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.

Pushing Through to Happy

A comment on one of my blog posts and a couple of facebook links really nailed me this week. 

The comment was nice, the writer pointed out how good things were in my life.  They were spot on, my life is good.  It’s good for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is I have the time, resources and health to tend to Marty’s care.

 

The face book post was about being content in a career.  The writer posited that some in their chosen career groused because they felt like they were supposed to grouse, that they were, somehow, supposed to be unhappy because their chosen career was very hard and required long hours sometimes fighting against great odds.  I resemble that post.

The article I read, also on face book, listed five regrets the dying often had in common.  The last regret, one many of us can understand, was wishing they had let themselves be happier. 

 

All three of these pieces dealt with happiness.  They all spoke to me and reminded me of something….well they reminded me of …..Me.

Somehow I got it in my brain that feeling real abundant happiness, expressing joy, was okay for some, but not for the serious.  Overt happiness was not for those who had important things to do.  I don’t know where it came from, I don’t know why it would be there because I like happy, heck I am a huge fan of Pharrell’s Happy, I love it, it makes me do the baby boomer head bob.

 

But the curmudgeon gene is somehow stuck in me.  I know it’s kind of a stupid thought and I really, I promise ain’t that stupid.  I suspect it has to do with that whole Texas work ethic manly crapola.

There have been too many times I have found myself feeling a little guilty for being happy.  I worked hard in my life, I worked at hard jobs, I was a hard, serious career man, how could that produce happy?  Told you it was stupid.

Then came the strokes and being a giver of care for Marty, talk about a serious undertaking. 

I distinctly remember as Marty lay in a coma in the intensive care unit I was having a light moment with my children one evening.  I laughed, I smiled, and I felt a brief moment of happy with my favorite people in the world.  I occurred to me at the time I should not be having happy stuff and I decided right then and there I needed to feel bad about the happy feeling.

Marty was sick, really sick, very sick, it was serious, how can serious and happy exist together?  In my mind they couldn’t so I couldn’t ever experience a light moment, everything had to be a heavy burden so I could show myself and others that I felt miserable bad about my wife’s plight, our plight.  Guilt made me move away from happy, serious made me shun joy, dumb, dumb, dumb.

It has taken me time, like years, but I’m better at finding and accepting joy.  I still struggle with the guilt of feeling happiness, especially when Marty is feeling bad or when I am away and doing things while she is at home, recovering from her strokes, my fallen partner.  How can this engender happiness?

I know and Marty knows that we have many things to celebrate in our lives.  We have Marty being here, we have a supportive loving family, our children are good people who have joined with good people and are producing amazing people.  Happy, happy, happy.

We are supported by good people and we have met many amazing health care givers who are serious about their craft and about helping Marty.  We are incredibly fortunate to have been touched by so many who care so much and are so very talented at their chosen endeavors.  That’s bound to be happy.

We worked hard and had very good fortune and I know we are blessed that we are financially able to maintain this rather expensive care giving hobby.   This is a lot more expensive than golf, and for me and my golf skills, much more rewarding.

We have been lucky and in spite of the overall tragic circumstances we, I have a lot of reasons to be happy.  I’m happy Marty is still with me, I’m happy I’m healthy and able to care for her, I’m happy with my family, I’m happy with friends, I’m happy a lot of the time.

Most importantly I know Marty and I know she fights for happy moments for herself so I should do the same.

I still feel a little guilty for it.

Bone Crushing

There are times it is bone crushingly sad; occasionally the sadness of what has happened permeates every part of me.  It runs so deep and is so real it is almost a physical pain.  It never lasts long and it almost always happens late at night, at times when I feel most alone.

What has happened to Marty, to our life, is sad, it’s awful, it’s unimaginable to people who had lived such a charmed life, to people who hadn’t known much illness, to people who had seen little death and had lived lives of relative privilege and success.  

But it happened, the strokes happened, the life changing event erupted quickly.  The result, the consequence of the eruption is beyond sad.

The good news is that feeling sad; feeling the loss, feeling grief has become only a small part of our lives.  As time slowly moves us away from the days of the strokes, as the days of walking the black precipice has receded, so has the constancy of the sadness.  

The depth of the pain is there, the intensity of the grief is still present, but mostly it is set aside, hidden, tamped down as life necessarily continues.  Mostly, I just don’t think about it as often because there are too many other things to feel.

