Sadness: Refusal of the Call

by Linda Cochrane

My brother Dan and his wife, Paulette, call on speaker phone. I am alone in my little house. I hear Dan saying, “I have Parkinson’s disease, and I’m telling you so that when I start drooling somewhere down the road, you”ll know why.” He often says things with a dry humor, and I don’t always know what is funny, or what is serious. I only know that I like him, I really like him. I choose to inhale this information somewhere between the two. And in that instant, I unconsciously decide to block his news. You could almost say, I decide not to believe something so potentially, possibly horrid, that I use an old technique I adapted quite early on in my childhood. I freeze inside and place my unborn grief in a vault labeled: This Can’t Possibly Be Happening.

Within this week, there is another call from these dear people. My people. This time I can hear Paulette saying, “Linda, I have stage four breast cancer. I need your prayers. We will need your prayers.” Quite easily words spill out, “Sis, I’m so sorry. Yes, of course, prayers. Top of the list prayers.” 

I don’t have a container big enough to hide this from myself. It’s already crammed full with denial of Dan’s diagnosis. I know I can’t stay this way, hiding in a circle dance with fear and love and denial. I already lost my brother, David not too long ago to a shockingly quick cancer. And yes, I eventually learned to marry my grief with the love I will always feel for him, and the gifts he gave me. But damn! Don’t give me two of the people I hold so fully in my heart on a warped platter and expect that I know how to balance it. I don’t want to believe that their most marvelous years may be behind them.

I know my old patterns of denial and refusal will return full-blower if I don’t create a space for grace to find her way in. A beat later, a shift begins. Almost as if I’m sleep-walking, I remember my tools that work. I stuff my jacket with tissues and take a long solo walk through trees and a meandering river. I talk out loud without even caring if a passer-by thinks I’ve lost my marbles. I don’t even know exactly to whom I’m speaking, and trusting to be heard. Memories pour out about the first time I met Paulette: the blue and green suit she was wearing, how easy her smile was, how eager she was to love our family without even knowing us. And then Dan. So dear-to-my-heart Dan. How slow I was to love him until we became adults. How much I resented him as a child. My jealousy watched him get out of slippery situations with his humor, his wit, with a finesse I never had, and how my parents put that red hair of his on a blasted pedestal. He even stole my little brother, Michael’s cans of vanilla baby pudding, and pulled it off. He cleverly thumped a nail into the bottom, sucked out the pudding, and put them back on the shelf. And my parents, “Oh, Danny! You’re so funny!” just killed me. 

Then I got to witness him in a new chapter. Dan, the father. It was there I was graced with new eyes. I saw him in the swimming pool at their clubhouse. He was with his children, Christine and Bobby, and my little girl, Gwendolyn. He wasn’t just playing with them, it was that, and also the gentleness he exuded as he talked with them and touched them. My mouth was agape with wonder. It was then I began seeing him through a new lens. How easy it had been to define him from my memory without allowing him the possibility to become more beautiful. In my own life, it’s a moment-to-moment walk to stay in love with myself deeply enough to dance with grief, letting go of the myth of control, where possibilities are born.