If Your Happy and You Know It.....Good for You

I get, I understand happy.  I’m largely a happy person, always have been, I like happy.  The odd thing is, at times, every now and then, occasionally, I feel a little guilty feeling happy. 

As dumb as that is, it’s a real thing for me.

I remember at one point sitting somewhere, eating, talking, hanging with my children while Marty was still in the ICU at Zale Lipshy Hospital in Dallas after her first stroke.  Marty was lying in her high tech hospital bed with tubes in her nose, her throat and her head while being fed food through a tube and given IV drugs to keep her asleep so she wouldn’t buck against the daily assaults on her body.  Keeping someone alive can be an awesome and awful thing.

Anyway, we were sitting, talking, hanging and someone said something funny and I laughed for just a moment. I don’t remember what or who said something funny but the moment caught up with me, life seemed normal for a fleeting moment and I laughed, I found happy, and then I caught myself. 

My happy seemed like a direct affront to my bride who was lying in a bed with a tenuous hold on life.  How could I, if I was true, if my sadness over Marty’s aneurysm, if my fear for Marty’s life was true, how could I laugh. 

I quit laughing.  For longer than was smart.

The whole thing, caring for Marty, watching her suffer, watching pieces of her die was so overwhelmingly awful it pushed out virtually all emotions except for fear, anger and sadness…..and guilt for those odd times when happiness or laughter occurred.  It took months, really years to get to the point where other real and better emotions such as love, gratitude and happiness could be real again.  It took work, thought, self awareness, effort and most importantly adaptation to move past the self pity and angst of our situation.

I have since discovered that happiness does not require an ideal life, it does not require an easy life, it does not require perfection.  Happiness simply requires effort and permission, permission from you for you to enjoy what fruits of life are there.

Man that’s high tone talk about someone who is healthy .  It's because I've been married to Psychologist all of these years.  Think about how hard it is to find happiness if you are the Psychologist in the bed is the stroke patient.

When I ask Marty if she is happy her first and immediate response is almost always, “No.”  Not a lot of detail, not a lot of nuance, it’s just, “No.”  But, give her a few beats, and on most days, almost always, she will think and then say,”Yes, some times.”

I think that’s the real truth.  “No,” she says, “I shouldn’t feel happy.  Life has hit me hard, life, living has taken too much of me away for me to be happy, there is no friggin way I’m going to say I’m happy and it’s pretty damn stupid of you to even ask or think I could be happy.  What the hell is wrong with your pee brain?”  That’s what I imagine she thinks, she really just says no.

But then it hits her, as it hits me, there are a lot, I mean a lot of happy things in our lives.  First and foremost we are both still here, with each other, enjoying each other and yes laughing with each other.  Marty hasn’t had a serious illness in well over a year (knock on wood) and she has me, bubbly little ol me to take care of her.  Bubbly little ol me has Nykkie, Erica, Renea and LaShonda to help, we have amazing children and family to support and love us and we have the means to live life in a reasonably comfortable manner in spite of all the wounds of life. 

It would be wrong, wrong, and wrong again not to claim happiness, even if I am required, through my own psychosis, to feel guilty about it from time to time.

It took time to get over the shock of the events in our lives.   It took time and learning to get past some, but never all of the fear and anger, it took time and effort and a very conscious effort (pat myself on the back) to leave the idea of a daily funeral for Marty, the idea that Marty was always on deaths door. 

Happiness does not always occur naturally, sometimes it takes effort, sometimes it takes thought, and sometimes it takes accepting the guilt associated with it. 

Me, I accept happiness and I expect the occasional feelings of guilt that come with it.  It just is.

The Cards

It’s a little dangerous when I start organizing, I never seem to finish.  I didn’t get very far because I’m easily distracted from tasks that kinda suck.  Mostly I was side tracked by a treasure trove of old cards, cards from about ten years ago, cards to Marty in the aftermath of her ruptured aneurysm.  

When Marty was in ICU at Zale Lipshy Hospital in Dallas people would send cards to our son’s address in Dallas or our home in Waco and friend Sue would truck them up to Dallas when she visited.  The cards were from all over, friends from church, Marty’s high school and college friends, strangers from other churches, little kids from Sunday school, from our own kids and our family.  I saved all of those cards, bundled them up together and stuck them in a filing cabinet.

I would sit by Marty’s hospital bed where she lay in a coma with tubes coming from all parts of her body, draining fluids, breathing for her and feeding her.  I would sit there and read her the cards and read her the notes inside the cards, often several times.  It was a way to stabilize the chaos in my head, a way to drown out the constant hum of the respiratory equipment and the tones of the machines measuring Marty’s life forces and maybe a way to reach into Marty’s consciousness.

Reading those cards kept me connected and reminded me of the love and caring of others. I read the cards to Marty hoping somewhere somehow she heard their message….we love you, we are praying for you, wake up, get up, recover.

After Marty regained consciousness I once again read her all of the cards she had received.  I sat by her bed, amazed she was finally awake.  I read each card aloud, to my miracle of a wife who was still missing the left front part of her skull, had matted dirty hair from lying on her back for six weeks and still had way too many tubes coming from all parts of her body.  

I read the cards to her, each word, several times, sometimes multiple times during the day.  I wanted her to feel what I had felt when I first read her the cards.  I wanted her to feel the connection to people outside of our new world that was centered in a medical center; I wanted her to hear the encouragement and pleas of her friends, old and new, to move, to recover, to get well.  I wanted her to know how many people loved her and the cards helped with a very simple message, you have been laid low but you have not been forgotten. 

I read her the encouraging words from Jane Ann, the words of love from my brother John, the words of comfort from Sherry, the words of prayer from complete strangers from a friend’s church, I read her the simple words from children.  

We read them over and over again as Marty came back to life.  We read them as she went to a regular room, we read them as she sat up in a wheelchair for the first time in weeks, we read them as Erin cut off her dirty, matted hair.  I took the cards to comprehensive rehab and read them to Marty as she started getting stronger and the miracle of her recovery continued.  I read the new ones Amelia and Joe and Ellen and Luan, I read the old ones again and every time she would listen and ask, “Now who sent that?”  It was proof she was recovering.

I’m a big connectional guy.  I hate to feel isolated and away, I need, and I mean need, to feel close to the world, to my people.  The cards did that for me and they weren’t even meant for me, they were for Marty, the woman fighting for her life.  

For Marty, they meant something even more, they reminded her of who she was, in a strange kind of way they brought her back to her world, to her friends and to her family.  From very simple words, from very simple cards, from very thoughtful remarks she was reconnected to life.  

Of course I read through the cards again instead of focusing on the reorganizing task ahead.  It’s strange that these simple pieces of cardboard still carry power today.  I will let Marty hold them and read them again and then file them away one more time.  

The cards and the words and the people who sent them are our treasure.