Still too breezy out there for my taste but warmer, at least. I woke up at 6:40am, got my ASEA, peed, but didn't get back to sleep. I laid there wandering around in my mind and it was nice and relaxing. The horror, grief and stress that was afflicting me for weeks seems to have vanished and I'm finding myself like a ship wreck survivor washed up on a sandy shore, bruised and weak but alive, coming back to consciousness by noticing the sound of the ocean, the feel of the sea breeze, the smell of the salt air and the clear blue sky whisked clean by the storm. After all I've gone through, I can now crawl up the shore, find a way to stand up on all twos (as mom would say) and figure out where to go from here. I should watch Castaway again, I can relate in a whole new way now. As in that story, my continued survival is not assured just because I've made it this far. There will be more storms and a whole new way of living must be created. I have to become resourceful, make unlikely friends, find ways to tell one day from the next and continue to care for myself.
So as I lay there in my bed exploring options, I thought again about how to start telling the story of Stephen and what came to mind was the early morning, Oct 29, being woken by the cell phone ringing. I wrote that all out in my pages long ago and have tried to no avail to find it again since. I called it, The Pause. In those first few moments of life on that day, I still had hope, an assumption of continued life and efforts toward healing and repair. It was dark, just after 6:30am, and I had left the cell phone on the coffee table in the living room. I didn't answer it, assuming it was work calling, wanting me to come in, and I never said yes to those requests. But then I flashed on the night before, the last conversation with Stephen and how he had left me hanging, and I stumbled out of bed to go see if he had texted me in the night, as he sometimes did.
I have this all written in my pages, I'll go to the studio later and make a concerted effort to locate it. It was very raw, the words came out with lots of tears, but I'd still like to read it again and see if it can be the basis for the beginning of the story. Because that moment in time, before Stephanie said the words and after, was when my whole world split apart. The life that went by in the few seconds of her pause was all the life worth living, worth remembering. In that pause, Stephen was still alive, not laying on a slab in a morgue refrigerator at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Beverly Hills, where he had been all night while I slept, not knowing that was gone.
It's the last things you say to someone, not thinking that they are to be the last, that come back and haunt. In a normal passing, you always imagine expressing love. My dad told my mother he loved her, they were his last words. My mother didn't say it back to him, she had been mad at him for over 30 years and even on his deathbed she couldn't tell him she loved him. And she paid the price of that stubborn refusal to forgive by being haunted by it for the rest of her life. She never recovered her health or her mental state after my dad died even though she lived another three years. But that's another story for a later date.
The last words Stephen heard me say were, I'm sorry. I also said, call me back. Get yourself together and call me back, call me back, I'm sorry! In the heat of the moment, as he was crying and wailing, that's what I said. He didn't say goodbye, he didn't say he loved me, he just cried out in agony and then he was gone. I didn't know what happened, but I knew something bad had just happened. I was a thousand miles away, it was 10:00 at night and all I could do was run around my house screaming and so that's what I did. I didn't have anyone to call at that moment. There was no one, no help, for either of us. I dialed his number again and again and then I started texting him. No response. Those were the worst moments of my entire life. I will never again feel so utterly helpless.
My mind is filled with that last conversation, what he said when he first called, the energy that was in his voice and the questions he asked. I want to write it out in detail, all that I can remember. But it all hurts so bad! How can this be it? It's not it, I know that. He and I have had many conversations since that last one but none have satisfied my need for him to be alive in the world in order for my world to be OK.
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