The past two or three days have been fairly good for me. I wrote to Gary as usual, and I even thought of a moment that I had not remembered until now and it made me laugh at what Gary said at the time.
I accomplished getting through Sam's Club for the first time as a solo even though I still almost reached for the same old staples that 'we' needed, but 'I' do not. The last time I went was when Gary was still alive but had stayed home because he had no strength to even walk into the store to the waiting electric shopping cart. I remember being drained myself when I went to big box stores using my knee scooter after my broken heel surgery.
Oh whatever- I'm stalling.
This morning was my first appointment with a grief therapist. I won't tell you his name, so let's just call him Al, because its nice and short to type. I was really looking forward to it. I had gone to a therapist in Redlands after Gary was diagnosed with Parkinson's. I never failed to feel better when I walked out of that office than when I went in.
In the hour Al allotted me, he wrote down some things as I rambled. Mostly I talked about the last 15 years in which Gary and I spent a fair amount of time away from each other. He stopped me after awhile and said, "So. You are still expecting him to come back aren't you." It was not a question. I stopped too and had to think. My mind says No, I am too intelligent to think that. I know he's dead and whats left of him sits in a box on the bookshelf in the living room. I saw him take his last breath. I said goodbye. I paused and told Al, "The dog thinks he's coming back..." But as I type this, I know I am waiting for him, not wanting to and feeling awful and pathetic that I am.
When I worked for the phone company, there was a universal language of terms for every event that could occur in the business. In personnel terminology there was the word 'retreat'. To retreat meant that if you took a transfer to another job that was in the same or higher wage group than what you left, you had 6 months to try it and if for any reason, you wanted to go back to your former job, you could 'retreat' back and be guaranteed your old position. I was a lineman for a week once when the guy I replaced retreated which then bumped me back to being an operator. Then when I was an artist, I transferred into Customer Service and after 4 weeks of training and 1 week on the job, I decided, 'Oops- this is not what I can hack doing for the next 3 years'. So I retreated back to my old job in graphics.
I was thinking about that as I brushed my teeth tonight. Every night I open the medicine cabinet and see Gary's Braun electric toothbrush in the cabinet. It was last charged in early October. It sits in the cabinet without a brush in it because I threw that away the day he died. It has been flashing "low battery" now for 2 months.
Looking at it is almost like seeing a heart beat that I keep waiting for to stop. Its not a throw away brush, its a good quality keeper.
Well, as I think about Gary being gone, and that even his toothbrush is finally giving up that he will hold it again, and my realization that I am forever alone without him, I want to retreat. I have never not had an option of retreating until now. Think about it: there's not many times in our lives that we can't get a do over. We are all about second chances in careers and even failed marriages. Not so in getting to stay ALIVE in this world or, (worse) in being forced to stay behind IN the world after someone you counted on dies and leaves you. Its pretty lousy not to have a choice.
That's what Al made me realize today.
I am going back again next week. He will probably knock any happy right out of me again, if I have managed to bounce back in any way. Maybe that's his job. Like the charge of an electric toothbrush, nothing lasts forever.
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