“Stories are our primary tools of learning and teaching, the repositories of our love and legends. They bring order into our confusing world.”
~ Edward Miller, British Historian
How ‘bout letting one of the stories below be your wingman?
It might be just what you need to “prime the pump” to get hearts and minds engaged, but with other people as the main characters!
We hope one or all of these stories lead to meaningful conversations with friends, family, neighbors, co-workers…and your medical care support team. Let’s keep the “die-a-logue” alive!
Forever is Way Too Long
I've wanted to write about Suzanne almost every day that I've woken up since December 14th. I can't even bring myself to use a euphemism. I can't quiet my head and allow myself to face the truth. And then I tell myself, no one actually knows the truth. No one knows what happens once you're gone from this dimension. She could still be here in someway. Right?
!And so I've avoided writing about Suzanne, because this all sounds incredibly personal and painful and really should I be sharing this here?; well, I finally realized I can barely show up here without doing it. I want to talk about Suzanne, I want her name said once a day, I want to think of her and be able to bring her up, something she said or did or a memory of something that happened, I just want her remembered, talked about. But more than anything, I want to talk with her.
It's the forever-ness of it all that makes my heart constrict. That makes me never want things to be totally quiet anymore. There's a movie going. Or there's music. Or both. And yet I crave it, I think about it, I wish I could quiet things down... but that's too quiet, there's too much room there to have reality set in.
I had planned on growing old with Suzanne. I could see it with clear vision. It involved family, laughter, wrinkles, grey or still dyed hair (we were forever dying our hair) and a park bench, or a porch, somewhere in Brooklyn, because we had finally accepted what we'd all resisted for years, and RK and I eventually retired there. We're telling stories to make the other one gasp! One of us is smoking, most likely. We get a phone call from my sister, K., saying she's coming to visit...
The forever part feels crazymaking.