Marking Time

I've heard the expression before that when somebody you love dies, time seems to stand still.  I have not found that to be true at all.  Instead, it frequently feels like time is behaving abnormally - speeding up, slowing down and occasionally just not existing at all in the way that it did before Vicki died.

As she was dying, her last few days seemed to stretch on much, much longer than normal.  Minutes expanded out to maximum capacity, waiting to hear another breath, watching her still-thudding heartbeat, but knowing that she'd already said her last words and moved voluntarily for the last time hours and then days before.

Dying was slow.

Death came more quickly, but in a different, more deliberate way.

When Vicki's breathing changed and it became obvious that the time was now, she seemed to be gone instantly, too soon, too fast.  Slipping, flying, zooming away from us.  Fifty-one years gone in the blink of an eye.  But remembering it later, it must have taken longer than that.

I had time to walk downstairs and gather the family.  Her daughter Julia had time to drive home from a friend's.  We all had time to sit next to her, touch her, tell her we loved her.  I had time to ask if I should give her morphine, go into the next room, measure it out, bring it back to her and say, "No more pain, baby, no more pain" then replace the syringe, return to my place at her bedside and still watch her die.  Was it seconds, or was it hours?

When she took her last gasp in - huhhhhhhhHHH - then sighed her last breath out - AAAhhhhhhhhhh - and her softly fluttering heart came to rest, I looked at my watch.

I already felt it before my brain could formulate the thought:  this was the moment - 12:12 pm - that would forever divide us all into BEFORE and AFTER, and it was so ridiculously fleeting, gone before I could wrap my fingers around it and hold it tight.

Much too quickly, I took my next breath - the first in my entire existence on this earth without a sister - and my heart pounded again and again with fear and sadness.  She was gone.  Time stood still for her, but for me it was hurtling forward, rubber-banding me into a future I couldn't comprehend.

*blink*  The hospice nurse was there to declare her dead and it was already over an hour after she was gone.

*blink*  Another hour later, the crematorium people were there to carry her body down the stairs and load it into the back of their van.

*blink* I closed my exhausted eyes for a second and woke up the next morning.  My sister had died yesterday.  I had been alive without her for nearly 17 hours.

I took a picture of the sunrise the morning of December 16th.  There was no part of my skeptical, practical brain that truly believed it wouldn't come up, but it was somehow still a surprise.

Time was passing, and my sister was dead, stuck.

I have actually tried since that day not to take too much note of the time.  I don't look at my watch during the noon hour because I don't want to see those same numbers.  I don't pay attention to Fridays, thinking that it's been another week.  I closed my eyes and pretended like New Year's wasn't happening, because how in the world could it be that she died last year?

I'm smart enough to understand that I have to acknowledge time at some point, but when I do it means that in addition to looking back at what has passed, I'll look forward.

I will live without a sister for the rest of my life, and as a healthy 48-year old there's the slim but not unrealistic chance that I could be missing her as long as I had her.

That's ...

I don't have words for that.

So instead I'll focus on right now.  This heartbeat, this breath, this moment.