St. Francis of Assissi God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change
Recently I was given the chance to learn a sad yet important lesson when my ex-husband called to tell me that his doctors believe he is dying of pancreatic cancer. We talked a while about that and then he asked me not to say anything to the girls until he had a 100% diagnosis.
On the day of his doctor visit, I called to ask him if he wanted me to accompany him to his appointment as I feared it might be overwhelming to be alone if hearing such news.
He said (quoting from memory), "Oh I've decided not to go to the doctors. I'm just not going to do anything and I don't want to talk about it anymore and I don't want the girls to know how sick I am. Let's just not tell them and that'll be that."
Well.....I hung up the phone and sat there staring at the handset, blinking in disbelief and saying too myself, "What the.........."
I was now in the position of being asked to keep from my daughters the gravity of my ex-husband's health and to go along and "pretend" to my daughters that everything is fine and dandy. In effect, to lie to them.
Meanwhile, ex is frail, in constant pain, sick to his stomach all the time, unable to do much more than lie around and he gets winded when he speaks. He is gaunt and walks feebly. Yet he is asking me to look the other way so that our daughters don't think there's anything wrong.
It took me a week-and-a-half of talking to trusted friends and my current hubby and some family to reach the point where something dawned on me.
I was back to playing into one of alcoholism's very most favorite games: "The ssshhhh....let's all pretend that this great big huge frigging giant elephant isn't in the room. Lah dee dah".
Oh yeah. How well I remember it. Telling myself that ex-hubby didn't have a problem and that I didn't either. Nope. No siree!! We were one big happy family!!! Except for the part where booze was pounding our souls into the dirt.
Yeah....................Right.
It'd been a while since I'd been involved in that insanity and yet here I was feeling as if I'm betraying ex by saying anything to my girls, yet feeling as if I'm betraying my girls by keeping things from them.
I believe they call that being the ball in a game of tennis.
Well....I refused to keep up with the insane volley. So I told my girls about ex's issue. My eldest I told point blank. She hinted to ex that she'd be open to talking to him, then waited for ex to call her but he never did and she is resigning herself to him dying with things unspoken between them (which maybe is part of his reasoning to begin with). She is learning to accept that she will be robbed of the chance to say goodbye because he simply will not talk about it or come clean.
With my youngest, I said that her dad has been ill for some time and I don't know that he's going to get better. She said she'd known that anyway and then she talked about other things. I guess that's a 13 year old's way of acknowleding their fear but keeping it at bay till they're ready to face it.
So in her way she is accepting his inability to open up too.
As for me, I have had to accept that my ex-husband may very well die without ever having reached out to those closest to him; without every having given himself the opportunity to talk to his daughters of his life, his philosphy, his regrets, his memories.
That is a sad, sad thing. And there is nothing I can do about it but pray for him and let it go.
I am giving it to God to guide me and my loved ones in this difficult time.
Thanks for listening.