Circles

Intimate grief. Collective loss.

Fwiw, I’ve always felt a sort of grief-kinship with the families of Sandy Hook. Looking, now, at an overhead view of their 10-year commemorative memorial fountain has me reflecting on the interconnectedness of loss, the circular nature of grief, the seemingly never-ending swirl of our country’s complicated relationship with guns, and the profound cycle of life. If these are the things the memorial’s architects wanted to me to see in it, they did a stellar job.

The memorial brings other insights, too…

Ten years ago, the Sandy Hook shooting occurred just days after Jonathan temporarily (best laid plans) suspended his increasingly debilitating chemotherapy in the hopes he could enjoy a bit of comfort and peace over holiday season 2012.

What seemed like just moments later, came the news of the violent attack on the Sandy Hook community.

Although the shooting was hundreds of miles away from us, it felt like a particularly painful blow to Jonathan’s already-swollen gut and aching heart.

“What is this world I’ll be leaving you and the kids to?” He seemed to question in heavier refrain from that day on.

A few weeks later, on Jan 6, 2013–our wedding anniversary no less—I rushed Jonathan to the emergency room just a mile away from the courthouse where we’d said our vows nine years earlier. He was doubled over in pain and unable to walk that day. The security guard at the drive-up ER entrance brought me a wheelchair to assist in getting him out of the car. It was impossible not to feel how boney Jonathan had become; he had lost so much weight by then, even his head seemed smaller, almost like a child’s.

The team at Northwestern admitted Jonathan immediately, setting him up in a negative pressure hospital room only the kids and his mom and I could visit.

We drew pictures and supportive phrases on the room’s whiteboard. I wanted someone—anyone! everyone!—entering that room to know just.how.f*cking.much his 5- and 3-year-olds loved him.

They’re just little kids, facing grown-ass loss, I thought. Not unlike the students of Sandy Hook. The fallen ones and the living-with-the-aftermath ones.

In a private vestibule outside Jonathan’s door, hospital staff would gather to suit up, from head to toe, in disposable single-use protective gear before entering the room to check on him.

“Is all that to protect Jonathan or them?” I sidebarred to his mom, creeped out by the sci-fi-ness of it all, not to mention the sheer plastic waste of it all. She rolled her eyes, barely able to contain her anger, her sadness.

The irony wasn’t lost on me how much gear the Sandy Hook shooter must’ve worn; how little protective armor the victims had.

With Northwestern being a teaching hospital, sometimes whole groups of protectively-shrouded medical students would encircle Jonathan’s bed and listen closely as their Attending Oncologist reviewed his chart and interacted with him. More often than not, I’d catch a resident glance at me then immediately look away.

Soon the teams stopped examining Jonathan at all, they merely inquired as to his pain levels.

Who’s checking on Sandy Hook’s pain levels? I wondered. Is someone attending to them? I hoped.

Turning my attention to the people of Newtown, CT, somehow steadied me. Made me feel less alone, I suppose.

Eventually, the hospital team encircled me. They told me there was nothing more they could do and they would be discharging Jonathan in a matter of hours. They were sending him home to live out his final days.

“How many days is that?” I asked them, trying to conceal a whole new level of foreboding.

“Could be weeks. Could be months. We can’t be sure,” the Attending replied.

None of the residents stole a glance at me that day. Or if they did, I missed it. I saw only the tops of heads, looking down, hands scribbling on notepads.

His dying days will be in our living room... I repeated it over and over again to myself.

Was this poetic? Ironic? Gracious beyond measure? It would be many years before I was sure.

For now, this hospital goodbye was unceremonious. Do I thank the oncologist? Do I thank these students? Do I say so long? F*ck you? Do we hug?

We did none of it.

After what felt like an eternity (Do we just flee??), a discharge counselor(?) advisor(?) person whose job must really suck(?) came to Jonathan’s room to have me sign a bunch of paperwork, I don’t recall what. She handed me leaflets on how to order a medical bed for our home and whom to call for hospice care. I tucked them in my bag as she walked away, then his mom and I gathered his belongings.

We bid adieu to his oversized, overwrought hospital room—arguably larger than the living room we were headed to, but, also arguably, way less comfortable—and wheeled him through the familiar-by-then halls and elevators of the hospital to the main entrance. Jonathan’s mom waited with him while I walked a few blocks to get the car. By then I was used to the $70+/day hospital-parking fees; they’d become a regular line item in our family budget.

Outside, in the freezer that is lakeside Chicago in midJanuary, I telephoned my sister to make sure she’d taken down the Christmas tree before we got home. I couldn’t bear to see it. The merriment of the holidays was over. Not one thing anymore felt gleaming and bright.

After Jonathan settled into the passenger seat and the security guard was rolling away the empty wheelchair back to its station, I asked Jonathan, “Is there anything you want to listen to on the drive home?”

He paused, then, always a sarcastic mofo, shrugged, “Death Is Not the End’?”

—

Dear Reader,

If you’ve stayed with me this long, I thank you.

Please know these are just a few of the approaching-Jonathan's-10-year-anniversary memories I’m reflecting on and writing about these days.

So much of this may seem sad and dark. And maybe it is. But it’s also all very real and very pure and if we never give voice to these harder aspects of living, well, what have we learned, really? What have we to pass on? And who or what might we enlighten, or embrace, in our telling?

If something *good* or redeeming is what you need to hear right about now, let it be this :: 10 years on, I find these memories of Jonathan’s final days much MUCH easier to think about and put on the page than they once were. To me, that’s huge. Time truly has made everything feel less like PTSD and more like posttraumatic growth. PTG, you might call it. And it is a beautiful thing. A *good* thing. A celebratory, dare I say, merry thing.

On a day like this, when I sit and think, “What might the Sandy Hook parents and siblings and grandparents and neighbors and friends be reflecting on today? What intimate memories might they be giving voice to? And with whom are they sharing?” I hope they are feeling PTG, too, no matter how bitterly won. I hope they are holding each other close. And I hope they can feel, if only for a second, that I’m thinking of them and honoring their loss as I honor my own.

And to all those whose losses may not be mentioned here, or whose losses may be less well-known or less overlapping with my own, please know that I honor your loss, too.

And with it, I reflect again on the SH memorial fountain :: its interconnectedness, its circular formation, its cyclical nature.

[[RIP.SandyHook.12.14.12]]