The Likelihood of Dawn: An Intimate Journey Within and Beyond Grief

By Raechel Bratnick

A spiritual healer confronts the rapid decline of her husband from cancer and the long aftermath of his death, entering into a fresh phase of her own life through deep awareness and a clear-eyed willingness to face the many stages of grief.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781946989390

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AN INTIMATE JOURNEY THROUGH ILLNESS

Chaos may not be an easy way

to run a universe or a life,

but no one has found a better way

than making complexity

its own master.

Wisdom in the face of chaos

is a shifting place where

action endlessly seeds response

seeds action

seeds response.

So choose a cause, any cause,

and learn from its effects.

—Michael Bratnick

RANDOM PATTERNS

I’M STANDING AT THE METAL FILING CABINET in Michael’s office, preparing to move my household accounting files into the third drawer, where his client files sat yesterday. Overnight he has gone from a super-industrious business professional to a man staring directly at his death.

My eye catches a quotation by Henry Miller: Chaos is the score upon which reality is written. It is surrounded with pictures of fractals and other beloved quotations about chaos theory. I have looked at these many times but always thought of them as evidence of Michael’s delight in contemplating chaos theory. I never grasped that chaos was a living reality of our lives. Now it informs everything about our life together.

According to chaos theory, patterning is built into everything in nature; even randomness is patterned. To our eyes, disorder is without pattern, when actually it hides order and pattern. Chaotic theorists call this apparent disorder. Given enough distance, you can see the pattern more clearly and truly know that everything is connected to everything.

The patterns of wholeness in our relationship were formed from the very beginning but were not visible to us as we were creating them. A clear boundary is necessary.

Death is an inevitable boundary once you can see beyond your loss. The pattern of who we were together continues to surprise me. There are many ways to explain his illness and death, many layers to the truth of who we were together and who we were separately. His death was the greatest rupture of my adult life, yet out of it arose harmony and wholeness as I discovered my resiliency.

This seemingly random, chaotic illness changed me. It stripped me of false beliefs. It burned away my excesses. It forced me to descend into the underworld, to the core of existence, and brought me into connection with a greater sense of reality than I had previously known.

Martin Buber describes the chaotic nature of life in this way: Every journey has a secret destination of which the traveler is unaware. We are all travelers in this chaotic world, yet we usually only see a particular destination ahead of us. We aren’t looking for the secret one. We don’t see the underlying pattern of our lives until the pattern is complete, and even then most of us don’t know how to find the secret. How death will interrupt a marriage is a secret until it appears. Then suddenly it changes everything, and in the absence of your partner the secret destination begins to reveal itself.

LAST CANOE RIDE

EXACTLY TWO MONTHS before Michael’s diagnosis, we spent two weeks on Vinalhaven Island, off the coast of Maine. On our last day, the weather is perfect for a canoe ride into the bird sanctuary—the tide at its peak, just enough time to slip over the waterfall before the tide turns, before the moon pulls the tide towards the other side of the ocean. Michael hefts the canoe off the dock and into the water of the bay. I climb in, and we begin to paddle and synchronize our movements. Michael directs the canoe; I follow his lead. Within a short time we reach the small falls that separate the sanctuary from the public finger of the bay, where homes are built along the shore. Here, birds can nest in safety and privacy. Michael estimates that we have a half hour before the water recedes and the rocks of the waterfall are no longer covered.

We slip easily over the waterfall and enter a silent world of stillness and vibrancy, a place of wonder. He directs me to stop paddling. Here we have no currents to fight. We do not talk. We glide, we pause, we linger until a hawk screeches. Just above us a female hawk sits on a nest of eggs as her mate guards their safety. We paddle further away, not realizing we are approaching another nest. This time a male hawk dives at us in a fury to drive us away. We understand his concern, so we paddle to the other side of the cove, where we can linger in the stillness, gazing at the mirrored trees. This precious stillness, while only a small number of clock minutes, is an eternity before the tide turns in our lives. All too soon, it is time to leave while we can still make it through the waterfall.

We glide over it, watching the tide now moving in two directions at once, flowing in and out at the same time, switching directions.

