There’s a call to action that thrills the hearts of skilled canoeists and kayakers. It’s the initially distant but distinctive sound of a Class IV or V rapids.  The one who hears it first may call for silence and a momentary stilling of the paddles. Sshhhhh! – Hear that?? Yes! Rapids ahead!

https://www.paddling.net/guidelines/showArticle.html?67
Essential Boat Control describes 3 important principles for whitewater kayaking: balance, speed control and direction control. These principles are applied to the paddling techniques for entering eddies and exiting eddies. Essential strategies for kayaking in and out of eddies: posture, controlling turns, controlling speed, vision, navigation timing, eddy turn variables, edging, front & back leaning, maintenance strokes, enhancement strokes, linking maneuvers, and boofing.

What was a distant sound begins to dominate the senses and they look intently forward – looking hard – for ripples, patterns, angles, entry points.

• Where are the standing waves?
• Where are the visible rocks and perhaps more importantly, the invisible rocks?
• What route to take? For how long?

The knowledge gathered from experience or scouting takes second place now to the imperatives and choices which will determine the outcome of the run. A refusal to paddle with all their strength will pretty much guarantee capsizing – so they paddle.

The unfamiliar waters move faster. The noise builds. The intensity of effort increases. PADDLES IN! And now they are fully committed – even if they do go over, even if they do make mistakes, they will simply get through the best they can.

In November Sundance described the white water we were facing –

You are going through a journey of profound loss…only one of you will be returning to ‘this old place’ upon completion.  (When you return) it will be different than when you left…. so different, so brutally different, you might not want to return. But return you must.

It’s not safe to drift when you’re in white water. PADDLES IN!

The paddles we had in hand when the waters first roared around us were not skillfully constructed and they certainly weren’t from Cabela’s. They were the paddles we had been using for decades, to lesser and greater effect.
Just like anyone else facing Class V rapids for the first time we were humbled by the roar and knew that our willingness to DIG IN AND PADDLE was essential.
In troubled sleep the night before our first appointment with the oncologist on November 15 I did try to find better paddles.

I woke up from a sharp dream in which I was out on a huge lake. The water was perfectly still.
I knew without being told that I was supposed to be paddling across the lake.
I was on a flat wood square raft of some kind and didn’t have a paddle.
I got across somehow anyway and went into the stores along the shore trying to see if there was a paddle somewhere I could buy.
The only one I eventually found was the remainder of a broken one. It had jagged edges where it had been broken off about ten inches above the paddle area. The paddle was the part that was missing.
I carried this stump around the store looking for a whole one I could buy. There were none in stock.

Sundance and the admins had constructed a special thread called simply the Sharon and Grant Thread on the back side in our super secret location. Even before DH and I understood the worst, during three weeks when the surgeon who knew wouldn’t talk to us…that thread was a place where I could vent a bit and I discovered that…

(w)hen I vent it just seems to reveal things about me that aren’t very nice. And then as I push my thoughts past the pointless self-accusations my mind actually does go to Psalm 103:11-13 which ends with this – “He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust.” How astounding is that.
Why on EARTH should He remember anything about our predicaments??? That’s a CHOICE on His part. He chooses to remember.
And what does He remember according to this particular verse? That we are dust.
What expectation do we have toward dust? Not much. But He remembers with compassion that – “They are just dust. I remember that. I love them. I do not expect of them. I will not abandon them.”

The day we heard the worst, November 15, I went to that precious clearing and typed…

It’s not good, woods people.
The entire consultation was a detailing of the worst possible scenario.

Then Sundance painted this word picture of the stumbling, staggering, lostness.

The cancer diagnosis FOR YOU is like walking along a cobblestone path in your life in high heels.
Before today you were walking on runway like pavement – even if it seemed rough or crack riddled before, life’s challenges were nothing compared to what lies ahead. The thing you took for granted was your footing. Challenges were surmountable because you could look up. The risk of a twisted heel was always present, but not significant enough to distract you from seeing, or enjoying, the landscape around you.
Now however, you just can’t walk comfortably without constantly looking down to avoid the cracks beneath your feet. The stones are uneven and loose. Each step is slower, more deliberate and the risk of a twisted heel exponentially greater. Landscape? who knows – that’s not for right now.
However, everyone else (in your concentric circles of friends/family) is wearing sneakers so they are able to walk past you like they are on the airport “people mover” while you are slowed because of the terrain. They, love you, but they may or may not notice your shoes; they’ve never paid attention before – so why would they now.

