Grateful and Overwhelmed
“Jessica, she’s gone.” Those were the words I heard coming through the phone at 7:30am one year ago today. My Mom. Gone.
I was expecting this phone call, had been expecting it for the entirety of the three months since her metastatic cancer diagnosis. I knew it was coming, and yet the finality of it was breathtaking.
I remember being grateful that it was over. After a week of watching her slide away from me as the pain took over and she turned to the comfort only morphine could provide, I was grateful that part hadn’t lasted longer. Grateful too that it wasn’t sudden. That I had the chance to let her go, instead of having her ripped from me.
I will also never forget the crushing feeling of drowning, overwhelmed by her debt, her choices, her stuff, her lies, her love, her apologies. I was sipping air, barely able to keep my lips above the surface as the chasm of all I needed to do kept growing beneath me.
It’s been a long year without her. She is still the first person I think to call, and while the gut wrenching reality of remembering that she is no longer call-able has lessened, I cannot take her number out of my phone. I’ve been emotionally preparing all week for this day, uncertain of how or even if it would affect me as I’ve been a poor predictor of what milestones will trigger me this past year. That’s part of why I was so wholly unprepared for the phone call I got this Wednesday.
“Mrs. Greenwood, your husband has been in an accident.”
Everything in me hardened. My auto-pilot kicked on. The gear I have used to get through absolutely every traumatic moment in my life. I became competent, capable, and robotic…already disassociating my emotional self from what my reality was about to become.
My husband is alive, by the grace of a helmet and a God who must understand that I cannot lose him. He is just broken. A Humpty Dumpty version of himself that exceptional surgeons and modern medicine can put back together again. I am beyond grateful. WE are beyond grateful.
And yet, I feel the chasm opening up again, the feeling of nails scratching the walls of the well as I try to scramble up for that sip of air. The overwhelming understanding of what lies ahead of us. But the second I think “us”, I’m flooded once again with that gratitude, with the reality that it was terrifyingly close to just being “me”.
I always thought that if I lost my husband, it would be to his career. The wife of a combat veteran knows that latent fear, the one you take to bed with you every night as you silently thank God you’ve gotten through one more day without a Chaplain at your door. I am all too aware that prayer of thanks is not possible for so many wives, and sisters, and mothers, and brothers, and fathers, and friends. I cannot imagine that phone call, combining the shock and the finality into one. We learned what that loss was like early in my husband’s career when he met not one, but three caskets on the tarmac at Dover.
Today is Memorial Day. It’s an oxymoron to me that we consider it a holiday. For all of the families who have drowned in the overwhelming sea of their loss, I cannot imagine that they feel much like barbecue and beer today. Or maybe they do, because celebrating the life lost is that sip of air at the top of the chasm. All I know is that our responsibility today is the gratitude. It’s to appreciate such a selfless calling to serve and to acknowledge that our first world existence has been earned through their sacrifice.
Today, I am deeply grateful for the service and sacrifice of our men and women in arms. I cannot offer much to their families whose loss will always be overwhelming except my sincere promise that they will never be forgotten. If barbecue and beer are on your agenda today, understand whom you have to thank for the opportunity and freedom to do so. Be overwhelmingly grateful today, because that is truly the only reason to celebrate.
