Living the Stress-Free Life

[copied from dland]

Is this even possible? If there's no stress, is it really still life, or what? One year ago I would not even have been able to believe that anyone anywhere lived life without stress. If they said they were, they were lying, and if they really thought they weren't, then they just didn't get it. One year ago, stress was like a cargo net that contained all the details of my daily existence. Now, it's gone. No net, no threads connecting the dots as it all swung and slipped above the harbor. Dots seem to be connected on their own now, thank you very much.

It is a way of life unfamiliar and strange. If I'm not dashing from task to task all day every day putting out fires, what am I doing? It turns out that I'm not doing much of anything, a little errand here and there, a daily phone call to dad. Life without stress, it turns out, is somewhat boring.

But not unpleasantly so; I wouldn't want to sound ungrateful. No stress is also no pain: no headaches, no gut pain, no body aches (except the backache I've had since I slipped on the ice in 1974, but that's another story). No pain is a good thing. I can tell you exactly when I realized the pain was gone (and so the stress). I made peace long ago with all of this making me sound like the worst person on earth. I'm not.

It was May 27, a Monday, Memorial Day. I had spent the morning with daddy, going to the funeral home with him, picking out the casket. Mommy died the day before, on Sunday. Mommy died. When I talked to my sister later, after we got home from making the arrangements, we both noticed that suddenly our pain was gone, both of us. All because Mommy died.

I was at the hospital with my sister and her daughter, 24. We three were there. Daddy was home. We didn't know that she would die that day, and anyway, he'd already taken his medication and couldn't leave the house. Sister and I went with her to the hospital. Niece arrived about an hour later.

We were in the emergency room all day. They talked about controlling her internal bleeding, about taking her for a CAT scan. It was about noon, I guess, that Mommy stopped knowing we were there, or that anything else was going on. She looked frozen. Her eyes were open. She looked scared, as if she had been frozen about one second before she was going to be okay.

Some tech person came into the cubicle holding two giant cups of yucky something to drink and said brightly "You need to drink this for your CAT scan!" The nurse shhd her and turned her out again. About a half hour later I realized that the nurse had been with us the whole time. That's when I knew what she knew: that mommy was going to die any minute now. The nurse wanted to be with us at the end, not for mommy, but for us.

But, tough old girl, she just wouldn't go. For eight years we had been saying to each other "Doesn't she know she's got cancer? Doesn't she know she's not going to 'beat this'?" That's what she would always say, "What's going to be with me?" She was wasting away, physically and mentally, and she still thought that one day she would get better, would drive again, would go out to lunch. She was 81. She'd been smoking a pack or two of cigarettes a day since she was 15, and had only just stopped in March when she was in the hospital for a week.

"What's going to be with me?" She wasn't asking anymore, even though now we knew the answer. We knew what was going to be, and it looked like it was going to be any minute. We held her hand and talked to her and looked into those scared, frozen eyes.

Niece turned up and took center stage. She told grandma that she was beautiful and strong and wonderful. She was a source of stress and pain to her daughters, but to this grandchild, she was still beautiful. Imagine.

Sister went outside for a smoke and to make a phone call, while niece and I watched the heart monitor beep less and less often. Finally the nurse turned it off; it kept setting off alarms each time it went below a certain level and it freaked us out. Sister returned. We watched, all three of us, as the heart monitor went lower and lower. I felt like I was having a stroke. I felt light-headed and foggy. I'd been having blood pressure problems for a few weeks; my blood pressure went up each time mommy called on the phone. I was thinking, this is it and I'm going with her.

And then it stopped. She hardly looked different. Still frozen. No heart monitor beeping. But we could see that there was no line any more. Over. Over.

We went home and told daddy. He went into captain mode, telling us what had to be done and who to call. No one was stunned or startled, except niece, of course. She thought grandma would live forever, always suffering and dying, but living forever. I called mommy's best friend, who was in the bathroom, and her husband gave her the message.

I went home so I could tell my daughters in person. As I entered the house I saw #2, age just 18, standing in the middle of the room with the phone to her ear and a horrified look in her face. She saw me: "I don't know what she's talking about!" she said softly, gesturing to the phone. I took the phone from her. It was my mother's friend, calling back for details, and telling my daughter how sorry she was that grandma had just died. So that's how she found out.

I told and hugged both girls, and my husband expressed sympathy. Within minutes, we four were imagining where mommy was now: sitting someplace in a comfortable chair, her feet up, with a cigarette burning out of each side of her mouth, both nostrils, her ears, and one in each hand. There were clean ashtrays everywhere. She was sighing in constant contentment. Ah, death!

Am I macabre? Black humor is our crutch, all of us. Mommy liked it too. And I liked thinking that wherever she was, she was happy.

As was I. Eight years killed her, and took its toll on all of us. I thought I was getting old, going through menopause, developing an ulcer, maybe. My heart was going, my blood pressure was going up. I'd been wondering if I would live long enough to be a grandmother.

Then she died. My mommy died, and my pain all went away. Living the stress-free life. Now I just have to figure out what to do with it.


ENTRY #12