Living the Space Between—A Story of Profound Loss

Over the course of my life, I have experienced loss. In high school, a good friend committed a most organized suicide—complete with sticky notes dictating who he wanted to have what, a conversation canceling his attendance at a ballroom dance competition for the following week, and a call to a cleaning company to handle the aftermath of a bullet to the head. My still-maturing mind focused on the raw details and the whys and the what could I have dones and the added attention and physical and emotional self-destruction it meant for me. But, in my one, brief interaction with her, I remember distinctly the almost tangible numb devastation I could feel emanating from his mother.

In my 20s, I watched from a distance as my parents both lost their fathers, and my mother lost her mother. Wrapped up in my own life, I experienced these losses from a detached space. I was not close to my grandparents, so my connection to the loss was felt distinctly only when I watched my own mother grieve and attempted to understand the devastation I would feel if I lost her.

In the years since, two additional acquaintances lost themselves to disorganized suicide, which I could greet only with a curiosity as to how that could possibly be an answer. I could find no sadness to send their way—not because life is so grand and all things can be overcome, but because they couldn’t grasp the inscrutable pain they were forcing on others by choosing to not try. And I watched as their mothers transformed into my high-school friend’s mother, absorbed in the numb devastation that is profound loss.

Early last year, my stepdad was diagnosed with cancer. It was just like all the stories you hear: an active, healthy, mostly retired man who’d worked so hard his whole career to be able to finally relax and travel throughout his many, many retirement years suddenly finds he has a rare, aggressive form of cancer with a grim prognosis. Those stories are everywhere on social media. So much so that it took minimal effort to detach myself from the reality of it.

Until it didn’t.

After months of chemo eating away at his energy, muscles, organs, blood, appetite, and a little bit of the cancer, a metal hospital bed and a shell of the man who raised me were put in my mother’s living room. No timelines were shared with me, but the word hospice said it all. However, brief visits showed him recovering from the chemo. Along with his voice, his personality came back. The dullness left his eyes as he found strength to occasionally leave his bed. He joked; he told stories; he laughed; he was awake and interested in the goings-on around him.

Then, just as gradually as he recovered from the chemo, he started leaving us. I watched his morphine doses increase weekly as he stopped getting up, stopped eating food that was only feeding the cancer, and started saying goodbye. I didn’t see the ups and downs of every day that my mother experienced with him, but I heard it in her voice.

When I bent to hug him in greeting the night before he left us, he kissed my cheek and told me he loved me. He felt reassuringly present and calm in that moment. Four days before, he had told me he was tired and that he was okay with not waking up one morning. On that last visit, I believed him.

When my mother called me the next morning to let me know I needed to come home, I calmly sent an email I had been drafting to a coworker, turned off my computer, and gathered my things. I joked with a coworker in the elevator. I patiently stood in line to pick up my car from its oil change. Then I called my husband and told him he needed to meet me at home to go to my parent’s house. He thought it was for one last visit. I didn’t correct him until I was sitting next to him in my car. Then, just like that, I had my first taste of devastation.

In the time it took us to drive to the house, the numbness I had felt leaving work had returned. Everything was as in a dream; when I reached the door, I felt the shadows shift in the sunlight as I turned the handle. Inside, the metal bed sat as it had for months. His body was still in it, but his soul was overwhelmingly absent. Though his body and I sat in the same room for hours while we waited for the nurse and the morgue, he wasn’t there.

Over the next week, I encountered raw devastation. I saw it in my mother, and I felt it in myself. There were long moments of composure distinctly marked by numb distraction, but the devastation was there. Lurking. Waiting. Raw and real. Having never felt anything close to it, I could not control it. There were countless moments where I didn’t even try. The worst part was that letting the devastation take over didn’t help me. It was strong. Pervasive. Almost tangible.

After the funeral, I practiced exerting control over the devastation. Most days, I succeeded to one degree or another. One day about a month after, my three-year-old son asked why I had his grandpa’s hat. When I asked him if he remembered how his grandpa was sick and told him he was gone, my innocent boy told me he wanted his grandpa to stand up again. He wanted to see how big he was. That’s the last time the devastation won.

It’s been almost two months now. I am learning to balance the devastation with numbness. I am working to realign and to find a new center ground. While I cannot wrap my head around him being gone, I am learning to live the space between.

I suppose that’s where I always was before; I just didn’t know it.