Gratitude.

Funerals and hospitals are raining from the sky. The news we’re getting from friends is choked with death, and mysterious medical ailments, and we’re exhausted from oscillating between hope and bracing ourselves for another blow.
And at times like this, I am grateful for my wife, and the safe communication patterns we have built.
The other day she was yelling at me because I’d lost her phone chargers yet again, in a place where I clearly hadn’t, since I’d been lying sick on the bed and hadn’t moved. She was angry, and furious, and I just waited it out.
A few minutes later, she apologized.
Later, when Gini was driving, she cut off some guy in traffic and I went off on her for her terrible fucking driving, and though she looked stricken she said nothing. A few minutes later, I apologized.
Because we’re smart enough to know that this isn’t what we’re angry about. We’re furious about small sick girls, dead grandmothers, dead cousins, babies in ICUs. We’re angry because we still have to function through all of this, that “lying down and crying” would be an unthinkable luxury. We have friends to support, bills to pay, places to be.
The phone chargers and traffic patterns are just a small cut through which all this pent-up pressure erupts.
And we’re smart. We trust. A fight would be so satisfying in all the wrong ways, now, because it’d be something we could affect; we can’t strangle tumors, we can’t punch God in the throat, but we could scream and yell a lot at someone who was actually mean to us and get a lot of satisfaction out of it.
But in the end, we’d feel worse. An argument like that would shred us. And so when Gini snaps at me or I at her, we suppress that snarling instinct and mutter, “It’s not about the dishes. It’s about all of these other things.”
We do that because we trust. We trust that we would never hurt each other on purpose. We trust that every hurt inflicted is either accidental, or because there was no other choice in it. We trust that we want nothing but the best for each other, and though we fail constantly, regrettably, lamentably, the intentions we build this fragile psychology on are made of glittering diamond.
We love. We heal. And we hope. And, until there is safe space again, we forgive.
That’s all we can do.