On January 15, I typed:

 I had no idea this would/could be so painful. No wonder people choose not to actually experience their own losses. Fear and chaos and pain and dread. But it cannot be “as those who have no hope” even as I hate the emotions. I hate the chaos of the pain.

Cobblestones. Yes. It is really hard to walk on cobblestones day after day.

Treepers, you have given me your arms and hearts and prayers again and again, and I am aware from your sharing in the threads that some of you are walking the cobblestones right now, for yourself or for another.
May you experience, as I have, that empathy and love from trustworthy stalwarts in the woods is not given with some pretense that it will change the wounding that life and death bring. It can’t do that but it does break the loneliness and provide refuge when it is received as freely as it given.

~ Freely receive ~ Freely give ~

On February 25 –

Grant has still been getting his own breakfast cereal as his strength has been better in the morning. I just asked him if I could begin doing that tomorrow as his strength is visibly changing and now he’s weak even in the morning. He quietly agreed.
Then I stood by his chair holding him in a gentle hug to pray   table-thanks with him and and also prayed for him, including this – “Father, I’m reminded of the phrase from Ecclesiastes ‘there’s a time for weeping and there’s a time for rejoicing’ – as these days unfold for us, help us to enter freely into both: weeping together and drinking in the times of quietness and joy together…soften the edges of our spirits to receive freely both from You and from one another…”

God bless you if you’re walking on cobblestones. It’s a little startling to realize that none of us is really all that special, not even at the height of our pain. The common despair that is fed by our limits and/or our own looming deaths really makes it impossible to be unique – even in the throes of loss. But, at the same time, there is nothing more special in terms of human experience to discover that in this valley, in these shadows, in this pain – the individual heart can indeed live and strive and love.
So, how full of anguish do we dare to be? The German writer put it this way ~

Let everything happen to you
Beauty and terror
Just keep going
No feeling is final

― Rainer Maria Rilke

Perhaps if we don’t dare experience anguish and drink deep of its presentation in our lives, we will have difficulty seeing the links in life and will be only slightly alive.
Jesus the Christ said that He came to give abundant life. (John 10:10) I’ve concluded (with a h/t to maryfrommarin) that the abundant living He spoke of is not, in this life, pain free. And of course, He never said it was.
In some way, it seems that abundant living has to do with the capacity and willingness to engage life as it is without self-embarrassment over the difficulties and the pain. There is a yielding to the pain of impending loss that is absolutely not narcissistic, and authentic grieving requires such yielding.

I wasn’t certain that I (or we) could walk out this journey well. I sometimes felt like a child caught short at the candy shop, laying a few paltry coins on the counter, wondering if they are enough to purchase his heart’s desire. Would our few coins, Grant’s and mine combined, be enough to purchase the desire of our hearts?

We had already consciously decided to engage rather than evade – and we were participating at every point. We were not wasting  emotional energy or time digging in our heels and refusing to enter into the journey planned for us by Another. But we just did not know if we would be able to do, together, what we dearly desired to do because willingness does not always equal ability.

And now I see that I had imagined the journey to be an unfinished tunnel dug straight into granite where it would perhaps dead-end in solid rock. Of course that’s not how it is.

It didn’t dead-end; it diverged. And when it did his path lifted into light and life and love. [My path lays another way and and Time, which has absolutely no tolerance for *unwalking, forces me to walk on.]

It was my conscious desire and hope to walk with Grant as far as possible and if possible, to accompany him right to the door. I didn’t know if I had what was required to do that.

