Heavy on My Heart

 

 

I had to take Frances to to the emergency room this week.  The trip  was hellish.  She was miserable and throwing up and unable to walk, so that was terrible.  But I could have gotten over her symptoms.  The REAL problem, of course, is that it placed me back in a previous trip to the ER when I took Molly for a psych evaluation.  With Molly, we spent the better part of the day waiting to be seen and I was sort of hopeful that we would get a magic pill and all of her problems would go away.  Painfully, I know better now.  I know better.

 

This more recent trip was efficient (in that we were only there four hours), but every second was spent breathing the air of my past naiveté, re-living the fear that we felt as Molly failed and re-anticipating the loss that we ultimately endured.  Just too much.    

 

When neighbors came to visit Frances, who spent days immobile on the couch in our family room watching TV, different memories hovered.   My neighbor, who died last summer, spent the last six months of her life on her couch.  In her family room.  The connection was obvious to our visitors who had also visited her; our houses, after all, are basically the same.  With every visit, there was joy, but no doubt I was re-living the pain, the awkwardness and the stark loss of last summer.

 

Of course, since I spent two months of this year taking care of my dad after the accident that killed my mother, this more recent nurse maid role brought all of that back too.

 

Frances is actually getting better…. after a week away, she’s back to work, and her vertigo is evidently treatable.  I am still reeling.  I have been thrown back into memories that trigger mourning and ignite fear. 

 

After these last three and half years, I am no longer naïve.  I know that the worst that life can hand out will not pass me by.  Most days – most days – I can leave the burden of all of it in God’s hands.  But there are some days – and today is one of them - where there seems to be nowhere for the pain and the uncertainty of life except heavy on my own heart.