Kaleidoscope
A kaleidoscope is a "toy consisting of a tube containing mirrors and pieces of colored glass or paper, whose reflections produce changing patterns that are visible through an eyehole when the tube is rotated" also "a constantly changing pattern or sequence of events".
My journey with Brian ended abruptly 2 years, 3 months, 22 days and 19 hours ago. In so many ways, I am still waiting for the airplane to land after a very long business trip. So much of my life I have kept the same. His side of the bed is still there, dad's tools are out in the garage. I finally relocated dads junk drawer into a Rubbermaid bin just in case the kids are looking for something that would have been in his drawer. The drawer is now my tea drawer, who needs that much tea? His clothes are long gone from the closet, my professional wardrobe inhabits the place where his attire lived. I just realized that now, I guess I subconsciously filled his section of the closet with the clothes I need to fill his role in our household as breadwinner. His truck is still filled with all the little random things he kept in there "just in case". I can't bear to clean it out. I've tried to get one of the kids to do it and they don't. I've decided to give the truck to my youngest and let him make it his and do with the stuff what he may. Is that bad? It's like I'm punting on that one. These small little changes are all so stinking hard and yet they have to be done.
My mind can go to an alternate reality in a flash. I can see, taste, feel in any minute of any day the alternate story as I would have written it. I still reach over to the other side of the bed just to check if perhaps he made it home safely in the middle of the night. I reach over to the other side of the car as though he's sitting there and we are having a passionate dialog about some topic. In each and every instance of longing I come up empty. Have you ever wanted something so bad that you could taste it, feel it, be in the moment with it? It is an intense unsatiated longing that is met with emptiness.
BUT I came to a new place in this journey the other day. For the first time, I couldn't imagine who I would be today if he was still here. It caught me off guard because I can so easily imaging him being here and what we would be doing and how we would be approaching life together. But it was this realization that I had journeyed so far alone, so much has occurred in the time that he has been gone, I have had to adapt and change and I have had to grow and become this person that is enormously different yet fundamentally the same. The best description is a kaleidoscope. All the shattered pieces of broken dreams, of broken me, are still there and when the kaleidoscope shifts there's one picture after another that are all different and beautiful in their own right. The fundamental elements are the same, but the pictures are dynamically different. I am different, I have been stretched and stretched, I have had to dig deep and deeper still to live in this story that has been thrust upon me.
THIS realization brings me right back to the space of gratitude. So many of the fundamental elements, the shattered pieces of broken me and broken dreams, they are the remnants of what once was everything to me. I dig deep because I experienced Brian digging deep and trusting his Savior even as cancer took everything in the physical realm from him. On days when I want to wimp out and call it quits, I remember that he never quit, that he stayed in the battle for us, for love, and I think how can I give up when I watched him stay the course? Brian's journey's end is a kaleidoscope of its own, at first his death haunted me; I did what I could to shield the kids from the horror of how he was going to die while bringing as much comfort to him as I possibly could. Did I do it right? What should I have done differently? What if we made different treatment choices, would he be here now? Now as I acknowledge that I am not God and not the Author of the story, I turn the shaft and I see a different picture. I see a broken woman with strength and dignity kneeling by her husband's bedside with a hand on his heart wondering if that was the last heartbeat. How many women get to be by their lover's side at the moment the angels are beckoning him home? The horror and tenderness juxtaposed against each other create a kaleidoscope of unusual colors. One more turn and I see Brian imparting wisdom; on his last conscious day on earth he said to me, "Susanne, I don't know why God is calling me home and leaving you here. My life's work is done, yours is not. I know he has something very important for you to do. Maybe it's to write a book. But whatever it is, you are intelligent and you have been gifted with incredible intuition, and you have the Holy Spirit. You will know what to do."
Do I know what to do? No not exactly. But Brian blessed me that day with his final instructions to me. I don't have a plan, but I do get up each day and follow my instincts and the Holy Spirit to whatever is next. It's not in my strength. I am completely exhausted and stretched thin beyond my years. I guess that's the good news, when you come to the end of yourself and you know you have nothing left, when anything good comes out you know it's not you but God gently drawing you out, gently guiding you forward. And so here I am turning the shaft on the kaleidoscope and acknowledging that this pressing is bringing out a different me than I knew could ever be. It's the me that God prepared for this moment in time. So let me tell you that if you feel pressed beyond belief today, just stay the course, the LOVER of your SOUL will use it in some unimaginable way for you. And one day you will see the Kaleidoscope of shattered dreams has shifted into something different and good and beautiful in its own right.
In the words of my then thirteen year old son who was trying to convince me to take him to see a movie that would be very sad, "Mom you've got to get through the sad stories, that's what makes the happy stories so good". That's wisdom.
I am living a story that at present is still very sad to me, but I am so grateful for new eyes to see gifts most precious and a Savior who gently moves me through time and space. Perhaps J.R.R Tolkien says it best: “The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater.” Love and grief together create a most beautiful kaleidoscope ...
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