It is our last time alone when the world is still peaceful. I know the moments are special, but I don’t know it is to be our last bliss together. I never suspect, at this moment of great stillness, that our lives are in the process of moving in two directions at the same time, towards life and death, and that one of us will be switching directions. This stillness lingers with me. The sacred half hour will never come again. Life will soon tip us over, throwing us into chaotic, turbulent water.

SWITCHING DIRECTIONS

WE ARE COMPLETELY UNPREPARED for Michael’s illness. We’ve been living in the now while planning for our retirement years. This vacation, Michael spends his time doing what he always does, working on one or two client projects and doing his personal spiritual exploration. He is also compiling a book of his own poetry. I am deeply involved in meditating with Hebrew letters and studying an ancient Kabbalistic text. Our daughter Stephanie, and her husband Erick, are with us. He is completing his novel; she basks in the sun and reads Ingmar Bergman scripts. Days are for our personal time; evenings are spent together, eating, drinking, and playing Scrabble. For two weeks we live with the tides, driven by the moon.

I sit in a century-old house

ten feet above high tide

breathing with the moon,

six hours in, six hours out.

I rise and fall, rise and fall,

flooded, then laid bare,

opening to feed,

then closing like the barnacles

And all the while,

the ducks swim in deeper water,

never hurried, diving now and then

for morsels on the bottom

—from "Crockett’s Cove, Vinalhaven,

Maine, 2007," Michael Bratnick

Michael loves this little house on the bay. He decides to spend three full weeks there the next summer, an unheard-of amount of vacation time for him, so as soon as we arrive home, I book the house for the summer of 2008.

We go home to an overly full schedule of commitments. In addition to Michael’s active public relations business and my healing practice, we are both teachers in a healing school. It is deeply pleasurable to know that we have a place we treasure waiting for us the following summer.

The way in which this illness reveals itself masks the immensity of it. So does Michael’s propensity to keeping information to himself. At first he shows signs of extra fatigue, which I attribute to the intensity of his work, his age, and the fact that, a month after our vacation, Stephanie ended her marriage. This was shocking and felt sudden. Michael experienced flu-like symptoms.

These continue through an intense four days of teaching in the healing school, where he drags himself out of bed for classes and then crashes, unable to eat much, tossing and turning through the night. He begins itching, which interrupts his sleep. A man with great stamina and a belief that he can work through anything, he tries to carry on with life as if he were not ill. He refuses to leave class to rest.

Returning home after teaching, he is exhausted but goes right back to tending to his business clients. He volunteers to help Stephanie move a new sofa and bed into her New York City apartment. He is too weary to drive, so I am enlisted even though I, too, am exhausted from trying to sleep near him as he thrashes about and itches and is horribly miserable. The morning after this moving jaunt, it is apparent even to him that he really isn’t well. His skin is now yellow and jaundiced.

Twelve days after the first flu-like symptoms, Michael finally gets an appointment with his internist. Michael is a scientist: He is smart. Without saying a word, he has researched his symptoms on the internet. He communicates his concern by asking me to go with him to the internist. This is highly unusual behavior. There, he reveals all his symptoms. It turns out that he has other symptoms that he has not mentioned to me: His urine has darkened, the color of his stool has turned chalky white, and he’s lost weight. He opens his notebook to share the notes he has made on jaundice and its causes.

But after a short exam, the doctor says, I don’t need your notes. This is clearly obstructive jaundice. He is ninety-nine percent certain the cause is cholangiocarcinoma, a rare form of cancerous tumor in the bile duct, which drains the bile from the liver into the intestines. He says that, if this were a gall stone, Michael would have pain, fever, and chills. Michael has none of these symptoms, so the doctor immediately sends him for blood work and a CAT scan.

Early the next morning, the doctor calls; Michael yells frantically for me to come into his office. He puts the doctor on speaker phone, and together we hear the dreaded diagnosis: cancer, in a state that needs immediate treatment.

Suddenly, unexpectedly, the word cancer is a part of our personal lexicon. I’m shocked. I have been clueless about how serious this jaundice and exhaustion are. It seems impossible that my husband can appear to be healthy one day and, overnight, scarily, deathly ill.

