this life to the next one.  

I’m not sure it’s a particularly healthy thing for me to keep time this way.  I do breathe a bit easier on the first through the seventh days of each month and on the eight day I begin the remembering anew.  But it’s where I am and it feels to me as though I am trying to solve a mystery that I hope will have a different ending each time.  

I would give anything and everything to have Bruce still with me, with us.  And I’m still getting used to his absence, at least in the flesh.  Sometimes he is very present and that’s another story for another time.  

But one of the lessons I keep coming back to, perhaps as often as I keep coming back to the passing of time, is that every minute we have is sheer gift and what we do with it matters.  To be sure, not every minute can be extraordinary or breathtaking, but we can do all that we can to make every moment a good moment.  To fill our moments with compassion and love and passion and meaning.  When we do that and we come to the end of our days on this earth, in the shadow of our own mountain, we will have crafted a life of compassion and love and passion and meaning…what some might call a good life.   And to the ones who will mourn us, that will make all the difference.