PROLOGUE IN THE BEGINNING THE LOSSES JUST KEPT COMING (4rd installment)

PROLOGUE

IN THE BEGINNING

THE LOSSES JUST KEPT COMING

 (4^rd installment)

As a new year rolled around, the losses kept on coming, only this time they were close to my heart.  In January my thirteen-year-old cat disappeared, snatched by a coyote off the front steps of our house, leaving only her torn collar and her blood at my door.  In February my former mother-in-law, paternal grandmother to my grown daughters, died, devastating them both.  In March, another cat disappeared; he just never came home.

In April my mother’s long battle with her health entered its final stages.  She stopped eating, and she faded before my eyes.  My father’s grief and panic were palpable.  His tearful phone calls telling me the “end is near” caused me to burn up the freeways between Diamond Bar and Long Beach.  I could cover the forty-three miles in less than forty minutes, even though a third of the way was surface streets.  And yet, for all the times I raced down the freeways to be with my mother and father at the end of her life, I wasn’t there for them when she passed.  I was frozen in place, unable to drive, unable to think.  It was only the call from my daughter telling me that her grandfather would not let the funeral home take my mother’s body until I arrived that finally forced me to move.

As I traversed the freeways to be at my mother’s bedside that final time, I questioned my reason for practicing law.  Was it really my passion or just something I had learned to do very well because it made her and my father proud?  Was I now free to follow my own path without her judgment?  With my mother’s death, thoughts I had never allowed to be credible began to take shape.  But, with my grief, I stuffed those thoughts back down and soldiered on to fill the void in my father’s life.

But as my mother died, so too did my trust of the motives of other human beings.  I had been formed by my mother’s pride but also her judgment.  In the end, I had failed her, but that failure was not mine alone.  I blamed my father for making my mother die in a nursing home instead of her own bed.  My emotions made no logical sense but, nonetheless, those emotions ruled my actions and my attitudes.  I no longer trusted myself or my ability to solve the problems of the world.  I began to judge my prince by my own failings and found him wanting.  I wanted him to “be there” for me, but I had no idea where “there” was.  How could I trust him to care for me if I wasn’t there for my own mother?  How could I trust any man when my own father, who had loved my mother all of his life, cast my mother aside to die in a facility?

I railed at God. “How could you abandon me?  How can I endure this pain?  Are you really there?” 

I somnambulated through my life.  Gone was my sense of humor and my compassion for others.  I was wrapped in a cocoon of grief and seclusion.  A “Do Not Disturb” sign was firmly planted on my soul.  The prince was not allowed in, but it was the death of his beloved Rottweiler, Alice, that closed his door to me.

Alice was clearly my husband’s dog.  She had adopted him years earlier, and her eyes were only for him.  She was his companion in everything he did. She slept on the floor next to him and kept him company at night after I had gone to bed.   One day she just lay down and didn’t get up.  It was my husband who carried her to the car; he held her in his lap as I drove to the animal hospital.  When the vet gave us the news she was dying of cancer, it was my husband who quietly told the vet, “End it now. Don’t let her suffer.”  He held her mighty head, pressing his cheek next to hers as the fatal dose of medicine was given, gathering her body in his arms as she took her final breath.  Then he silently took her collar and tag, leaving the office without a word.  At home he cracked open a bottle of vodka, picked a lemon from the tree the two of them had planted together those many years before, and then he watched the sunset, just as he and Alice had done so many times before.

No words were spoken between us that night.  His grief was too heavy to support words of any kind.  Thus, his silence joined mine.  Communication between us died.  The grief in our house seemed too thick for any marriage to survive.  The nightly ghosts gathered around us, each pressing their haunting on our psyches.  The distance between us grew into an un-crossable chasm.

Failure, guilt, anger, loss, and grief were the primary emotions filling my life.   I was too numb to love.