SIGNS

WAS I CLUELESS? Or not knowledgeable about the signs? We know more than we let ourselves know. Looking back on my journals at that time, I see that I was feeling a deep weariness with life. I had little energy or connection to my work. I felt disconnected from the world. I couldn’t fire myself up. I was agitated, fuzzy, directionless, thinking I needed a spiritual retreat. I was living in the field of Michael’s hidden illness and his denial.

A caul hovers above my eyes, a fuzzy sensation in the center of my forehead, which I have felt for the last nine months. It’s never changed: a haze just above my eyes. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Neither could Kim, my healer and chiropractor, or Kathryn, my healing/psychotherapy supervisor. None of us could discern what was going on. We knew it was important because it was such a prominent kinesthetic sensation. I knew I wasn’t seeing something, because I had never experienced it before, but what was so important that my third eye was covered in gauze? Also, in every healing I had for months, Kim kept seeing mistletoe. That, too, was a mystery. After Michael’s diagnosis, I learned that mistletoe is an anthroposophical treatment for cancer.

Four days before Michael began to feel the deep exhaustion, I consulted the I Ching, a classic Chinese book of divination and Taoist philosophy, with the question: Why am I exhausted with a haze over my eyes, like a caul? I don’t feel in sync with life: I’m disoriented, unattached, lacking passion, disinterested.

The reading that appeared was number 9, The taming of the power of the small, which describes the way in which wind restrains the clouds but isn’t strong enough to turn them into rain. It says my way forward is blocked, so any action will not be harmonious with the state of my life. Eventually, I am told, there will be success, but now my way is blocked. What I need is inner determination, gentleness, and adaptability. The I Ching continues by describing the appropriate relationships and connections between the individual members of a family or clan that are necessary to keep the social relationships of the world in order. It emphasizes that strong leadership must come from the head of the family. The tie that holds the family together lies in the loyalty and perseverance of the wife. It also speaks of the influence of words when they are pertinent and clearly related to definite circumstances. … Words must be supported by one’s entire conduct.

Readings from the I Ching, or Book of Changes, have always been helpful in guiding me when I’m confused or upset. For thirty-one years we have been consulting it for personal and family questions, ever since Michael introduced it the first New Year we were together. It’s true in this reading that I can’t see my way forward, but I can stay attuned to being gentle and stay determined to see. I am startled by the emphasis on the wife’s loyalty and perseverance and the need to act in accordance with her words. I carry these words like a lantern through the next few months as Michael’s illness unfolds and I am required to be his advocate and voice.

I feel adrift, as if I’m living in bardo state with no direction. I am aware that three significant rituals are due now, one after the other: the turning of the Jewish year on Yom Kippur; the Equinox, when day and night are of equal length; and Sukkot, a Jewish harvest ritual, when the fragility of our protection is highlighted. Recognizing these rituals reminds me of the circular path of life. My uncertainty lifts: I feel natural, alive, and full of presence. Naively, I think things will be good from now on.

But this is a brief reprieve. When Michael first became ill, I had two short, significant dreams: In a time of uncertainty and near misses, a cop in a car behind me bellows unexpectedly, Step out of your car, miss. I write in my journal, Step out of your karma!

In the second dream, a Chinese dinner is presented along with a risky adventure and a guide. I am being guided. What is about to happen is going to offer me the chance to change my karma. It will change the entire way I live. It is an opportunity for time to stop and to begin moving in a different direction, just like those minutes when the tide pauses before changing directions. We are about to go through the greatest test of our lives and transcend who we think we are.

With cancer, Michael lives closer to his core. He swiftly transitions from his outer world involvement to a spaciousness that links his inner and outer selves. He is moving towards the ultimate spaciousness: death.

I am having significant dreams. The night before Michael saw the internist and received the initial diagnosis, I dreamed of a couple who had created a successful restaurant and then decided to let it go and move on into the unknown. The wife has cancer: She awakens to her priorities.

It turns out that it’s my husband who has cancer. He is the one who awakens to his priorities. It is also true that, within a week, we will close his business and move into the unknown, radically shifting our priorities. Where once our work was our priority, now riding the waves of an intense illness is our only priority.

