Peace, Health, Death, Coping

As my wife is having health emergencies again and again (yes there’s been another crisis and we’re no where near home), I have often been confronted with the emotional prospect of being a widow – an uxorious widow, if such a thing might be termed. No, I do not think she’s going to die any time soon and there’s fortunately now no immediate medical reason to think so – but as I’ve caught myself considering her mortality I’ve wondered if the reason I can’t really think of her as ‘dying’, if the reason why life’s just ‘temporarily difficult’, is because my interior is balking at the idea of so much of my framework just — disappearing. (When you love someone you open yourself up to a to a world of hurt – because all relationships involve emotional dependency to varying extents.)

Yet for some reason, in a strange and disconnected way, I can think and consider the practical things I might have to do if she happened to already be dead; I think the process of her removal from my life is different than coping with her irrevocable absence from my life. I suppose however if it is true that I’m worried about coping with her dying more than her death, the upside is that I am coping with what we currently have to deal with just fine, that I’m doing what I have to in order to support my wife just fine and I’m loving the life I have of loving her while I have it.

Though frankly I’ve always been rather zen about life and death; I’ve always thought life just keeps going on – until it doesn’t – but then that that’s part of life too. I suppose it’s really about having inner peace about it all – having the ability to cope with the reality that there’s so much of life and the living of life that’s just not, possibly never going to be, within your control.  We’re here for whatever meaning we can take but we can only take meaning from what happens, and we actually can’t take meaning from ‘coulda woulda shoulda’, or worse, ‘whatif’.

Compared to my wife I have such peace in spades; she likes control, even unfortunately uses control as a way of coping with lack of control, which naturally can set up a vicious circle of stress. Don’t get me wrong, I love her control and controlling tendencies because they’re sight lines right to her fire that is her – but loving her as she is, loving what she does as a function of who she is, doesn’t mean everything she does is necessarily helpful to her.

And this I think, more than death and dying, is my problem: no matter how much you love them, there isn’t a whole lot you can do for a person in a control stress circle other than help support them - because like people needing to have their own opinions to go with their own framework, people by necessity must find their own ways of coping, ways that go with their framework.