One Week Out ATK 3

My Darling Pam,

It seems as though all of my life I have heard that the third day following surgery is the most painful. Whether this data is anecdotal, proven science or the old wives tales of nurses, it has become a reliable prediction to my mind.

Recently, I told someone that losing you felt like what I would imagine the pain from the simultaneous amputation of my right arm and leg would bring. So it should come as no surprise that I expected last Tuesday, day three from your funeral, to be the worst. It was also the day the kids and Sherry left.

The question looms then, why one week out from your funeral the pain of loss is worse and not better. I chuckled aloud this morning as I recalled the times you would say that you wanted this process over so that I could get on with life. I would always tell you that wanting it over to be rid of pain was one thing, but please don’t long for my life to move past the process.

Little did I know the intensity of the process that lie ahead. Day seven is much worse than day three. 

Again I refer to Dr. O’Connor in her book The Grieving Brain, “another of the marvels of the brain is that it is a remarkably good prediction machine. Prediction is key to almost all human behavior. We compare the expected sensation… to the feeling we take in through our sensory nerves. However, it is important to note that the brain has already logged what it thinks it senses. Imagine the man whose wife has returned home from work at six o’clock every day for years. After her death, when he hears a sound at six o’clock, his brain simply fills in the garage door opening. For that moment, his brain believes his wife was arriving home. And the truth would bring a fresh wave of grief.” (Pp 18-19)

“A fresh wave of grief ,” now that is an interesting turn of phrase. Again, referencing our sailing experiences, waves, like people, come in all manner of sizes, shapes and temperaments.

The waves that I’m experiencing, babe, are ugly tossed about at sea kind of waves. The kind that make bearings, course and comfort hard to find in the free flowing cockpit of a sailboat.

I have commented that COVID taught me that I could work reasonably effective from home and simultaneously function as your care giver. That also meant that working from home, even when you are in another room, filled our home with sounds, experiences and thus built a whole library of sound predictions to my brain.

Lest you think I sound desperate, I am not. My reasoning is not incapacitated by the waves of grief. My theology has not taken a back seat to my emotions. But the waves are definitely rocking my boat and the seas are pretty choppy.

I miss you so much that the pain is palpable.

Love eternally,

Brad