Stalking Truth
Stalking Truth by Helena Fagan
"Two truths approach each other. One comes from within, one comes from without. Where they meet, you have the chance to catch a look at yourself."
Tomas Tranströmer
A letter arrives from my relative, brimming with accusations: I am despicable, mean, judgmental. Her words cut like small, deliberate wounds, reopening the uneasy distance that had grown between us during my visit months ago. Back then, a string of tense interactions left us wary, circling each other like strangers instead of family. On the plane ride home, I'd tried to untangle the knot of my confusion. I loved her. I had trusted her completely—with my heart, with my secrets. And now, she sees me as an enemy.
I easily extend to others the trust I cannot always offer to myself and tend to remain optimistic that betrayals and resentments will right themselves eventually. I know after a bit of time passes that I will forgive and maybe even forget. That's what we do for family, right? And the blow-up has no substance. I couldn't even understand what had blown, only that the tearing of our connection felt like a ripping in my gut. After three months, I mailed her a letter:
While I was cleaning today and listening to music, the song I walked down the aisle to for my first marriage played and stopped me cold. I had a good cry for the shortness and challenges of all our lives. You arose as one of my losses.
The fracture in our relationship is painful and magnified by the feeling that this should be fixable. I still don't understand what happened. All I can tell you is that our perceptions and memories of that morning are different. Whatever storylines we carry only create pain. I hope you know someplace deep in your heart that I would never intentionally hurt you.
At this point, unearthing details seems unhelpful. Relationships, love, while the most important elements in our lives, are often also the most difficult with intentions easily misunderstood, words often misheard. We can choose to cut whatever this is and start fresh. We can free ourselves of this heaviness and enjoy again the lightness, laughter, and love that once flourished between us. I don't know what else to say.
With love,
Helena
My letter fails to address the broken trust between us and my self-doubt that floods between the cracks of this brokenness.
Many months later, I receive from her the three-page typed letter that catalogues my flaws and sins and accuses me of saying and doing things I'm certain I did not say or do.
"Burn the letter," my husband urges after I read him the first lines. "Don't read the rest."
But I cannot resist. After reading it, I tuck the letter into a desk drawer and weeks later, on New Year's Eve, burn it in the woodstove without rereading it.
The ritual burning does not release the letter's grip. Her opinion of me matters. Not only do I love her, but her condemnation destabilizes my self-confidence and sculpts my view of myself from a kind person into a blur that might now take any shape. Maybe I am mean and nobody else has been able to tell me. Maybe people are afraid I will judge them instead of hearing their truth. Clearly, this relative believes whole-heartedly I am evil and not trustworthy. Her angry words follow me day and night, creeping into my dreams and raising my blood pressure so high that I must visit my doctor.
"What is going on in your life that is stressful?" she asks.
"The house is full of visiting family and my back hurts."
"Uh huh," she says as she folds her arms across her chest and looks at me evenly. "What else?"
When I tell her about the letter, she reacts instantly, this woman who has watched over my health for many years. "You know that's not true, right?" Her quick and strong response reassures me somewhat, yet I cannot shake free of my self-doubt, the accusations from the letter echoing constantly in my head. The desire to make it all stop propels me to find the truth about myself.
I turn to my old journals, the places where I worked to understand what I thought and felt. One bookshelf and an entire cabinet hold journals filled since college with my confusion, happiness and pain. Certainly, truth must live in these pages that nobody else reads. Pulling a random pile of filled books from the cabinet, I settle on my meditation cushion and begin flipping through them, looking for evidence of my unkindness, instances where I judged rather than supported and cared for people in my life. I grab one journal, the black one with purple iris and orange tulips on the cover, and immediately recognize that this journal holds my recording of the weeks of my first husband's dying. October 1989. The first page lists the clothes I want my friend to pack for me and send down with our ten-year-old daughter who will fly alone from our home in Juneau to Portland because we are already there. Black boots, dark green jumper, black turtleneck. Funeral clothes.
The next pages transport me to Room 403, St. Vincent Hospital. Holding his hand and loving him as much and as best I can. Holding and letting go. Reliving this after almost thirty years brings both pain and a sense of curiosity. As I cry, I try to remember exactly who I had been during those days. I recall the long nights at his side, calming him from morphine-induced hallucinations, breathing with him when his failing lungs threatened to suffocate him, and he opened his eyes wide in terror. I remember my exhaustion, meditating to stay present and resist the grief barreling toward me. When my chest began hurting, his nurse checked my blood pressure and said, "Your heart is breaking."
I don't want to remember the night I sat by his side and wished he would die more quickly. I want to believe this desire stemmed from altruism, wishing him done with pain and fear and feeding tubes. And I wished for those things, as much as I wished none of it was happening. But that night I wanted it to be over because I felt like I was dying, too.
There it is.
There is the meanness, the selfishness. I poke it, examine it from all sides, knowing my therapist would tell me everybody finds something to feel guilty about after a death. I had been truly depleted. I didn't have it in me then or now to be kind to myself about this. I hadn't recorded the moment or the desire in my journal. Its absence glares. Nor did I speak of it to anybody until last year, when I shared it with the wife of a hospice patient during my first volunteer assignment. I couldn't help but share it with the exhausted woman who tearfully and shamefully confessed the same yearning. So, okay, maybe I can let myself off this particular hook.
I continue reading my notes, especially the entries written as poems, surprised by the tidiness of my handwriting. Almost no cross-outs or notes in margins. It looks like the words moved from my heart to my fingertips with no interference or second thoughts. Even the page written on his last morning when I did not understand his cold feet and blue hands meant his body was shutting down.
The medicine too strong,
now he lies
unable to respond,
his hands blue
his feet cold
his breathing loud and short.
Some awareness before dawn,
asking for help
I cannot find.
I don't think I imagined
the blurry I love you.
I push the book away, finding more fault with myself and reliving that anguish through my bad poetry. A card slides out from the back of the journal. Whales, ocean and mountains on the front with a long message inside from Alisha, one of Michael's nurses, thanking me for a poem I'd sent her about Michael's last adventure, which she facilitated.
Michael had flown to Portland for more tests nearly a month before to discover why his health was failing when earlier tests showed no problem with his lungs. He called me after that first day of tests to tell me a heart/lung team would perform a complicated surgery the next morning. They needed to determine why he could not eat or stop coughing. I flew down as quickly as I could and learned the surgeons discovered the most aggressive form of lung cancer had already spread to his chest wall and twisted around his esophagus. They cut out a large chunk of one lung, scraped his chest wall, and then inserted drainage and feeding tubes. He could opt for treatment, but it would likely only make him feel sicker.