Squalls and PSYWAR

I remember an April day Karen and I spent on Dartmoor back in the late '80s. In the middle of that sunny spring morning, a dark squall blew in, with low clouds, hail and eventually snow. Just as quickly, the unbeatable British blue sky returned, and the sun beat down. Again and again the storms drove through, then blew themselves away, leaving a fresh-scrubbed blue world.

That's how the past 24 hours have been. Dark gusts of accusation and despair strung with intermittent deceptive domestic calm. I put down my umbrella and take off my raincoat just in time to get soaked in the next shower.

Cancer's Psychological Warfare continues.

[Postscript: when the sun comes back out after a storm, it's hard to remember what all the fuss was about. Could it really have been a life and death struggle just a moment ago, or was it just a slightly embarrassing overreaction? As in the mountains, so in Cancer PSYWAR.]

Not me. Not her.

I get hit by great gusts of anger from my wife. These days, It seems that the best I can hope for is a forced smile and an artificial "good morning." It's all down hill from there.  Intellectually, I get it. Cancer sucks. Cancer hurts. It makes her angry. But cancer is not around to shoulder the blame in person. I am. 

In the abstract, this transference of grief and anger to the closest person sounds manageable. Too bad I don't live in the abstract. Where I live, the love of my life lashes out at me--at my motivations, my actions, my commitment. My being is under attack from the most important other being in the world. This is not a role playing game where I stand in for Sucky Cancer and she takes pot shots at me. This is real. My defenses kick in. I strike back, making it worse. In the heat of the moment, I let my anger at Sucky Cancer focus on my wife. 

Unless I can remember my mantra: "Not me. Not her." 

These storms aren't her attacking me, they're not-her attacking not-me.  Have I done anything that would merit this scale of attack? Not-me. Has she ever shown such venom towards me during all the ups and downs of our 30-year relationship? Not-her. 

I'm not a dualist. I believe that the collection of organic chemicals opposite me is indeed my wife, but cancer, stress, drugs, and gamma knife are having their wicked ways with her. Although she desperately wants to be "normal," she is not 100% her old self. Who would be? It's relatively easy for me to conclude that she is "not-her."

It's a bit harder to remember and convince myself that the person under attack is "not-me." I search myself for faults that would justify my ending up estranged. I am not perfect. Presumably, Sucky Cancer is taking a toll on my personality, too. I am sure I have voiced painful, hurtful things that I would take back. I'm doing my best, but I'm human. Over the years, though, I've come to recognize in my life that some problems I'm involved in are intractable, and that's not my fault. Not me.  

So when I feel myself under attack, like this morning when I learned that she will "never show me what's behind the mask," and "only ask you to do things when there are no other options," I work hard to remember:

"Not her, not me." Cold comfort is better than none.  

 

Let's Get Started

My wife is dying of metastatic, triple-negative breast cancer. Barring unexpected shifts in the probabilities of life, she will predecease me, fairly soon. A crescendo of psychic pain accompanies this process, the white-hot, searing, level-1 core of pain that is my wife's knowledge of her impending death, and the lesser circles of agony that surround her and burn away at those who love her.

I'm in level 2. In my level, I attempt to abide by The Rule articulated in the Silk Ring Theory:

Dump out. Comfort in.

If only it were that easy. Having built a loving relationship for 30-plus years based on two-way, mutual comforting and dumping, switching it to a one-way street is just not natural for either of us. At this stage, she won't dump out, or let me comfort in, and I dare not dump in or expect comfort out. We are growing isolated from one another, as the disease inexorably drives us to two different destinations.

"It's a truism that metastatic cancer is worse on the carer than on the patient," she said to me last night after berating me for folding the towels wrong (or perhaps stacking them wrong. I'm still not sure). "It is a truism," she continued, "but you have no idea how hard this is for me, and if you did, you would take better care of me and do more for me." (Including never folding or stacking towels without detailed, step-by-step guidance.) This jab hurt my feelings so much that I proceeded to dump in, to engage a painful and fruitless argument.

Now that I have had time to reflect, I can agree definitively that I have no idea what it is like to have my own cells running amuck in my chest and my brain, laying designs on my liver and my heart. My body trying to kill me. No idea how it feels to know that 2020 is beyond my years, and--statistically--2016, too.

Perhaps she's right. If I did know, I would figure out how to provide my wife more comfort by never questioning her judgment and always turning to her for detailed guidance before trying to execute the most basic household helpers' tasks. I would figure out how to undo 30 years of mutual training and build a fresh relationship based on the One Way sign.

But I don't know. I have no idea.