Stunningly, it was my privilege to walk holy ground with him as he left this life from the encirclement of our arms (#2 son’s and mine) at 11:30 pm on Saturday, March 1…….

~~~~~~~~~~~~

On Wednesday, February 26, I was trying to get the post previous to this one done – Are We There Yet? -and I wrote,

I am going to start writing out Are We There Yet? this afternoon. If I don’t get that done between today and tomorrow, I don’t think I will get it done at all.

That turned out to be the absolute truth…if I had not gotten my part of it done that day, it would not have been done at all. I also learned later that, on that same day, my brother (who lives 900 miles from here) realized that he knew he would not see DH again. And our son knew, that day, that he must be with us at our house on March 1. (He said later it was so odd – that he wasn’t thinking, “I need to be there on Saturday” – he was specifically thinking, “I need to be there on March 1.”)
As always, I read the post to Grant before turning it loose and he liked my descriptions of our efforts to walk well in the woods.
On Friday, February 28 we suspected that there was some internal bleeding so we called the on-call hospice nurse on Saturday morning and asked that she stop by to check his vital signs.
Here’s what happened on Saturday, March 1:

• The on call nurse (first time we had met her) made little comment except to note that his slightly low blood pressure reading was similar to earlier readings.
• At 10:30am, he let us know that he really wanted to get to Home Depot to pick up a faucet for the kitchen sink. And it couldn’t be just any Home Depot – we had to drive by a closer one to get to the one where he worked for sixteen months after our arrival in Oregon in the summer of 2011.  Now he hadn’t been out of the house for two weeks and I didn’t want to do it – I was so terribly tired and was feeling responsible for what might happen at Home Depot if he became ill.
• Our son and his family were with us for the day. Son said, “Well, if we’re going to do it, let’s just drive both cars and get it over with.” (He was misreading my concern and thought I was just being Mom….we figured out much, much later that neither of us thought it was a good idea for him to go to Home Depot. [We also figured out, after 11:30 pm,  that it was rather wonderful that Grant got his way about the thing.])
• We went to Home Depot where he made use of the wheelchair for the very first time, pushed by our granddaughter. He goofed around with the brakes after she explained them to him, causing her to suddenly be pushing him in a tight circle because he would slyly reach down and slightly snug up one of the brakes, leaving the other one unapplied.
• He was surrounded by former work associates in a sea of orange aprons the minute we came in the door,  hugged on and greeted affectionately from the time we arrived until we left – as he held court after a fashion.
• In an unusually playful mood, he submitted to being towed down the aisle by his 45-year-old son, Grant holding on to the curve of his cane and our son (who should have known better – being a former Home Depot employee [years and years ago]) pulling him at fairly high speed with Dad laughing at him and saying, “You’re gonna fall on your butt if that comes off” – referring to the rubber tip on the bottom of the cane.
• He playfully harassed our grandson on the way home in the car, looking innocent while accidentally poking GS with his cane – again and again – until GS, in the back seat, finally grabbed the offending end of the cane, fixed Grandpa with a baleful look and just said, “Really.…????”
• We got home at 4:30 and all six of us dug into a KFC spread that DS and DDil had picked up.
• DIL and GS and GD went home about 6:00 after hugs and kisses and many tears. It seems their spirits knew it was goodbye because tears  sprinkled over him like a baptism in a scene that was raw and pristine, without precedent. Ever. The beautiful GD turned to me with eyes overflowing, pointed to a big wet spot on Grandpa’s pillow by his right cheek and said, “Those are my tears.”
• He went to bed about 6:30, not feeling well and woke up at 10:30, not feeling well. We used the walker for the first time for a bathroom trip.
• I was within inches every second but continued to practice what we had perfected over the weeks – letting him do for himself until he knew he couldn’t, at which point he would  quietly indicate I should step in when strength left another small area of life for the last time. He was still using his own strength now, the last of it, and didn’t indicate I should step in.
• As we came out of the bathroom DS was watching from the kitchen doorway and said, “I love you, Dad.” Dad acknowledged and kept walking – Now we only have four more steps to the bedroom door and then four or five to get him to the bed.
• His legs buckled within the frame of the walker at the bedroom door.
• I stepped in behind, surrounding and holding him as well as I could and DS immediately came around behind, put both arms under his Dad’s, across his chest to support him, and began evaluating whether he would be able to raise himself a few inches to lock his knees to set up for a stiff-legged move to the bed.
• If I could paint, I would draw his strong hands still gripping the walker as his shoulders hunched forward and he used the last of his strength to try. For the first time in almost seventy years, he could not physically do what he knew he must do.
• “Get a chair, Mom. I don’t want him on the floor.”
• DH’s hands were still gripping the walker when his head began to sink forward to his chest and Dear Son, realizing that I didn’t have the experience to know what he knew, said, “Mom, prepare yourself. Dad is leaving,” sobbing as he forced the words out.
