I think I need to clear something up here, more in my own head than anywhere else.

The further time takes me away from this, the more perspective I get on death and grief and this whole universe changing event in general. It’s logically- the bigger the distance, the more of the picture you see.

And this is all becoming bizarrely mundane for me- I have to remind myself that dealing with a suicide, a visible one, isn’t really a ‘normal’ activity. I remember the distress in the health workers voice, on the phone to me the weekend directly After this happened- “There is no literature on this, Lori… I can’t find a documented, psychologically studied case.”

An oddity. So horribly, horrifically unique.

Anyway. Enough of that. That’s what we’re here to talk about today.

There’s something that’s been slowly solidifying itself in my the subconscious part of my mind, just lately, the part that deals with that big picture, and brings it into focus as it drifts away. There’s a phenomenon that has grated on me since Tony’s death. I don’t know if it’s specific to this situation or death in general.

But there was so much discussion, so much emphasis placed, on how Tony would feel, what Tony would think of this or that.

When someone’s dead, they’re…well…dead. Isn’t that the essence of it, the bottom line? They don’t think or feel anything.

I believe in an AfterLife, I think. I have to, after this, because some nights that’s the only thing that lulls me to sleep- the thought that there is an afterlife, and eventually I’ll get there, and Tony and I will catch up over tea and toast, and all this pain will seem just like the blink of an eye, a stitch in time. But if there is an AfterLife, I’d hate to think of it as the kind of place where you worry and stress about the insignificant things that happen in the life that going on without you, below. I doubt you’d stress and stew over stupid things, little arguments and trite, petty concerns.

Wouldn’t you be returned to your happiest..? That’s what I’d like to think. You’d be returned to the time of your life when you were happiest, felt complete, when life’s problems felt passable and mundane, and the good times where so sweet the aftertaste of them ran from one to the next.

So, I like to think my husband is in a place where he loves us, where all the material concerns of life are gone- where he doesn’t stress about all this bitching going on.

And if he is that place, then all he’d want to do is protect me.. all he’d want to do is make all the hurt better.
And that’s where I am, right now. Damn the guilt over how Tony would feel, about this, or that. Tony’s not here. And I have to think, I have to believe, he’d be OK with me doing whatever it is I need to get through, as long as both myself and our babies are happy and safe.

The AfterLife- it can’t be a place where you’re bothered by little stuff. If it was, why would anyone bother going there at all…?

I had pneumonia a few weeks back. It happened so quickly. One day I had a fever. The next I had what felt like a cold– runny nose, sore ears, a bit of a cough.

I woke up on the third morning with my chest feeling tight and my skin burning up in an attempt to fight off this bug. Breathing in, I could hear tiny popping, crackling sounds in the bottom of my left lung. I could feel it too– a low, weighted pain that I was sure would be exceedingly, achingly heavy by sunset that day.

So I went the doctor. I drove the fifteen kilometers to the surgery in my car, of course. I waited for ten minutes, saw a well educated general practitioner for another ten minutes, signed a form so the cost of the treatment would be covered by the government system that I whinge about a lot. I waited ten more minutes to have my script filled– three huge tablets that cost me $5.60, and worked within 24 hours. That afternoon I traveled another fifteen kilometers– again, in my car, air conditioned comfort that I completely take for granted– and had a chest x-ray performed, again with no cash exchanged, and the results had been emailed to the GP who originally saw me within the next few hours.

Three days later and, apart from a slight lingering cough, you wouldn’t be able to tell I was sick at all.

Now watch this.

I sat, flabbergasted, at the Vicks Breathe For Life event a few weeks back, feeling every privilege I have as a white, middle class, first world, educated and empowered women who has access to free healthcare, ample food clean water come back and smack me in the face. I felt naive and arrogant and slightly disgusted with myself.

Children die from this. Millions of them. Millions. Mothers have to hold their babies and watch the skin around their ribs suck in as they desperately try to force oxygen into lungs filled more with liquid than air. Parents have to hold their babies as they take their last breaths, ever, watching the pallid pain in their faces as the simple act of breathing becomes, psychically, just too much to do.

