It has been one year almost to the day that Blaine and I moved to Maple Creek. It was April 7th, 2021. The memory of that day is etched in my mind like it was yesterday. When Blaine was diagnosed and I took my leave, it wasn’t long after that Blaine came up with the idea of moving. At first when he mentioned it I thought it was a crazy time to do it, but as we discussed it further I realized he was right and it made good sense to be closer to the kids, the hospital, our seasonal campsite, and anyway I had been eyeing up Maple Creek as a good retirement place for some time.
It’s not like we hadn’t considered moving before all of this happened. When we had the ranch up for sale we took the time to research homes and looked at quite a few in Swift Current. Blaine got very good at researching homes and he actually enjoyed looking at them and was excited about the prospects of moving to a bigger center where things were more readily accessible. He was always so practical and could easily see what would be a good fit. I always went more by “feel”. It had to “feel” right when I walked into my new home.
When Blaine showed me the pictures of this home in Maple Creek I instantly fell in love with all of it. We looked at the house on a Thursday or a Friday early in February and put the offer in it and purchased it days later. It was a quick decision. We looked at another couple of nice houses for good measure but this was the one that felt right to me and made practical sense to Blaine. We worked so well together! We knew this was the right decision.
Packing up the house on the ranch was a huge undertaking and on top of everything else Blaine was taking chemotherapy and ended up in the hospital multiple times for longer stays. I trudged through the process of packing things up and trying to discard as much as I could from what we had collected over 35 years of marriage. I would pack things upstairs from the basement and Blaine and I would go through those things together deciding what to keep and what to give or throw away. It was very difficult work emotionally and physically. I remained somewhat stoic through it all just hanging on to the fact that there was something else to think about besides the illness and that moving should be exciting after all! Thankfully we had some very key family members and good friends that got us through. Some helped pack, some lent us trailers, some were there moving day to make everything go smoothly and some were there to help unpack it all. We were always supported and never alone and we are eternally grateful for all of you. You know who you are. There is no way we could have managed it without you!
When you go through grief of any kind, psychologists talk about stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. You don’t experience these in any order. These are supposed to be tools to help us frame and identify what we are feeling. I realize that many of these phases I went through during the time when Blaine was sick. The bargaining phase seemed to happen then. If God would just make Blaine better we would spend the rest of our lives helping so many people. Some phases happened before and after like the denial phase. I still find it hard to believe all of this happened. But one I never really thought much about was anger. I got really angry a couple of times when Blaine was sick. I absolutely lost it and I was angry at God/ Universe/Angels anyone up there mostly for not helping us when we needed it most. I felt like we had just been abandoned and left on our own to just muddle through all of it. Where were they? We were praying and meditating and doing all the right things. Why did it seem like nothing we did worked? Why did Blaine have to be so sick? Why did all of this happen to us? What did we do to deserve it? I think it scared Blaine to see me that angry and I think it scared me too. So the last time it happened I made a vow to him not to do that anymore and I did not.
After Blaine passed I never got angry. I felt sad, depressed, denial and even acceptance at times but never anger. I started to question this one day when the teacher in my healing class was guiding us through a rage healing. I had never heard of rage healing and as I went through the motions of experiencing it I realized that there probably was some anger deep down there but I really couldn’t feel it. I had no idea what I should be angry about. It is the strangest thing to know that you have an emotion but you don’t know how to feel it.
I did some research and found out there is such a thing as suppressed anger. Who knew? We are taught that anger is a negative emotion. We are often taught NOT to express anger instead of taught HOW to express anger in a healthy way. Interestingly a way I found around this was to ask myself this, “If I was to be angry about something, what would it be?” Oh my goodness, then I could think of lots of things to be angry about. As I thought about my situation and gave myself permission to feel the anger, I started to realize my angry thoughts. I will share some of these with you just to give you an idea of what goes through a busy mind. Just be forewarned that these are raw and they are honest and maybe not even rational. They are just feelings and thoughts. Some I feel I have dealt with and some will need more work.
My husband died from Stage 4 Colon Cancer and had we caught it sooner he would still be alive. My daughter lost her dad and went through a terrible cancer scare with her own husband at the same time. My son and his wife are expecting a baby and my grandson will not know his grandpa. I don’t have Blaine here to share the excitement with. I had to take leave and retire from my position and on top of it haven’t been able to enjoy my retirement like I had hoped with Blaine by my side. Blaine never got his trip across Canada in the motorhome like he wanted or his Mustang. I am alone and now responsible for more things than I want to be. I am frustrated and angry with the medical system because it could not help Blaine, everyone knows about Cancer and it seems no one can do anything about it.
This is just a taste of what goes on deep down in the psyche. I could go on. It is gut wrenching and painful working through these things. What I have realized is that I have to do the work to let the anger go or I will simply never be happy. It is a work in progress and I will have to be patient and loving with myself. I cannot just sit idly by and hope that time will heal these wounds or the anger that goes with it. I have heard too many stories about people who agonize over loss for decades later and can never move on. I find this so sad. Blaine would never want me to be that person. He would want me to be happy, to move on, to feel love, excitement, joy and passion for life like never before. He would want me to enjoy this home I am living in, that we chose together. I am not letting him go. I am letting the pain go and that is the difference between attachment to love and attachment to the things and the feelings. The things I feel are not Blaine just like the things in our house that we had to let go when we moved were not us. Blaine is the love I feel in my heart at this very moment and it is a love that has no bounds. It is the tie that binds us together forever. In this way, I can take comfort in the fact that my husband, my best friend and I will never ever really be apart.
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