Lifting the Plywood on Grief

​Have you ever lifted up a piece a plywood that has been laying for a period of time in a field, vacant lot, or even just your backyard? You dig the tips of your fingers underneath the wood, feeling the moist ground below the edge of the plywood, grab hold of the decaying wood, and then brace yourself for whatever you might find (organic, mold or rodent) living underneath it? Whatever is under that piece of wood, you know it won’t be pretty.
 
This is a metaphor that has been floating around my head for the better part of the last half-year as it relates to grief. I’ll admit, I didn’t know that there was some residual grief still living under the surface of my life until earlier this year, as plans for this fundraiser began coming together. But then something happened, and as usual, it began innocently enough.
 
I was on one of my post-lunch walks, working off the sugars from my meal. I was walking along one of the streets of our neighbourhood, earbuds in playing a random playlist of songs, when all of a sudden the data on my phone cut out. Wanting to continue listening, I switched over to a playlist of songs that I had downloaded on my phone, songs from about eight or more years back. As I walked along with my feet pounding the pavement and thumb scrolling through song titles, I noticed a growing lump forming in the back of my throat. I found myself scrolling through old song titles, and stopping to play snippets of music I had not listened to in quite a while. What I noticed though while I played these songs, was not so much the songs in and of themselves, but strong flashes of memory, things I had not thought of in a very long time, if ever. They were all memories related to Kim’s struggle with cancer.

On my walk, I hit play and listened to the first minutes of, Beloved, by Mumford and Sons. As the music opened, I all of a sudden remembered driving home late at night from a church council meeting, descending the hill between Langley and Cloverdale, having just shared with the church board about Kim’s final diagnosis, and my need to resign my position as pastor of the church to help care for her in her final months.
I clicked on the song, Wonderful Tonight by Eric Clapton, and I saw a scene of Kim and I one evening, me sitting at the desk in our living room listening to this song on our computer, Kim puzzling on the couch. Without looking up, she asked me to change the song because of its almost mournful tune. It was in the middle of her 2018 chemo treatment and life was very tough and uncertain at that moment and she didn’t want to hear that kind of slow music. It brought up too many “what if” emotions.
Seeing many of the faster, heavier songs on the playlist, I began having visions of listening to these songs at an almost deafening volume, both in the car leaving work to come home to a nauseous Kim a couple days after chemo, or in my earbuds biking in the Watershed, just trying to drown out the thoughts, scenarios and darkness of Kim’s diagnosis, chemo and upcoming surgery; trying to work off the anger I felt towards the cancer that was changing my wife and our marriage so quickly.
 
In thinking about this over the past couple months, and finding myself unwilling to go back to listen to those songs for fear of those emotions rising up again, what I have come to realize is it that though I think I did a fair job of working through my grief around Kim’s passing, (I did a series of blog posts on this which you can find my scrolling down a couple pages on this blog), I have done very little work in dealing with the grief of Kim’s cancer journey itself. Of seeing Kim suffer through her cancer, and the death by a thousand cuts to the life we had once envisioned for ourselves. The roll of being a caregiver to a spouse, the five-year burden seeing Kim change because of the cancer, seeing myself change because of the role I had, seeing our marriage change because of this cellular intruder. The countless suppressed emotions, the jumping to end-of-life conclusions, while at the same time denying what was happening in front of us. It all takes a toll that sometimes you don’t realize in the moment as you are just trying to hold life together, trying your hardest as the caregiver though none of it comes naturally, and seeking to put on a brave face while doing it.
 
What I have come to see, and has become apparent through the process of writing thus far in this fundraiser, is that the grief of being widowed, and the grief of watching your loved one suffer through cancer are two different things. They are related, but I have come to see that though I have worked through a lot of the pain of being widowed, I have never really come face to face with the grief of being an intimate witness to the hardship of cancer.
 
And so I find, though this was not the plan at the beginning of this fundraiser, that it is time to dig my fingers into that forgotten moist soil and lift up the plywood that I have kept overtop of the grief of having watched Kim suffer for five years, particularly the last two and a half years of her life. To see what needs to be exposed, and maybe in the process, help others on a similar journey.
 
More to come next week.

---