Letter 37 – San Diego

 

Dear Garrett, 

I woke up feeling negative today. I’m at the bottom of the well again. Worrying over the stones of all my regrets. Tricia says that it is natural and part of the process to sink to the bottom of the well and stay there, until you need a break from it and rise back up again. And then prepare yourself to go back down, for as many times as it’s necessary to do the work that has to be done. 

I’m reminded of the recent trip I planned to go to San Diego after Christmas. I didn’t want two weeks of doing nothing over the holidays, the first Christmas without you. And so I planned a trip to San Diego to get away. Genevieve is a big fan of the zoo programs on tv, and I planned a behind-the-scenes tour for her as something special. 

Our flights got cancelled, and then rebooked. They were rebooked in the worst way, not getting there until a full two days after our original flight and coming in late at night. So many plans that I had scheduled for us would have to be cancelled or rearranged. Coming in at 11, our zoo trip was scheduled for 8:00am the next morning. Genevieve would be exhausted, I thought. She wouldn’t be able to enjoy it because she’d be too tired. The plane came in at 11. Then we’d have to get our bags, get the car. Drive to the hotel. It would be after midnight before I got her to bed.  

I tried and tried and tried all day to change our flights. There were no seats. I couldn’t change it. Even though I knew this, I called again and again and again to try to change things. I spent hours on the phone. When I was on hold, I emailed the vendor for the whale watching trip I had scheduled that we would now miss, trying to reschedule the excursion to another day. I really, really wanted to see a whale. There had to be a way I could make that happen. It wasn’t working out. Everything was booked. We got on a waiting list and nothing ever came of it. How could this be? How was I not able to remake the arrangements I had so carefully planned? I spent all that day on the phone, on the computer, trying to make things go my way. But it didn’t happen. The flights stayed the same. All of it stayed the same. Nothing I tried made any difference. 

At the airport, I still wasn’t over it. I felt this simmering rage and resistance to our unchanged circumstances. Why couldn’t I have changed the flights? How could I not have been able to do it? I don’t even know how to describe the level of frustration I felt about not having been successful.  

As I sat there, I thought to myself, I have to find a way to get over this. There is nothing I can do now to change what has happened and I have to find a way to be fine. I have no control over it. There is nothing I can do. And I decided to just sit with my feelings until I could accept what had happened. I sat there and I sat there and I sat there and I stared straight ahead, letting the internal battle wage its war. And I sat there and let my feelings of frustration and loss of control and inability to change things battle it out. It was an incoherent battle. Barely any words to apply to what was happening. Just some random words and phrases slipping around in my mind. No control, I have no control. I must accept this. I cannot do anything about it. And while my husband looked at his phone and my daughter played on her iPad, my mind waged war on itself over the fact that I couldn’t change anything. 

I sat that way for six hours. Waiting in the terminal. On the first flight. Waiting for the connection. On the next flight. I sat in silence for six hours and bore witness to this internal struggle.  

While I was in there, I visualized myself as a skeleton at the bottom of the well. I was lifting up rocks and chucking them aside. I was languid in the vision. Just a skeleton, sitting at the bottom of a black well. Picking up and examining a rock, and then tossing it to the side. One after another. I watched myself doing this. Rock. Toss. Rock. Toss. Until the scene faded out and then I continued to stare at nothing at all.

At some point, it was done. I was on the plane. We were soon to land at our destination. And I was finished with the battle. I had given up my need to have changed what I couldn’t change. I had accepted it and made the decision that it was okay. I had tried and not been able to do it and it was fine. Everything would work out. Genevieve would get to see her zoo, and it would be fine even if she was tired. We would enjoy what we could and accept the fact that we wouldn’t get to see whales. Maybe another time. Maybe not. It didn’t matter. We would enjoy what we could. 

I felt a little bit lighter, after that. My struggles overlapped with my feelings about you, and how I wish I could have changed that day. Anything about that day.  The weight of that struggle had shifted, when I was done on that flight. It didn’t go away. It didn’t disappear. But it shifted. It became a little easier to bear. And that has not changed, even though I continue to take dives deep into this well, to revisit all of these stones. As Tricia has said, maybe the stones are not as jagged anymore. Maybe they don’t cut as deep as they did. Maybe one day I can just hold the rock and then set it down and walk away. Maybe.