How Am I Doing? Don’t Ask Me
Please stop asking me how am I doing, I have no answer. Friends and family close to me are often asked, “How is Janae doing?” by others who know me. It also comes from those who are thinking of me and have heard my husband died, thus leaving me with 4 little boys. I think people want a connection to me within this raw reality, or a reassurance that I’m ok, but somehow they don’t feel able to ask me themselves.
My friends and family usually respond something like this, ‘She’s doing well, hanging in there, doing her best, etc.’ Thing is, they don’t actually know either. They just give the interpretation of what they see or feel or a platitude like I do. What they say is not how I’m doing.
Where I am, is a place no one knows. A place no one can go with me. A place that I cannot be rescued from no matter how much you love me. This is a place I can only be with myself. Others in my experience are in their own place, alone, dealing with themselves. All of us in these traumatic experiences are not in this place together. Each place is solitary.
But, because I’m functioning in some manner, it seems as if I’m doing fine in people’s eyes. And it’s true, some moments, hours, periods of time are better than others. If it looks as if I’m fine, people think I’m fine, but I’m not. You see, the question to ask is not, “How is Janae doing? But who is Janae, now?”
When my husband died, his physical body died. With it died all of who we were together, our life experience and circumstance together and everything we’d planned, worked for, and became together. We were creating our oneness, our world together. So I died too, but my body didn’t. The person I was, died. I’m no longer her. You see, I’m not just going through the grief of my husband's physical death; I’m going through the process of my own death of a different means.
The life I had died, a death that is requiring me to recreate who I am. Who I was is not the person I can continue to be. It just doesn’t work anymore, it can’t. The same stimulus, inputs and creators are not present. She, the me from before, doesn’t work in this new life. I had to say goodbye to her, as well as him. I am a different being now and I mourn her as well.
When you’re with a person living their last day on earth in their mortal body, you experience firsthand how fleeting life really is. You don’t believe it or conceive it in your fibers till you see that last day. Grant’s last day, it was our last day. And so, it was my last day. Everything was stopped and I started a new life in that moment. The new life is changed from the past life, forever, as I am.
This new life requires me to become something different than who I was, in order to get through it. I must be different than I was to make it to the other side and be a person who could still be alive and act like the living until I become a new living creature. Each choice feels like a life and death choice.
The smallest, almost unconscious decisions affect life. The choice to breathe deeply is a choice to create more life. The choice to breathe shallow is a choice that brings death. Every choice has more weight to it than just existing as a choice. We don’t just exist. We choose toward life and death every moment. In the end, that last choice you make, the one that is the culmination of all your life and death choices; that is what chooses life or death for you.
July 29th 2019, my husband made his last choice which ended in death. The climax of all his life choices up to that moment put him where he was. They made him the person who he was. It’s what created those last choices for him that decided his fate. That day for me, was a new choice for me to fully embrace my choice for life or death too. That choice now becomes the pinnacle of the fullness of life today or the negation of it.
Today is still that choice. I’m choosing life every day, becoming it. I can’t tell you how I am, I still don’t know. I’m in a place I struggle to understand, let alone find the words to describe; but I am finding my way forward into life with each choice. What I do have some concept of, is that I do know who I am. I’m daily discovering that. Who I am is the apex of what my life is today. I’m now a person who is actually living. Truly now, I am living my life. When you see me ask me, “What’s good in your life?” For that I’ll have an answer for.
While I’m rediscovering who I am amidst the crisis of pain, loss and trauma, it’s the little things that bring joy, and uncover what is really still there. Eating a chocolate covered strawberry with my baby as he looks at me with his gorgeous blue eyes that say, “I love being with my mommy and eating chocolate.” That’s what’s good in my life and I’ll always have an answer for that, because you see, that’s what I’m creating answers to. What’s good in my life, not what’s not.