Strength is not Immortality

My grandmother is a rock.

The things she has endured in her lifetime, and come out even stronger on the other side, are huge. Still she soldiers on.  She's a matriarch no one messes with.
She's also 83.

She my biological grandmother and she lives in California.  I try to see her every year but, I admit, it's been a couple years.  And with every visit, I see the frailty seeping in.  She needs a walker to get around.  She's on oxygen 24/7 and still can't get enough air.
She's my link to my past.

As I contemplate her mortality, I'm awash in emotion.  What will my life be like without her?
She is the one person who loves me unconditionally.
She doesn't place expectations on her affection. She doesn't try to manipulate me in any way.
She doesn't look at me with blame.  She doesn't see me as a symbol of all that went wrong in her life, her daughter's life, my life.
The thought of losing her overwhelms me.

She instilled in us the importance of being a strong, independent, self-reliant women.  My aunt, my cousin, my sister and I have all achieved this to varying degrees.  Sometimes it serves us well, sometimes it interferes in our relationships.
But we always muster through, using her strength.
We persevere.
We trudge through.
We survive, maybe even thrive.
I wonder how that will change when she is gone.

She's just always been there.
Taking us in after my mother's death.
Keeping us together as a pair when we entered the foster care system.  Visiting us in our new home.
Phone calls, card and gifts throughout the years of separation.
Always maintaining the relationship, the connection with her and my past.

As I've aged our relationship has changed. We talk about deeper things, and I feel the guilt she carries.  Guilt over things she's not responsible for.
I feel her sadness and her loss.
I feel her loneliness.
I feel her love.
And I feel her undeniable strength.

Strength I can only hope to live up to.

Live with Purpose

Four weeks ago, I almost died.

I went to the ER thinking I was having a heart attack.  It turned out that I had a perforated ulcer on my intestine the size of a quarter.  It was leaking air into my abdominal cavity.  The doctor kept asking how long I'd been having symptoms, amazed that I'd felt nothing until that day. He said most of this type of perforation are the size of a dime, and patients are in excruciating pain.  Why didn't I feel it?   I was in emergency surgery within 2 hours of leaving work that day.  Had I waited one more day, the results would have been very different.

I have a freakishly high pain tolerance.
I've trained my body to not feel any thing.  Emotionally or physically.
Call it a coping mechanism.

I have complex PTSD.  To deal with all that "stuff", I learned how to just shut down.  That means blocking pain and emotion, good and bad.  As a kid, I actually forced myself to not be ticklish in order to avoid attention. I learned to deadpan, to not allow my face to show emotion.
Just absorb it.  Just get through.
Just don't feel pain until it almost kills you.

I spent a week in the hospital.
I have an incision from my sternum to belly button that needed 25 staples to close.
I've been home, recuperating, for 3 weeks and I still feel like a bus ran me over.
Sleep is my only escape, but that's becoming harder to do.
I'm malnourished and dehydrated.  All my plumbing has been re-routed and it's not happy about it.

Up til now I've been too busy trying to heal to even begin to deal with how close I came to dying. This week, feeling a little better, has given me more time for reflection.  I've come to believe that the excruciating pain I felt that night, the pain I could not ignore, was the finger of God.  Stay with me.  I know not everyone believes this way, but I do.  He could have let me just continue to ignore whatever was going on inside and die.  Or, as he did, put me in so much pain that I had to pay attention.

There has been many tearful moments this week, realizing how close I came to not being here.  I guess I've been kept here for a purpose.  Strangely, that brings a lot of pressure.  It also brings clarity.
No more just coasting through life, hiding from the hard things, believing the lies people told me just to hurt me, neglecting the gifts I have been given.  It's time to live with purpose.

It's time to feel again.