On Not Being Grateful Enough

It seems like there has been a lot of sad, strange news lately, and I am trying to gain some perspective.

My friend Jo's husband went into the hospital with a stomach ache upon returning from vacation; This Saturday, just 5 weeks later, he passed away from pancreatic cancer, leaving behind his wife and 18 year old son, Max.

A colleague in my building recently learned that her husband has a degenerative brain disease that has created a state somewhere beyond manic-depression or bi-polar disorder, a condition that includes emotional desensitization and a decreasing ability to remember who he is, or his family.

Both women, only 50ish, lost their life partners, their best friends, the fathers of their teenaged boys, the men they have lived with their entire adult lives. Jo did not have enough time in the passing, and can not really fathom that Graham is not coming back. Emily had a long, slow, and despairing loss, and will continue to "lose" her husband for as long as he lives--in a violent state of forgetting--and it could be a long, long time.

These are two situations that I can't begin to imagine surviving.

They are situations that make me wonder why I get so angry when the bathroom garbage is overflowing at work and I am the only one who ever empties it (I'm not your mother, people); when commuters won't let you out before trying to push into the subway car (I'm pregnant, people); and when Dave and I quarrel over the teeniest tiniest thing, and allow "fault" and "blame" and "who did it wrong" to seep into the hairline cracks between us, where I hope they won't expand, like the sapling that grows up to split the boulder it stems from.

The garbage, the subway, who forgot to wash the knives or close the cupboards- these things are petty complaints, but I suppose they are a part of life, and a part that we don't realize as petty until we see them in the light of something much more serious. There's a passage in Bel Canto, the book I'm reading now, where hostages in a bungled kidnapping in Latin America become demanding, emboldened by their restlesseness. The author writes, "but there was also this: nearly 18 hours had passed, and still no one was dead. If what a person wants is his life, he tends to be quiet about wanting anything else. Once the life begins to feel secure, one feels the freedom to complain." In our daily lives, we take it for granted that life is secure. It is too easy to take on guilt in the face of unfair death, to believe we are never grateful enough.

Still, we can learn something. Jo told me that she and Graham made it twenty years in this era of divorce because they shared such a sense of humor about things. At the funeral yesterday, most of the speakers reflected on Graham's sense of wonder, and his refusal to take himself, or his work, too seriously. What he did take seriously was his love for Jo, his pride in Max, and his belief that they were his whole life and future.

I can only hope that Dave and I can make that true for ourselves. Actually, I can do more than that. I can work to make it true.