The truth is we laugh more than we cry, we joke more than we grieve, and we work hard at living a simple, scaled down life that is, at times, very hard.  

I see other people who must deal with overwhelming sadness, the people who have lost a child, the husband who has lost his wife to Alzheimer’s, the wife who has seen her husband succumb to disease to the point where neither spouse can recognize the other, and the soul mates that are now separated by death.  My Marty is here and present and knows who I am and that is my saving grace.

I get to hear Marty laugh and best of all I get to laugh with her; laughter was always one of the best parts of our marriage.  Marty knows me, she knows her children, she knows her grandchildren.  I don’t have to worry about Marty wandering off, I don’t have to worry about Marty taking the wrong medication, I don’t have to worry about her being afraid of me because I’m a stranger.  Through the muck of this life, Marty and her story of survival brings smiles to so many so how could you always be sad.

Our life is not smooth; it’s not what I would call easy.  It’s hard, in some ways and on some days it feels impossible.  We have missed out on so many opportunities, so many moments, so many events.  Like so many others in the world we have missed part of a life we had hoped on living, but at least we are still living and on the whole living well.  

Our journey through life has been seriously interrupted and we have had to deviate from a planned path or at least the idea of a path.  The interruption has been at times seriously sad, frightening, unbearably difficult and awe inspiring to me and to those who watch and admire Marty.

Occasionally a soul killing sadness grips me and starts to suffocate me.  We will always have the “what might have been” hang over our lives, we will have to carry a certain amount of sadness with us on our journey… it just is. 

 Fortunately, today, the happy times for Marty and the happy times for me outweigh the weight of the strokes, and the journey continues.

If Your Happy and You Know It

Snoopy, the oracle Beagle of Peanuts fame, dancing, feet pulsating, moving rapidly, nose stretched to the heavens shows it.  Brandy Chastain, running, arms held high, hands gripping her jersey she just ripped off, unabashedly celebrating victory in a way where everyone recognizes the sheer joy of the moment.  They exude and manifest happiness for all to see, unbridled, unashamed, total immersion in joy of the moment. 

Spontaneous joy like that has always makes me smile, regardless of the circumstances.  The unprovoked celebration, the instant laugh, the involuntary smile, the automatic lifting of the arms does something to me, it’s contagious, I smile, I borderline laugh every time.  Unadulterated joy is contagious.

Personally, I’ve never been that demonstrative.  I have seen happiness, I have been enriched by pure joy, I’m just not the jump up, rip my shirt off kind of guy, that would scare people.   

Marty was so much better at knowing and experiencing her emotions than I ever was.  She could be the saddest, the angriest or the most joy-filled person I knew.  You never doubted where Marty was, you could see it in her face, in her demeanor, in her ability to celebrate even the most inane moments.

 

She got that from her Dad who could dance a jig even at 70 years to let the joy out of his body.  Marty reveled in happiness, though I never saw her rip her shirt off and run around the house, Marty never ran anywhere.  The strokes have changed Marty’s essence, her God given ability to experience spontaneous joy in life has changed, it has clearly been diminished.  She still feels happy, she still laughs, but I miss the bold loud laughter.  I miss that, I miss smiling at her laughter.

I’ve always been envious of unrestrained joy.  Sometimes I barely remember how it feels, to simply jump for joy, to dance the happy dance in an unrelenting display of happiness.  I remember it as a child, the innocence of a child; happiness not tamped down by reality or smothered by a sense of relief that you have survived something.   I do feel it, I don’t know if it’s the same as Marty or her Father, but I do know and recognize great joy, not just great relief.

The picture at our wedding shows my version of joy.   Marty and I walking down the aisle of the Presbyterian Church in Dalhart Texas, Marty looking beautiful in her wedding gown, me styling in my plush velour tuxedo with the ruffled shirt.  As we are retreating down the aisle after the vows and the very public display of affection a wedding requires I spy my Uncle Dean and I smile, point and continue walking, it’s in the photograph.  For me, it was my sign of total happiness, my way of ripping off my shirt, pointing to the sky and screaming, “We did it.”

