What love is

Thoughts on anniversaries, death, and birth

Dear humans,

Last week marked the 22 year anniversary of my spinal fusion surgery; yesterday marked one year of being married to my love, Alex; this Sunday marks 39 weeks of pregnancy; and today, my mother arrives on a one-way ticket to help us in our first few weeks and months of parenthood. With all these anniversaries, births, and beginnings, I am thinking about what it means to love. I am thinking about how I have learned the most about love when I’ve had to, when everything else has been stripped away. I am thinking about how love is dynamic and ever-evolving, how it is both a choice and not a choice at all. I am thinking about how our child will learn what love is, and how they, too, will probably learn the most about it when they have to. I am thinking about how much beauty, how much heartache, how much joy, how much growth awaits us in this next year of life…

I started writing the below piece last week, not knowing if I’d share it. It’s about surgery and death and loss and even constipation, but mostly, it’s about learning to love. I decided to share it after all, even though it feels incomplete; I decided to share it because I think that, too, is part of loving: learning to share what’s incomplete, because nothing will ever be complete – a thought that is as comforting as it is terrifying. I hope you enjoy it, and even more so, I hope that it reminds you to hold the ones you love even closer.

From my heart to yours,
Abby

One of my favorite pictures of my favorite silly goose and me. Cheers to many more years of loving and growing and laughing together! <3

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What Love Is

I always forget whether it was October 21 or 23, but I remember it was a Wednesday morning.

The night before they fused my spine, I had to take a shower with a special soap to make sure my skin was clean. I thought this was funny, because how would the kind of soap make a difference, if I was using it the night before? And wouldn’t they clean my skin again before they sliced my back open, more thoroughly than I could at home with a bottle of soap and a loofah? But I was a rule-follower, so I obliged, even though the soap made my skin ashy and smelled like an old medicine cabinet.

The surgery was at 9am, but we had to get there at 6. It was dark when we left the hospital-sponsored hotel room, my mom, sister, brother-in-law and I. Besides the unspoken fears we all had – Are we making the right choice? Did we research our options fully enough? What if the surgeon slips and instead of waking up with a stiff spine, I wake up paralyzed? – it almost felt like we were going to a cross country race, which is where I would have been, had I not been getting surgery. The cool autumn air, the anticipation, the knowledge that my body was about to go through something painful and vaguely heroic, the knowledge that all I could do was my best, to stay in the present, to not panic, and to trust that I would be okay when it was all over – or if I wasn’t okay, at least my family would still be there.

I don’t remember the clothes I wore to the hospital, but I remember the hospital gown and slipper socks they gave me, both gray-blue and scratchy. After I handed my mom my street clothes, I sat in the wheelchair they’d brought for me. I remember feeling ridiculous as they wheeled me, still perfectly capable of walking, to the hall just outside the operating room. It was in this unceremonious place, the middle of a stark hospital hallway, that the anesthesiologist told me she would place the needle. I felt my heart flutter, and a flash of panic. 

“Okay,” I said, and then added, somewhat anxiously, “Do a good job!” 

I didn’t just mean her as she placed the needle, or the nurses that were wheeling me in, but everyone: the surgeon, the team of doctors, the aftercare team… This was when it hit me that I was no longer in control of what happened to my body – at least, for the next 9 to 24 hours, or maybe ever.

The anesthesiologist and nurses chuckled kindly when I said it, assured me they would do their best, and then I felt the needle go in. 

“Now I want you to start counting backward from 100 as it kicks in,” the anesthesiologist said.

I got to 97 before everything went black.

The room I woke up in had an orange light and a slightly frenetic energy. I remember seeing someone I didn’t know relieved to see me wake up, even though it was only for a few seconds. I, too, was relieved to find that I was awake, and that I was not paralyzed.

“The surgery went very well,” the voice said.

“Great,” I said, or maybe just thought, and immediately felt back asleep.

The next time I woke up, the room was blue and calm. I think my mother was sitting in the chair next to me, the chair by the window, but it could have been my sister, or my brother in law, or my grandmother, my mother’s mother. I remember feeling so thankful that they were there, so loved by their presence, even though I could barely talk or move. 

This is what love is, I thought. A willingness to sit with someone, even when that someone is really boring company.

For the first five days, I didn’t poop, which, aside from death or paralysis, was my biggest fear. “Survived surgery, bravely; died full of shit” is what my tombstone might have read, had the backup lasted much longer.

When I finally did poop, my brother-in-law had to wipe my ass because I could not reach, my freshly-fused spine, too rigid.

This is what love is, I thought again. A willingness to wipe someone’s ass when they cannot do it themselves.

Six months earlier, my father had been the one who was barely alive. Unlike my surgery, his was truly a matter of life or death as a brain tumor aggressively ravaged his brain.

We sat with him in the weeks that his body withered, sang to him, rubbed his feet, talked with him, even when he couldn’t reply. No one needed to wipe his ass because he couldn’t get up to use the bathroom, but we all would have, because we loved him that much.

Eight years before that, it was my grandmother, my father’s mother, who was dying. Her brain, too, was disintegrating, as plaque worked its way through the cracks and folds. While my father’s withering only lasted a month, his mother’s lasted five years. I was eight, and ill-equipped to sit patiently with a dying person, but my father was with her every day. 

In the two years she lived with us, he sat with her, walked her, wheeled her, wiped her ass, even pressed on her belly to help her pee and poop, toward the end.

That was love, I knew, even though I couldn’t fully appreciate it then. A willingness to become a parent to your parent.

Right now, I am 38 weeks pregnant. Technically, I am already a parent. And even though I have not met the being, living inside me, I already love them. 

I love them even though they have, for our entire relationship, been unconscious. I love them even though I have no idea what their personality is like, or what sort of living hell they might put me through. I love them because they are part of me, and because they are living proof of my capacity to love, to care, to tend. I love them because they remind me of all the people who have loved me, who have nourished me, who have helped me grow. I love them because I want to, and because I have to. I love them because to not love them would make our lives so much worse.

I have not always been good at loving. Sometimes, I’m still not very good at it. But I have learned what love is through witnessing. 

I have learned to love others through receiving love. I have learned to love myself through loving others. I have learned what love is by surviving pain and loss and death. I have learned that love is not something that happens, or something to do, but something to allow and to feel. I am still learning what love is, and how to make more space for it, because I believe it will expand endlessly, if I let it.

I do not want to imagine my child having the surgery I had, or the brain tumor my father had, or the Alzheimer’ my grandmother had. Sometimes, though, I make myself imagine it. Sometimes, I remind myself that I will not have control over what happens to them, nor will they, not really. From the second they leave my womb to the day they die, they will be their own entity, still a part of me, but not quite so literally as they are now. They will learn how to do things on their own, and I will have to learn how to let them. Over time, they will learn how capable they are, how much agency they have over their own bodies, how strong and resilient they can be. They will also inevitably learn, however, that no matter how much agency they have, no matter how strong and resilient they are, there will be things they cannot control, even things about their own body. They will learn, as I have learned, that controlling is the opposite of loving.