I was talking with a friend earlier this week. I was re-telling the places my mind had wandered when I heard a line on the season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy”. One of the patients is dying and needs a heart transplant. Once he had the transplant he said, [paraphrase] ‘Somewhere along the line that he had just stopped making plans. ‘ It hit me… and took me places.
It made me think back to when my son died. Not in a sad way, but the line in the show made me wonder. I used to be full of plans, I really was so full of excitement back then. I was enthusiastic and I looked forward to so many things.
Now, I’m not sure if I’m calmer in life because when John died I gained some really intense clarity on what is important, or if I just gave up on ‘making plans’.
I tend to believe it is probably a combination of both.
In so many ways, I have always been so young and immature and so full of big ideas and plans. I wanted. I needed. I deserved so much. After all, look at all I’d been thought in my life. I was hungry and greedy for life to deal me a fair hand.
When John died, something happened to me. After the shock, and the pain, and then the anger, something happened inside of me. Something that needed to happen I guess. I found I didn’t need so much after all. I had lost everything I wanted.
It was so simple and so complex all at the same time. There were no plans to make. No college scholarship, no high school graduation or senior prom. No watching him grow up and live his life. No knowing he was alive off in the distance making his way. It was all over.
I felt it almost right away. I’d wake up in the morning and go to work, but I never seemed to have a goal other than to just keep my life going one step in front of the other. No plans. No dreams to make come true. No hunger. No passion. No color. No flavors. No excitement. Nothing.
I never looked at the last 10 years for the lesson in humility and patience that it is/was. I’ll be honest, I wonder what kind of woman I was back then. I know I was not as accepting as I am now. I was hungry for what I thought I was entitled to have. After all, I deserved someone to love. I was emotional and moody.
I don’t even know how I became who I am right now. I suppose it is how many of us become who we are–a series of life events that impact and inform us, and we evolve because of them. I just can’t pinpoint how I got from there to here.
I do know this, I regained my passion and hunger, but somehow I still do not make plans. I want, but I am patient and accepting of not being able to have what I want.
There is a great line at the very end of “Postcards from the Edge” by Carrie Fisher. [again a paraphrase] She is questioning her attempted suicide and she says about her stomach being pumped. “Are you sure I didn’t lose something I needed when you pumped my stomach?”
I feel that way about the post-son’s death era of my life. I feel like something I need died with him. I know many of you will say, well of course, but it’s not the usual sadness or mourning I’m talking about. Oh to be sure, my life was forever altered, and I will never be the same. But, as I look back on the ‘plans’ I’ve NOT made or even contemplated, I have to wonder if like the character in “Grey’s anatomy, I need a new heart.
So much of life is battling with reality. A reality we refuse to accept. We think we can use our will and make things happen the way we want them. But we can’t. In fact, we seldom can. I think that’s why I seek so much stillness now. The calm of the quiet in the night. The peace of not battling with reality for some ‘goal’ that doesn’t really matter much anyway.
What did I learn in that hospital room as they unplugged my son and he drifted off to his death? Did I learn the futility of fighting reality? Did that teach me how to ‘be’ who I am. Did I learn to accept, and in the acceptance find peace? Did I find my peace in accepting that there is no fighting reality? Not then–not now–not ever. Is that the ultimate act of submission? Submitting to the realities of life?
I wonder. When we finally figure out that there is so little we can really do, do we lose hope and give up? Or do we find an appreciation in all the little things that put a smile on our face each moment of each day?
Is that why I don’t make plans? And if so, why do I miss those plans so much today?
Maybe I really do need a new heart.
