vitality

The other day, my daughter asked how old her youngest cousin is. I paused to do the math: he’s going on three years old now. Which is when it hit me: we made it. We passed that two-years-eight-months mark, and in a sense, everything now is a bonus. 

Em would have had a much older cousin, 18 now, but Paige was diagnosed with a severe form of leukemia when she was twenty months old, and she died a year later. When Em was born five years after that, I was consumed with anxiety for all the ways I could lose her, and part of me held my breath without realizing it until we hit two years, eight months. Like that was an invisible hurdle that signaled safe passage from then on.

The heartbreakingly short life of my niece, and the symbolic victory of each other child I’ve loved who’s lived beyond it, has nothing to do with today’s anniversary: two years and eight months since my life partner died. But somehow it feels like a sacred milestone nonetheless. 

I’ve loved and lost three irreplaceable people—my mother and Paige close to each other, both of drawn-out terminal illness, followed by a fifteen-year grace period before Phil simply disappeared one day, kissing me goodbye as he left the house, never to return. Hard as it was to watch people I adored shrivel and suffer under the assault of cancer, I have to say that for my sake, I preferred it to having my beloved simply vanish. No opportunity to talk about the things we’d never quite gotten around to talking about. To resolve dangling conversations. To know what all his passwords were. 

To say goodbye. 

But here I am, two years and eight months later, and I’ve rebuilt my life. I had a memory today of him in politics and was smacked again with the regret that he didn’t get to fulfill on all the good he wanted to do. He had such a big vision. I miss the vitality that he, more than any man I’ve ever known, embodied. Over and over after he died, I asked him to share that with me. I need your vitality. Please give me some vitality. Please help me. 

Funny thing about that is, when I went back to work two years ago, it was in the field of recovery, his field, which then led to my getting this job working with trauma, where I’ve come to understand that Phil’s seemingly bottomless vitality was in fact a constant activation of his fight-or-flight stress response. Riding a toxic high of his own stress chemicals. I have indeed developed a much greater energy in my work than I’ve ever had before, but I also recognized my own tendency to flip-flop between being fueled by stress chemicals and then hitting my wall and plunging into absolute collapse. Vitality this is not. I wish I’d understood back then, when maybe I could have helped Phil learn the balance I am establishing now. 

But I’ve had two years and eight months now to find my footing in this new world I never wanted, the world where my life beside him was over, our plans dissolved, my future a great blank that I must figure out how the hell to fill in instead, when the only life I wanted was the one I’d just lost. 
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It’s a triumph to be here, I acknowledge this milestone. I celebrate my survival. I honor my recovery. And I own my vitality: the capacity to live my life more fully than ever, to dive in with both feet not just in spite of what I’ve lost, but because of it. I didn’t want this life. But since I have it, I claim it: it is mine, and I will live it with every ounce of vitality I’ve got, for as many more cycles of two-years-eight-months as I get. ​