Sadness
My wife is gone again for another tour to the Alaskan wilderness. This time she’ll be gone for a whole month, about the time of her previous stay. This is her third time leaving me for an extended period, and this time was profoundly different from the other two. I never like to see her go, it is literally losing your best friend in the whole world, but it never seems to have struck me as hard as it did this time.
It made me remember a truism I was told by a Canadian armed forces parachute instructor. He was explaining how the third jump with a military parachute (substantially smaller than a recreational one) is the worst you will ever do. It went like this: [WARNING: The rest of this is basically a sorrowful, self-indulgent introspection and is likely pretty damn boring if you’re not me or my wife. You have been warned]
The first jump: Your heart is racing with anticipation, this being the first jump. As you fall towards the earth and your chute opens, you continue falling towards the ground. You feel the freedom, the rush of being out in the world. As you land, you break both of your legs. Not small sprains, massive bone-crushing breaking. Like the kind of pain that makes you wish you had died. The kind of pain you remember for a lifetime. But you’re young and strong, so the pain disappears quickly, but you remember it.
Second Jump: You remember your first jump and the awful pain you felt. As you fall through the sky, the rush is still there, but you think back to that first time. You think, the first time was a fluke. No way could it happen again. One in a zillion. Then as you hit the ground, you break both of your legs again. The same way, the same pain, the same everything. Its excrutiating in the exact same way again. This time it takes a little longer for the pain to disappear.
Third jump: You KNOW exactly what is coming. Your brain no longer allows you to think about the freedom or the rush, its focused completely on the inevtitible pain that is coming. Before you even hit the door to get on the plane, you know its coming, and it consumes your every processor cycle.
And so it was this time. I don’t think in my adult life I had felt such an impending sense of dread as I did the day before she was to leave. Its like breaking up with the first “love” of of your life. The first time you fall off a bike on your crotch, the first time you get left in a mall by your parents accidentally, the first time….well, you get my drift.
The first time she left I was excited, both for her and me. I would have all that freedom, and she would be doing what she loves to do. After about a week, that grew a little thin and the loneliness began to sneak in. By the end of the second week when she came home, I was very glad to see her. The second time, I was slightly less excited at the prospect of being alone, but honestly felt the first time was something so new to both of us that I wasn’t totally prepared for it. That the loneliness was something I had manufactured out of not being prepared properly and being so new to all of this. That the first time was a fluke, essentially, and that I would be better prepared the second time for what was to come.
The second time she left was for a bit more than a month. When she left, I assured myself that this time I would be fine, and that I had learned all I could from the first time around so that history would not repeat itself, and I was still excited to have the freedom and for her to being off on yet another new adventure. But, less than a week in, the abject loneliness began to once again rear its ugly head, as severely (if not more so) than the first time. The first time, it turns out, as not a fluke and these thoughts were not just my own personal psychosees, this was to be my reality for the next while. Once that realization came (I think it was about 4am while deciding whether or not I was having a stroke or an aneurysm, and if either was a sign of oncoming lymphoma) it was easier to get on with things, but only slightly so. I still really missed my best friend in the whole world, and more than anything I wanted her back to hang out with me, even if it was for our standing date to watch re-runs of Law & Order at 10pm. I was still happy for her, but felt quite alone in the world.
She came back for 6-weeks while her project was shut down for the holidays. It was a longer stay than before, and turned out to be longer than the next rotation will be (4-weeks gone, 2-weeks home). During that time we went to Hawaii for Xmas, and watched so many episodes of Law & Order, we had to switch to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in order to have something to watch. So long, that our routines began to mesh into what they were before her travel. But in the back of both of our minds, we knew the third trip was coming.
It didn’t really start to become an issue until the day before she was meant to leave. Bringing out a suitcase and doing umpteen million loads of laundry is a very powerful reminder of a reality which can otherwise be easily stashed in the background and forgotten about. She came to tears, and so did I. Its very much akin to someone you know dying. Its a little easier to take if it happens in an instant, like a car accident where you may wonder what the last thing you told them was, but you know there is no pre-cursor to it. No antecedent action, if you will. Watching someone whither away in a hospital bed for months on end is excruciating. While I certainly would not claim someone leaving for a finite period of time to be the same as someone leaving the temporal plane completely, it does server as an interesting analogy. The ride to the airport was hardly better than the packing the night before, and conversation that would normally be bristling was otherwise mute, peppered only with small bouts of random small-talk as if we had met only 15-minutes ago and were sharing a cab.
So, I sit now writing this only a few hours after she has gone, and I miss her greatly. I hung out with some friends and watched the Super Bowl (NY Giants won, BTW), again postponing the inevitable. The drive home brought forward the thoughts again, and the walk up the sidewalk to an empty house was dreadful to say the very least. Turning the key felt like opening my own personal little prison cell and voluntarily going in. Even the sadness is harder when you have no one to share it with. Even now I am walking about trying to find someone to tell, and the cats don’t seem to care one iota. Oh well, I guess that’s why people have blogs. The six beers I am trying to down before bed will surely help that. They’ve started helping already as I have reached what Pink Floyd referred to as Comfortably Numb. I really do miss my friend.