What I Didn't Know Then...

In Against the Wind, Bob Seger sings, “I wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.” I’ve always liked that line - sometimes, gaining wisdom from life experiences is painful. There are some lessons I wish I didn’t have to learn - and I would certainly count most of the lessons I learned in 2023 in that category. 

I traveled to Denver last week to participate in the American Sheep Industry Association annual conference, as I’ve done every year since at least 2016. Last year’s meeting was in Fort Worth, and I realized as I was driving to the airport, last year’s conference was the last normal week we had. I left Sami at Lara’s house in Las Cruces to fly to Fort Worth; I returned to Las Cruces to Sami waiting up late for me. We enjoyed a wonderful weekend of hiking, barbecuing, and pecan harvesting. When I look back on who I was the last time I participated in this conference, I was so naive about many things - I didn’t know what glioblastoma was. I didn’t know how to respond to a grand mal seizure. I didn’t know how to help care for someone who couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t know I’d be returning from this year’s conference to a cold and empty house.

At one point during the first day of this year’s conference, I felt sadness building up inside me. I felt the need to be alone - I find that sometimes my grief needs company, while other times I need to sit with it by myself. Some days, I’m extroverted; other days I’m introverted. Losing Sami doesn’t seem to have changed that - and the grieving process for me seems to reflect this oscillation. In some ways, I think, grieving has intensified these extremes for me.

I started the second day of the conference by having breakfast with my friend Cat Urbigkit from Wyoming. We always have great conversations - usually about sheep and livestock guardian dogs. But Cat has also had close experience with glioblastoma (we had talked while Sami was sick, which I found immensely helpful). Last week, she reminded me that I have a choice about what parts of my life with Sami I choose to relive. In the five months since Sami passed, I have found that I mostly relive the hard moments of her disease. Cat reminded me that I would need to work to relive the happy moments of the life I shared with Sami (and there were many). And so here’s one….

Sami loved collecting coffee mugs (you might say she horded them - much like I horde pocket knives and hats). At some point last spring, the girls helped me clean out the coffee mug cabinet - even with four or five of us in the house, we figured we didn’t need two shelves full of coffee cup options. Some of these mugs went to Goodwill; others ended up in Emma’s apartment. This morning, as I took down a mug to make a cup of coffee at Emma’s place in Idaho, I saw Sami’s mugs. I would have been sad to see these three months ago. This morning, while I did feel a pang of melancholy, the mugs brought back happy memories of Sami drinking Maxwell House Cafe Francais instant coffee (what our family always referred to as “Mom Coffee”). I laughed to myself about her habit of leaving a half-full mug in the microwave - “I might want some later,” she’d say.

If I concentrate, I find that I can recall brief moments of light and laughter we experienced even after we learned of Sami’s diagnosis. Reliving the uncertainty of Sami’s early symptoms, the anxiety of waiting for a diagnosis after her first brain surgery, the cycles of hope and despair we experienced during her radiation and chemotherapy treatments, and the ultimate sadness of the progression of her brain cancer during the summer months, come easy. Remembering how happy she was when we remodeled the porch and planted flowers is more difficult. Remembering the weeks when I slept in the living room so that she could sleep better in bed - when she awakened me each morning by squeezing my big toe on her way to make her morning “Mom Coffee” is challenging - but far more rewarding.

Perhaps this is the difference between moving forward and moving on. As I’ve written previously, moving on simply doesn’t describe the process of grieving for me. I don’t want to move on - Sami and I spent 35 years together, 33 of them as husband and wife - this will always be part of who I am. I do want to move forward - I want to cherish the good times we spent together, and learn from the hard times (and make no mistake, there were hard times that had nothing to do with Sami’s glioblastoma - any couple who stays together for that long will have hard times!). Celebrating Sami’s life before Christmas was an important part of this process for me (which I am realizing as time goes on). Seeing a hall full of people who shared happy memories of Sami - who have supported our family throughout this process - helped me fully appreciate the impact Sami had on our community. Hearing others share happy memories of Sami helped remind me to relive ALL of our life together, not just the last 12 months. That said, I would still rather be ignorant of glioblastoma. I still wish that I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.