what I didn't know

gaslighting through the ages

Earlier this week Freddy and I picked up his cross-country ski set up for the season. Now all we need is snow. It is the great in-between time here in Vermont. Sticks. Its own kind of depressing. As the sales guy reminded me on our way out of the shop, we live here because we love snow. And while that is not the first reason that I love living in this far northern corner, it is certainly a real piece of the puzzle. Getting out into the snow is one of life’s great pleasures. One that I didn’t quite realize until I began to witness my children out in it and learned to lean hard into that old adage: there is no bad weather only insufficient gear. This is all the way true and lays a beautiful path for a lifetime love of wool in all of its many iterations.

As much as I am eager for the snow to arrive and humoring the ongoing dialogue as to whether or not this winter will be a “good winter” with plenty of snow, I also feel the familiar resistance that always comes along with it. It is so much work to live through a real winter. The open ease of the warm season is replaced by the steady effort required to keep our people and our home warm, the driveway and the road clear and safe-ish, and the pantry and fridge well enough stocked to allow for some potentially impassable hours or days. Ya know. All the things that help us live well through winter.

This year, my regular resistance is running in tandem with some reflection around the previous year, especially in this month or so leading up to Chris’ mid-January diagnosis. I remember picking up Freddy’s skis last year and how it was shortly followed by a huge snowstorm that really got winter rolling good and early for us. There was tons of snow for my birthday and all I wanted to do was get out in it and onto skis with Chris. It was a school day for everyone so Chris took the day off and we drove Fredzo to forest preschool together and then swung up through Hardwick for a stop at Front Seat for pastries on our way up to the Outdoor Center. It was perfect conditions and we had much of the day ahead of us. We made it one hot lap around Duck Pond when Chris reluctantly said that he thought that might be all he had in him. He was feeling low on fitness and still recovering from a double quad tear that had taken him by surprise in the early fall.

I was so disappointed and he felt horrible about it and we did all of the rationalizing we could like yeah you are still coming back from this injury, and ski fitness is its own kind of fitness, and oh yeah no one’s getting any younger, and so on and so forth all the way to the place where you just get over it as a bum day that didn’t go as planned. It happens. And yet. Six weeks later we would learn that while all of those were potential factors there was a larger and far more nefarious beast at play. There was cancer moving through his blood, skyrocketing his white blood cells, sending his spleen into overdrive and making the bigger asks, and eventually the small ones too, impossible.

I do feel grief for that dark window of not knowing. The long stretch of time, probably more than a year really, where Chris wasn’t feeling good and was chalking it up to all of these other things, some in his hands and some not. I know that getting older is its whole own can of worms but I cannot help but think that the excuse of it is often to the detriment of our embodied relationship to self. We undermine our wisdom and our direct knowing of the how of who we are by just blaming it on getting older. It is how we carry the torch that gaslights us through the ages. And gaslighting is such a tricky bitch, right? It is how we endeavor to maintain the separation of body and mind. It is how we talk ourselves out of trusting our direct experience and sever the threads that tether us to the real.

I don’t know. I guess it is all up for me. As we near the one-year mark. I simultaneously want to forgive myself for not seeing it sooner and also be more vigilant for what is yet to come. I want to serve the systems with as few of my filters activated as possible. I was to see the real. Underneath and within the affects of personality and character. Like how are you really? Is the system functioning as it should or is it doing everything in its power to mask disease? Which is it?

I think about our aging dogs all of the time. And the way they will hide their pain all the way up until the moment it’s ready to kill them. Why do they do that? Why can’t they show us sooner so that we can help them earlier? Love. That’s why. It is because of love that they are ready to buck up and quietly, unnoticeably, suffer tremendous amounts of pain. Because they love us. And all they ever wanted was to be with us and shine the light of their love in our direction. Receive the light of ours in return. Aren’t we all that way after all? Willing to compartmentalize and downplay the pain in order to keep on loving what and who we love? God I am here for that.

And yet, suffering in the body is a nightmare. As is suffering in the mind. Suffering, as a whole, we can probably agree. The conditionality of it all. I guess we are here for it either way. I’m not even sure what I am hoping to get across here other than I feel both the pain and the hope of this path. And in spite of it all, I am thankful for both as they come. I forgive myself my previous ignorance and I aim to do better going forward. And perhaps that is it. The purpose and the point of this reflection. For never has there been a year in my life where I have loved so well as I have loved this year. I have given it all to my people and am learning how to hold less back from the world in general. My worst dreams are still the ones in which I lose Chris, it’s just that now when I wake up instead of being mad at him about it I bury myself into the center of his embrace. I let the full light of his love soak me all the way to my core. I let love be everything. For real this time. And each error, or hurdle, or misstep, or setback, I can see now as an invitation for my continued improvement at this task. It is the work of a lifetime, after all.

OK. Fingers crossed the snow comes soon. And that everyone wants to ski with me as much as I want to ski with them. Hanging by the fire, knitting, and sipping cocoa is excellent too.