When our children were born, I felt amazing; I felt a happiness and contentment that can’t really be captured.  With Matt, in Paris Texas, in 1979, believe it or not, they didn’t let fathers in the delivery room, afraid we might pass out or see something scary we didn’t see when making the baby.  I was relegated to the waiting room and had to sit with Marty’s parents as a miracle occurred a few yards away.  It was an interminable wait and the happiness I felt when the doctor came out to tell me I had a son was palpable; it was incredible that I now had a son that had ten fingers and ten toes and an enormous cabeza.  Marty later said he had eight pounds of head.  

I got to see Erin born three years later in a tiny hospital in a tiny north Texas town.  We knew everyone in the delivery room; they were all friends and neighbors.  No, we didn’t invite the neighborhood for a picnic and birthing, we knew the medical team as friends and neighbors.  It was amazing, it was incredible, it was more than a little frightening.  I didn’t do the happy dance, I didn’t rip off the scrub top and run around the delivery room kissing all of the staff, but my heart did.  

It was a different kind of happiness, not joy, but happiness completed washed by relief when the doctor came out to talk to us after Marty’s cranial surgery to repair the ruptured aneurysm in 2005.  I know it wasn’t joy I felt, how do you feel joy at that moment, at the news your wife has survived brain surgery.   Happiness was a part of it, she lived, she survived when so many didn’t, but I was too overwhelmed to feel joy at her survival, there was no happy dance anywhere.

The closest I have every come to flinging off my Texas, man sized inhibitions and dancing and singing for joy was when I saw Marty, about 10 weeks later, standing atop the three step platform her therapist used for exercise.  

She was standing, which was amazing in and of itself, she was standing after climbing three steps, she was standing after cheating real death, she was standing with minimal support from her PT with her right arm raised, index finger pointing to the sky her left hip canted slightly left in the Saturday Night Fever pose of John Travolta.  It was the most amazing moment, the most joy filled visual I have ever had.     The memory of that moment still makes me smile.

I don’t know if it’s all about the moment or the event or the circumstances.  I think that unrepentant joy, unrestrained happiness just happens.  Some raise their face to the shining sun like Snoopy, some dance naked before God like David, some run with tears of joy, some reach to embrace those around them who have fought so hard.  I love to see joy, I love to feel it, I’ll take it, I’ll live in it any way I can.

Would You Have a Stroke?

I wake up most mornings, check on Marty, eat a bit of breakfast and then hit the treadmill. As much as I walk you would think I would be thin as a rail, it’s so sad, not even close, but I continue to walk. As part of the walking ritual I watch DVDs from series television shows I have missed over the years. It’s a great way to watch some pretty good shows like The Wire, Rome, Deadwood, MI-5, X-Files and on and on and on. I’ve walked and watched a lot over the last four years.

Most recently I’ve been watching a show called Six Feet Under. It’s kind of a downer really, in a funny sort of way, normal people living normal lives in a funeral home. On a recent episode one of the characters was looking at their somewhat screwed up life retrospectively and mused that they wouldn’t really change anything, because if you changed one thing it would change everything and they didn’t want to change everything.

It got my head to buzzing just a little so naturally I had to bring Marty in and get her head buzzing with me. I still love to have philosophical discussions with Marty. The conversations are more stilted and I have to lead and guide them and be more patient than is sometimes comfortable for me, but I like talking with Marty a lot.

Marty really mulls over some of my more esoteric questions and she almost always has a thought or an opinion, you simply have to wait for the words to take the long way around from her brain to her mouth; the shortcut that used to plague her and cause spontaneous verbal assaults is no longer open for her, the strokes closed the road.

I’ve never been one of those to say I would change nothing about the way I have lived my life. I’m sorry to say I have regrets, there are things I would do differently, hopefully better. But, the question is, would you make those changes if you knew it would change other parts of your life you really liked, would you then fix the regret? Would you choose to repair some damage you have done if you knew for a fact you would lose things you have gained?

I asked darling Marty, “You know how much you are loved?”

She says, “A lot.”

“You know,” I continued, “It’s the only up-side to the strokes, you have been able to see how much people care for you, right?”

“Yes.”

This has always been a big deal for Marty. So often in life she struggled with feeling lovable, feeling loved. She always knew how smart she was, she knew she could be funny and even captivating with her stories, she saw the trappings of her success, she just never felt any real assurance of the clearly delineated self-sacrificing love she now sees and recognizes every day.

