Five Things: Shock

I can talk only about what it has been like for me. My husband, my son, my daughter -- perhaps they would see things differently, perhaps they would be able to order them in some way. Perception , response -- no doubt even those earliest cave paintings in France tell us something about the variety of human perception and response. I have only my own story to share.

The shock. The suddenness of a loss that blots out your entire universe. I read a couple of weeks ago that only 20% of deaths in the United States today are completely unanticipated. I was surprised, since my personal experience has been so different. My 28-year-old mother and year-old brother killed in a car accident. My 48-year-old stepmother killed in a fall. My 49-year-old aunt dead almost instantly of a stroke or heart attack. My 24-year-old son, dead by suicide.

There is, of course, a sense of shock even when the death has been expected, even when its imminence has been the focus of life. That reality first became apparent to me when I was in law school and my husband's uncle died of cancer. He was at home, where his family had cared for him during the last weeks of his life, and his wife's response was one of such overwhelming anguish and agitation that I realized that even when you know what is going to happen, you can't quite accommodate it until it does. I saw the same thing over and over again during my CPE experience at Giant Famous Hospital last summer. Probably close to 75, maybe many more, of my patients died while I was actually there on the campus, usually with them. I can't think of a single survivor who wasn't visibly shaken, heartbroken, devastated ~ and it made no difference whether their loved ones had been in the hospital a matter of hours or a matter of months. The completeness of death startles and undoes us no matter the circumstances.

But a completely unexpected death brings its own set of horrors. The ground has shifted, the sky has turned dark, and the requirements of your life have been altered, all in a single second. You have to absorb information that you cannot find acceptable, you have to make telephone calls you will not remember making, you have to make decisions no one wants to make.

As far as I can piece together, in the first hour or so after learning of my son's death, which had happened the night before while while I was four hours from home at a retreat center, I talked by telephone to my husband who was at home and called to tell me, to my daughter's college advisor and then to my daughter in Oregon, to my brother and son en route to our house from the southern part of the state, to a detective in Chicago, to my spiritual director who was at home, to my son's girlfriend in Chicago, to our pastors who were at church, and to a good friend at home. Some of those calls I can remember, some I only know must have taken place because of information I seem to have acquired in the first hours. The only person I knew at the retreat center, where I had been for a little more than a day, was the Jesuit who was my director for the week I had planned there, and so I talked to him off and on through the late afternoon and early evening, as I waited for friends to come for me. He offered his office and computer, and so I sent a few emails to others to whom I am close, knowing that within another few hours I would be unable to manage anything of the sort.

I felt encased in some kind of impermeable shell, into which the faintest knowledge of an ominous reality had somehow seeped, a reality that was gathering the steam that would enable it to crash its way into every corner of our lives and explode that shell into thousands of pieces.

It feels as if that explosion is still reverberating. I guess it will always feel that way.

Ways to Try

The thing about healing is that the waters are always choppy.

(I keep forgetting that I sort of committed to switching metaphors as I switch blogs. It's the other one where the ocean is paramount. This one is desert. OK. I'll start over.)

The thing about healing is that the desert journey is strewn with impediments: slippery gravel and little rocks and huge boulders. Most of them in unexpected places. The big rocks literally drop down in front of you, like meteorites spun off from an unknown planet and appearing out of nowhere, landing with an unwelcome thud.

It has been my great joy to be one of Michelle's correspondents on her 30-day retreat. The other night, I decided to go ahead and try to reserve space for a week-long retreat of my own next summer. I could go back to Guelph, which I loved two summers ago, but I'm not much in the mood these days for repeating past experiences. I sort of had in mind to try Wernersville, which friends here have raved about, and which would give me an opportunity to meet Wayne and Michelle en route. And Eastern Point, where Michelle is, has long been a dream of mine, but it's a considerable distance away.

Turns out that Wernersville offers no weeklong retreats that fit my schedule and Eastern Point is booked. I went ahead and filled out the registration form for the waiting list, and that about did me in. Big meteorite thudding to the ground:

The emergency contact questions. There are only a couple of them ~ name and phone number. But we all know that we only fill in those blanks just in case, right? We would never actually need to make use of them.

Last year I was on retreat in Michigan when the call came. I had been there since the previous morning, and I had met with my spiritual director twice. It was unbelievably hot that week and so I had spent much of the afternoon in the air-conditioned library, stretched out on a lusciously soft couch which, aranged as it was back to back with another couch, made me invisible to anyone who might happen to glance into the library, as the secretary did when she looked for me after the emergency call came in. Toward the end of the day I wandered back to my room and saw the note on the door. I was disturbed ~ no one would call you, and there would be no notes on your door, not during a silent retreat, unless there was an urgent need to contact you ~ but I wasn't horrified. Not until I reached my husband five minutes later.

And so I was by myself, on a cell phone in a small motel-like room in the silence of a retreat center, when I learned that my son was gone. I can see myself standing there as if I had seen myself in a movie. I can see every detail of that room. I can remember exactly what the air felt like as I stepped back outside.

Little wonder that my hands shook yesterday as I typed my husband's name and phone numbers into the appropriate blanks on the Eastern Point registration form. But I typed them anyway.

I was going to write, just now, that the enterprise of spiritual direction has a lot to do with hope. But then I realized: of course it does ~ because hope is the ground of our spiritual lives.

Completing that form, down to typing in the emergency numbers ~ an act of hope. A kick, however small and ineffective, at that damn meteorite.