Quotes from the War Zone
On our flight to Boston in May 2018, Chad and I watched the movie Darkest Hour, about Winston Churchill’s impossible choice to either capitulate to Hitler or keep fighting.
The parallel to our experience could not have been more patent.
That movie evoked in me the sense that we, too, were living through a war, one inside our heads. Looking around us, the world seemed to be turning as normal. The sun was shining. Our kids were going to school every day. Nothing was dropping from the sky. People were going places and shopping for shoes (more on that in a bit). But each day we awoke to our own private combat zone.
As portrayed in the movie, Churchill’s actions saved the world from evil. Watching that movie only inspired us to continue to save Chad from his evil.
Churchill became my hero throughout Chad’s illness. Although the International Churchill Society says that this quote is falsely attributed to him, I still drew strength from it:
What choice did we have, other than to keep on keeping on?
I started collecting other quotes, anything I came across in my readings that struck me as relevant or inspirational. I printed them out and taped them to my bathroom mirror, internalizing them as I brushed my teeth:
Even if that for which we hope never comes to pass, I believe the experience of existing within a place of hope is an essentially, elementally richer and more valuable life experience than one in which all hope is entirely depleted.
—From This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More by Augusten Burroughs
During Chad’s illness, the idea occurred to me that if this disease broke me too, it would kill two people. No matter what happened to Chad, I was still alive. I needed to keep living, for myself and my children.
Let me not die while I’m still alive.
Nor could I feel sorry for myself. Even if others around me appeared blissfully free of the burdens Chad and I carried, I wondered how many other human beings on this planet were also living in their own private war zones, unbeknownst to me or anyone else.
Self-pity is our worst enemy.
And, related:
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
The wisdom of those who had suffered unspeakably spoke to me:
Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.
Chad would agree 100% with this next one! It echoed his constant encouragement to me to do yoga, especially when I’d claim I had no time for it:
Because nobody ever said, “I wish I’d skipped yoga.”
—Facebook meme
I started reading books on widowhood that introduced the new-to-me concept of anticipatory grief. This quote summed up the way I felt as a prisoner of Chad’s illness:
I’ve often thought that grief can just sneak up and attack you, but anticipating grief is more like a long, drawn-out hostage situation.
—From Confessions of a Mediocre Widow: Or, How I Lost My Husband and My Sanity by Catherine Tidd
And this last one made me laugh. A widow describes the everyday humdrum of normalcy outside hospital walls, the “delicious folly” of shoe shopping:
Was I interested in shoes? I was so interested in shoes that once when Bernie was in the hospital for a one-hour procedure, I busted out of the waiting room, ran outside, jumped into a cab, hightailed it to Barneys, whipped through the shoe department to ogle pumps and platforms and flats, and then repeated the whole escapade in reverse, no one the wiser, all before Bernie’s procedure ended, and all simply to remind myself that somewhere there existed a parallel universe where people concerned themselves with the delicious folly of placing something exquisite on their feet. It was a trip to the far side of Pluto and back, all in the course of an hour.
—From Saturday Night Widows: The Adventures of Six Friends Remaking Their Lives by Becky Aikman
The power of all these quotes shaped my worldview at the time, which is now evident to me as I reread my Caringbridge entry from that Boston trip:
I believe one’s true personality bubbles to the surface more in times of difficulty than in times of ease. Each day I get to witness Chad’s indomitable spirit and optimism tempered with a reasonable dose of realism, and that’s what keeps me going. As we work through all these challenges together, I have also come to realize that underneath my seemingly sweet and easygoing exterior, I am a warrior. The empowerment I’ve discovered in myself enables me to support our children with whatever they need, which right now is the freedom to just be kids. They go to camps, they do craft projects, we play games together, we laugh and hug and snuggle, we go on adventures, and we are keeping things as normal as possible, even while a war zone rages inside Chad's and my heads.
