Hello Darkness

As they say, the only way out is through.

I’ve been going through a dark time these past few months, despite the fact that the bright summer season is just winding down. First, our senior cat was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease last spring, which I knew (since she refused to eat the very expensive prescription food that treats this illness, as many cats do) meant that she likely wasn’t going to be with us much longer. So I’ve been living with the specter of death hanging over my shoulder for some time, watching Lexi and trying to avoid a crisis by determining when it was time to act on her behalf.

As it happened, that time was last Friday. When I took Lexi in for an “end of life assessment,” our vet determined that she had wasted away to just four pounds. She also had a mass in her abdomen—probably cancer. There was no question about what I needed to do.

Meanwhile, in the months during which Lexi was slowly making her way toward the end of her life, several friends lost their husbands. Some of those deaths were expected, after long battles with illness; others took me completely by surprise. I lost two longtime colleagues at my university to illness as well.

Then there’s Mike, who is very clearly entering a later stage of dementia. At first I tried to convince myself that various happenings were one-off events that I could deal with on occasion. Now, I’m beginning to realize that this is simply where we are now. So I’ve had to start thinking about making changes in the way I’m managing Mike’s care much sooner than I feel ready to do that. I thought there would be more time to get used to the idea.

But, as I learned from Lexi, holding off on doing something doesn’t always eliminate the need for doing it. And whether or not you’re ready is irrelevant, when someone needs your help right now.

I’m old enough to know that this is just the way life goes sometimes: things pile up. In the course of less than one week in 2008, for instance, I was involved in a serious accident that totaled my car—then flew to Idaho to be with my family a few days later, while my dad underwent an emergency quintuple bypass surgery that we knew he might not survive—and then, the historic main building at the small university where Mike was a professor was almost completely destroyed by a fire.

For weeks, we didn’t know whether Mike would still have a job to help support our family. I didn’t know how my dad’s surgery (which he did survive, but just barely) was going to affect his already-precarious health. I didn’t know how Mike and I were going to pay for a new car—we hadn’t even finished paying for the one that had been totaled. I did know that the whole plan we’d put in place for handing down used cars to our kids as they moved toward their high school years had just gone up in smoke.

So many people stepped up to support me as I made my way through that dark time: neighbors, members of our church, colleagues. I got emails from dozens of people on campus, some I didn’t even speak with on a regular basis, asking how they could help—but the spring semester was just winding down, so there wasn’t much left to do. We were all heading into the summer break. I was dealing with a lot of difficult stuff, but at least I’d have time to regroup.

This time around, the darkness happens to be coinciding with the start of an academic year. And I’m just returning from a semester of sabbatical, so I’ve been away from campus for about eight months. The transition back to teaching in the fall is always a little rough; this time, I expect it will be even more so.

In the Robert Frost poem “A Servant to Servants,” he writes the best way out is always through. Frost isn’t the original source of this phrasing, though he’s often credited with it—but you can find various versions all over the place in literature, from Dante to Shakespeare and elsewhere.

I’m less interested in identifying the original source of this idea than with the fact that human beings have been saying some version of it for centuries: we’ve been reminding each other that struggle is unavoidable for a very long time.

Here’s the part we don’t like to acknowledge: struggle isn’t always something we survive. It’s not even something that makes us stronger, necessarily. Through can mean a lot of things. Pretending you aren’t dying of a terminal illness doesn’t change the fact that, when you’re on the other side of it, you’ll no longer be among the living.

But here’s another thing I learned from Lexi—or, rather, a thing I remembered in the wake of her death. When I came home from saying goodbye to her, all I could see was the evidence of her life. It was everywhere. And for the past few days, my brain keeps thinking I see her in the house: she’s curled up in her usual corner of the sofa, or lurking in a doorway, or coming around a corner to look for me. She’s still here, even in the places where I know she’s not.

The same was true after my dad died. In fact, I was astonished by how much more present he was in my life. I thought about him all the time. The cardinals in my backyard reminded me of him. So did the squirrels. So did a random song I heard in the background at the hardware store, a place I rarely visit but where he was in his element.

Maybe remembering that our loved ones are never really gone is how we make it through.