Now the real question, I asked Marty, “Is it worth it, is knowing you are loved, valued and cherished so much by your family worth what you have given up? Would you change anything?”

I waited, I watched, I fidgeted. I asked her, “Are you thinking, or do you need me to ask the question again?”

“Thinking,” she says.

I really assumed there would be no question or hesitation on her part. I assumed she would say she would rather have never had the strokes. I assumed she would choose a different path for herself and choose her normal cognition and health over the assurance of love.

She never really answered. She kind of mulled, waffled, answered both ways and gave every indication she wasn’t going to give a straight answer. I know she was conflicted, I know how important her mind was to her and how much she truly misses the ability to communicate smartly and quickly. I also know how much it means to her to see our love for her played out in so many different ways.

I recognized it was time to move away from our postulating and on to our music or a game of Strike a Match. Marty instinctively knows the best way to answer a theoretical question, a question that changes nothing, is sometimes you just don’t answer it.

The Different Martys I See

I watched as Nikki slowly pushed Marty up the hall to brush her teeth. The feeling started slowly, but surely and quickly I felt a real sense of sadness fall over me and grip my mind as I watched them walk by while I loaded the dishwasher. It took a tick of the clock for me to recognize the feeling and just a few ticks longer to understand why it hit me so suddenly.

I see Marty differently on different days , at different times and different situations. Sometimes that seeing, that vision is filled with joy; sometimes that vision is filled with a tangible sadness and regret.

There are days when I see the new Marty, the Marty of the strokes, juxtaposed with the old Marty, the psychologist, wise-cracking do anything and everything Marty.

There are times when I see her and immediately remember what was, what she was, what has been lost. There are moments when I see Marty staring blankly as she is ushered from one room to another and I am flooded with how contrary to her nature this simple act of being moved was to her overall personality.

It makes me think how the old Marty would have hated, literally hated, being moved from place to place, unless she was directing the movement. There are times when I see a flash of old Marty, especially when she asks someone to do something like “scratch”, as in her back. But for the most part, the new Marty is very quiet and agreeable to anything without complaint.

Marty was not a quiet person, she was not compliant; she was not what most objective people would call cooperative. She was maybe the world’s lousiest patient. She didn’t listen to nurses, doctors, friends or husband. I take that back, she listened, impatiently, and then did what she damn well wanted to do in the first place. She was not directed, she was not ushered, she marched to her own beat and pace and more often than not, that beat and pace was contrary to conventional thought and wisdom.

I’m not sure why I would ever be sad at this? As a compulsive people pleaser and obsessive rule-follower Marty’s contrarian persona drove me nuts. I was the one pushing for compliance; she was the one saying, “No, not me, you can do it that way if you feel like you have to.” When I am confronted with what used to be, sometimes it hurts my heart; sometimes it fills me with regret, sometimes I can literally feel the sadness grip my body like a tight glove.

Most days I see Marty as she is today. Most times I watch as Marty is pushed down the hall and I see her “new normal”. I see a woman who is alive, I see a woman who has survived the unsurvivable. Most moments I marvel at the woman Marty has become and how she has adapted to her new world and new life, I see a woman who has accepted her new life with grace and courage and as much dignity one can have when you have lost all of your privacy.

Those times when I see Marty not as yesterday’s Marty, but today’s Marty I feel happiness that we are still together, I feel pride in what we have weathered and confidence in our immediate future. When I see Marty for who she is, not for what I remember she was, I am able to find contentment in our new life.

This contentment may seem a bit incongruent, but it is reality and in a funny way it makes sense. When any of us accept our changing lives, our natural evolution, it makes life better.

Marty is not the only one who has changed, Marty is not the only one who has adapted to her new normal, our new life. I’ve changed too, a lot, and frankly, mostly for the good. On the whole I’ve grown, I’ve become more accepting, I live more and enjoy life more in the moment, I’m much more tolerant (okay, NOT).

It just goes to show you that change is all around all of us and that part of our change, part of our path to contentment, is to try and influence those changes and then accept and adapt to them in a way that allows us to continue to grow and mature. In the back of my mind I can still hear Marty saying we have to live, love and embrace change and growth. In her own way she is saying those more powerfully than ever.