There was a baby who had a fever for five months. A fever for five months.

My kids have a fever, I buy a bottle of Nurofen over the counter for twelve bucks and we’re done.

I contracted an illness that was once called the ‘henchman of death’ and wasn’t even worried. My only reaction was a slightly baffled “Do people even still get pneumonia?”

Ummm, yes, Lori, they really do. And there are millions of mothers weeping for babies that couldn’t keep enough oxygen in their body to live. Because the nearest medical treatment is a fifteen kilometer walk away that their child may not survive. And when they get there, they might not have the money to pay for treatment anyway. (In case you’re wondering, treating a child for pneumonia in the Third World adds up to about seventeen bucks. Yes, that’s right. Seventeen freaking dollars.). And the medical staff they end up seeing may not have a clue what they’re doing, may have no idea how to treat something so very simple as pneumonia.

And I got a script for mass produced drugs, had it paid for as a number in the system, and didn’t even fucking think about it again.

Dead husband? Big fucking deal. There are plenty of women in Bangladesh with dead husbands, too. And they still have to walk fifteen kilometers for inadequate medical care.

My own sense of privilege and entitlement smacks me in the face sometimes. And it makes me feel like every bit the stupid, arrogant white woman I just don’t want to be… but I’m born into it.

If I happen to have made you feel like an over privileged western arse-hat too… apologies. But ain’t life a bitch. There are things that can be done. The easiest amongst them is simply Liking the Vicks FaceBook page. For every person who does, Vicks will donate a dollar to help Save The Children increase awareness and prevention of pneumonia in children under five in Bangladesh, as well as help provide better diagnosis and treatment of the condition. Obviously, I haven’t been paid for this post- while I get a lot of charity requests for blog space, I can’t take them all on… it’s just not possible. This one effected me more than most, for the simple reasons I stated above…. how I could have this and barely even think about it, when there are people literally dieing from it right this second?!

Simple. Really simple. If you don’t at least attempt to do this, right now, I doubt very much if I would sleep with you. If you’re as unscrupulous as I am, your FaceBook Likes may include things such as ‘God, give us Kurt Cobain and we will give you Justin Beiber’, so hitting Like for Vicks– on your computer, in your lounge room, with your TV going, all warm and comfortable and full of food, with ample access to cheap antibiotics whenever you need them– isn’t that much to ask.

* Don’t exhale just yet…. I wrote this post before Aussie blogger Eden announced she was going to Africa with WorldVision. Reading her blog this last week… mind=blown. I’ll natter more about her tomorrow. It must have just been the week for the Universe to kick me up the arse (again) and remind me of what I have, that I don’t even see- more than many people will have in a lifetime.

If nothing else, we loved each other like fire.

My husband was my everything. And he loved me as simply as anyone ever could– with every breath he took, with everything he had.

We were so proud of each other. We loved to show each other off– him with his pretty, petite, clever, clean wife; me with my big, broad confident Aussie guy.

And we loved what we had… the perfect suburban family. And that’s light and shadow, a double edged blade– I’m so grateful we had what we did. I know it made him happy. I know we made him feel complete, I know I made him feel loved.

But (isn’t there always a ‘but…?’)… I wish I’d known the pressure it caused him, to maintain it: how important the appearance and upkeep where… I would have told him it didn’t matter, it’d never matter– give me a shack and a fire to cook on; if I had him and my children I could find happy, somewhere amongst that..

We fell in love the moment our eyes met, and if that sounds corny, I don’t care– it’s true. It was a given, decided after our first date by both of us, but not spoken of until weeks later, that this was it– the final relationship either of us would ever have. We’d each found the missing pieces of our puzzle. (”Love at first sight, was it?” asks a friendly secretary as she takes our details, the skin of my stomach stretched tight over the girth of our first unborn child; and I hesitate in my reply– of course it was, but I’d never verbalized that to the man who would become my husband. “Yeah, sure was,” he replies, big grin, all nonchalant as if that was already public knowledge and I couldn’t stop a shocked, happy smile teasing at the corners of my mouth, so infinitely proud that he had chosen me to love, chosen me to be have his child.)