• Quickly I knelt in front of him so that if he still had any vision, he might see my face. I stayed there until his left arm silently dropped off the walker.
• I put my arms around his shoulders and cradled his head, much as I had done when we prayed together over breakfast two days earlier. We embraced him and loved him and held him.
• In a moment, we fully knew he was gone.

The next morning I went to the super secret clearing in the woods and left this –

Grant died in my arms and (#2 son’s) at about 11:30 pm Pacific time last night. We had ten minutes of knowing.

Time was behaving strangely at that point.
It was only when Dear Son and I reviewed things later that we realized there were only three minutes of knowing.   
Grant lived until he died. In his final moments he had thanked me for helping him. It was traumatic. It was sudden. It was completely unexpected within the events of the week. We thought we just needed to get through the weekend, anticipating the Monday visit with the hospice nurse when we would evaluate what further support was needed. 
Do you have any idea how grateful we were and are that the man got to Home Depot? – just like he had been wanting to for a few days – but we didn’t want to take him…..

I have the most magnificent new kitchen faucet waiting to be installed that will always speak to me about his persistent love, taking care of me to the best of his ability – until his body would no longer allow him to care for me.

He never spent one day in bed due to the cancer.

If we had known the few hours he had left, of course we would have refused the Home Depot trip – and what a costly refusal that would have been. He needed to see his friends and play in the aisles and buy a kitchen faucet.

He never spent one day in denial. We knew full well where the journey would end but he didn’t figure that was a reason to cooperate with it and he didn’t. He didn’t cooperate with cancer for a single minute. Cancer happened to his body. It did not happen to him.

After he left that night I was trying to get my thoughts around this….

It is very, very odd. Death is an event. It certainly casts long, long shadows and it pierces and while approaching, it seems like it’s going to go on forever in terms of being a process. But then, suddenly, it happens. And then it’s over.

Which proves it is an event. It is not a process.

Death is a dialogue between
The spirit and the dust.
“Dissolve,” says Death. The Spirit, “Sir,
I have another trust.”

Death doubts it, argues from the ground.
The Spirit turns away,
Just laying off, for evidence,
An overcoat of clay.

-Emily Dickinson

Two and half weeks before my husband left, I typed,

Perspective is important. It’s not so much a dust cloud as a hurricane….. Breezy, then wispy gusts, then Windy, windier, more windy still, till the wind is howling sideways and you can’t think…. everything goes sideways. Then *poof* calm silence as the eye is above you and bright sunlight appears…
…. perhaps it’s over.
Then the funeral.
It ain’t over….. The worst is beginning. Now you get the backside of it, the stronger side, tearing at you from the exact opposite direction. Everything that barely withstood the Northern wind is now destroyed and laid bare by the twice as strong Southerlies….
….Old generational trees ripped roots n’ all from their footing… the windows blow out and you can feel the pelt of a million sandblasters on your finger tips that barely clutch the mattress above you as you lay in the bathtub….. fighting to breathe amid deafening screams.
When it stops. You look up and you are soaked in sweat and rain, covered in muck…. and it’s all gone.
Broom? No need – it’s all gone. It’s all gone.

And so it is. And the sifting sands amid the shifting winds run out to the horizon.

You have spent the past several months tenderly gathering moments, collecting them, storing them away to be forever cherished – Each a single stem to form a precious memory bouquet filled with colorful radiance; collected with a knowledge and anxiety amid a desperate reality – – urgently, before the shadow of storm clouds reached the valley.
It’s time to come in now.

 About two weeks before he left, I fired up Youtube and was playing the old gospel song,

Until then – my heart will go on singing;until then, with joy I’ll carry on. Until the day my eyes behold the city – until the day God calls me home.

I had pulled my chair up close to his bed,  laid my head on his chest and he had his arm around me as we listened. When it came to the chorus each time, we sang along.

We’ve sung duets since we were about twenty years old, he on tenor/melody and me on alto. This was our last duet and we sang it very badly because we were both crying.

There was long range counsel given in the deep woods thread:

As you and Grant lock hands, hold deep love, and set out into the unfamiliar…. (Y)ou must leave a trail of some kind which you can find later. You must… tie a thread to the old familiar so you will follow it back.

So here I stand, slightly stunned, still deep in the woods, and I begin to notice the vague outline of a possible path. I see bits of thread hanging here and there.

 Our shared journey is over

It’s time to come in….the storm clouds that come after are rolling in.
I don’t give self-fulfilling prophecies a foothold with regard to what shape my grief will take, but I drink with some of you the common elements of The Hurricane Called After.
It’s time to come in – the eye has passed. 

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*unwalking is a refusal to engage with what constitutes reality, both within and around us; refusal to walk in the light; refusal to walk at all