A Life In The Day Of Our Life

It was just one day in the life of our life.

We checked into the hospital, walking together, hand-in-hand, side-by-side. We walked in as the team I’ve come to know us to be, the perfectly imperfect partnership we’ve spent the last 30 years growing and honing and pruning and repairing and tending. As the nurses, caregivers, and doctors came and went, the two of us talked, laughed, held hands, prayed, and readied ourselves for his open-heart surgery to come.

And then it was time for us to go our separate ways. He was wheeled into surgery, and I walked out to begin that process called waiting. Waiting for the call that would update me on his progress, the call that would tell me when his heart had been stopped and its function taken over by the bypass machine, the call that would tell me his heart had started beating again, and the call that the surgery was complete and he would be headed to his room in the Cardio-Vascular ICU.

What do you do when the partner you partner with isn’t there to partner with you?

What do you do when the person you want to call can’t be called?

Those are the questions I had to encounter as I waited for each of those calls, especially the one that would let me know that my geologist’s heart was once again beating on its own. It was in that time of waiting that I had to face the reality that there was always a chance that his heart wouldn’t start. Maybe a slim one, but a chance nonetheless.

When that call from the surgical nurse came, his heart again beating on its own, I let out the breath I didn’t know I was holding, and shed the tears I didn’t know I had been holding back. Thankfully, I wasn’t doing all of that waiting and breath-holding and crying alone, but was there with my best friend of 50 years, her partner, and our youngest daughter. In that moment, when that call came, I didn’t know what to do. His was the only voice I wanted to hear. He was the first person I wanted to call. “So Mom, call him. Leave him the words you want to say to him.” And so I did. Walked out into the sunshine, called his phone, and left him a message that we would listen to together later, and that is now saved on his phone until he no longer needs a phone.

Those hours when he was on the surgical table, deep under anesthesia, gave me time to consider what life might feel like someday. Someday when one of us is gone and the other remains. It kind of felt like a trial run for the inevitable loss that we will eventually face. Looking at that inevitable eventuality, it was hard to know what to do. Dwell on the loss to come and its ensuing grief, or delight in the time we now have? I was quite sure then, as I’m quite sure now, that it’s not that simple, that straightforward, that either-or. As in many things, perhaps there’s a third way. A way that allows the grief that is to come some other day to mix together with the gratitude for the day that we have right here and right now. A way that is the alchemy of love, taking two things and making of them something greater, more powerful, and more precious, than either can be on their own.

How can just one day contain so much?

How can it be just one day in the life of our life, and a whole life in just that one day?

Maybe that’s what a third way looks like.