My whole life I’ve had doubts about the concept of love– the main doubt being that it is no more than a concept, a justification for a choice driven purely by reproductive biology. I think that’s where the clandestine love for gothic romances eventuates from– Tess of the Dubervilles, Romeo and Juliet– they all loved with an intensity that defied logic, an intensity that surpassed any kind of natural instinct. A love that burned so furiously it overrode their natural biological sense of self preservation.

If I taken nothing else from this, I have been given the knowledge of something amazing. My whole life I’ve wanted to believe that love– romantic love, above and beyond the biological kind– is the equivalent to a literal force of nature. That it is real enough to be tangible, to be measured; to be counted and stood against not only time itself, but the organic constraints of the human body.

I wanted to know that love could exist beyond a heartbeat, beyond a last breath, beyond a simple firing of neurons in a certain pattern to produce enough a of a certain hormone to make you believe you had fallen in love with someone who was simply primally attractive.

If it comes to some kind of sad existence– I live a long, long life, content but alone, never again having that connection with another soul, another spirit…. then at least I have been shown, been proven, time and time again, that love– romantic, blissful love; where it’s kissing and laughter and the air itself is drinkable and sustenance enough to live, and it all tastes of peaches– is indeed a tangible, weighted quality; far more than a fairy tale or a construct of Western society. I’ve had my faith laid bare, and had it shown to be true. I’ve genuflected in agony and been blessed with some kind of balming reprieve.

A ring in a toaster. A rose on an anniversary. A woman who says she has a connection, who spoke in my husbands tone of voice and used phrases as he would, despite never having met him, when he’d been dead, psychically existing only as carbon matter in brine, for ten months already.

The irony of this doesn’t escape me, nor does the slightly skewed irrationality… but then, nothing about love is ever rational. But the touchstone I reach for, time and again, is the greatest compliment I’ve ever been given; and it stung like flesh eaten to the nerve as it was said to me. It’s my Holy Grail, my essence of truth, not proof of life but proof of the existence of love as a driving, moving force, a connection of cells and souls and a place where minds can meld, just slightly, so they are capable of thinking the same thoughts and their hearts can beat in the same rhythm… so they can lay together perfectly intertwined, breathing in an offbeat lullaby and being filled with each others scent.

And, of course, stupidly, serendipitously; that proof, that touchstone is something biological. An involuntary reflex of the human body that served to prove to me that love is actually much more than just that.

“We don’t know what will happen.” The ICU doctor is compassion and calm personified. She has done this a thousand times before, probably will a thousand times again. But she is a healer, her soul so deep and empathetic I wonder if she ever really leaves this ward, or simply psychically goes home for a while. “He’s not responding what we’d call ‘normally’ to the treatments we’re giving him.” We know this already, his mum and sister and I, his cheer squad assembled. “And,” the doctors clear grey eyes meet mine and I’m struck by her dignity, even in this uncomfortable green room where nightmares are dissected and people’s whole lives dissolved into portions and blood types and salts and MRI’s; “his blood pressure drops perceptibly by twenty to thirty points every time you walk in the room.”

My husband’s blood pressure skyrocketed continually throughout those one hundred hours in purgatory. The medications they gave him- heavy doses as he was already comatose and side effects would be minimal- did little to bring it down.

The very presence of his wife in the same room as him… that was enough.

That’s my proof, my faith gratified and vindicated. I lost it, dropped and fumbled for it in the darkness of grief and trauma and lonely nights that stretched on for hours… but I present it to myself time and again as undeniable evidence that, despite the anger and hurt and burning, horrible heat of those last few minutes of his conscious life… he loved me.With everything he had.

Like fire.

Congratulations, you were number….

…and are the proud winner of the crappest, teeth-rottinginest giveaway ever!! I’ll drop you an email- reply back within the 72 hours, mmmkay? We don’t want any computer screens turning into pumpkins.

Thank you very much every one who entered- 37 entires! You people are insane. Given how much love y’all gave this one, look out for another crap giveaway, coming soon (I know, I know, just call me the patron saint of generosity).