NAVIGATING NARROW PLACES

GRIEF BEGINS WITH THE FIRST WORDS: This is a bad tumor. The prognosis is not good. The gastroenterologist is kind; we all cry in her office—Michael, me, our daughter Ann Julia, and the doctor.

Then, like the troupers we are, we go home to take care of our business and prepare Michael for hospitalization. It seems my whole life has prepared me for this. One of the oddest preparations began a few weeks before the illness surfaced, when I suddenly became obsessed with playing spider solitaire. Every evening I sat glued to my computer, rapidly sorting cards in this game. At the time I didn’t understand this obsession. When I had to make the first of many critical decisions, I realized that my brain could actively handle a crisis unfolding so quickly there was no time to ponder information. I could sort information quickly and make critical decisions. This was not the first time I’d had to do this, but I was rusty. Years before, I had created and handled complex public relations tours for doctors and authors. When our first child needed open-heart surgery, I researched medical options. But during the years between I had learned how to slow down and listen to clients without trying to fix them. Now, with Michael’s medical crisis, I had no time for research. I was called to listen to the doctors and take action.

Before we had a clear understanding of this particular cancer, our friends were anxious to help. Obviously everyone went to the internet, where the latest treatments in research and other alternatives are highlighted. I was flooded with too much information.

I faced a conundrum: I needed knowledge to process and sort medical information that could possibly make the difference to the outcome. At the same time, I was acutely aware I personally didn’t have enough knowledge to process it all. Going to the first specialist appointment, I grabbed a notebook. From now on, I would write everything down in order to create some semblance of order: everything the doctors, nurses and other knowledgeable professionals told us. Besides information, I have to navigate my own emotions as well as everyone else’s anxiety and urgency. Without notes, this will all be a mush. My years of college studies, doing medical public relations, and my healing practice where I am present to others while listening, feeling, and taking notes, have prepared me to do this. I also staple each doctor’s business card in the front of my notebook, along with any pertinent information. As the number of doctors increases, this ready information helps me stay on top of the dizzying array of specialists who have suddenly entered our world.

The visit to Michael’s internist, the blood work, and the cat scan happen on a Monday, the beginning of a new reality. The initial diagnosis and visit to the gastroenterologist take place the next day. Wednesday is to be the check-in day at the local hospital, with an endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP, a diagnostic procedure to look for disease in the bile ducts and pancreas by running a flexible tube down the throat, through the stomach, and into the small intestine) scheduled for Thursday, the fourth day. This is how rapidly we are moving.

Wednesday, just as we are leaving for the hospital, our friend Jason calls. He has been on the phone with Ann, a friend who is a psychiatrist on the staff of a prestigious hospital in Boston. She is raising concerns about this procedure. Her concern raises red flags for me, but there isn’t time to go into it, as we are dutifully walking out the door for the hospital.

But when we get there, there is no bed available for Michael. Even though our internist has made it emphatically clear that we need to follow what the gastroenterologist has prescribed, I take this delay as a sign to continue talking with these two friends. Sitting in the admissions waiting room, I call Jason and Ann to discuss options. The more we talk, the clearer I get about the kinds of questions I need to ask the doctor before Michael is admitted. Soon a bed is ready, but I ask the staff if we can hold off the admission.

Here is the scene: Michael, weary and yellow, sits in the waiting room with Ann Julia and a colleague of ours who works at the hospital. I am pacing, talking intensely on my cell phone. My friends are urging me to get him into Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, a teaching hospital and one of the top two cancer hospitals in the U.S., the other being MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. One of the alternatives they suggest is called photodynamic therapy, where radiation is directed like a bullet to the site instead of being dispersed throughout the body. (None of us knows at the time that radiation is a disastrous choice for this kind of cancer.)

I have no personal knowledge of Sloan-Kettering or how you get someone admitted there. I do know where we are right now is a top-rate suburban hospital where our internist saved my life years ago when I had toxic shock. I’m torn about delaying when Michael is already so ill. I feel overwhelmed by the immensity of this decision. For thirty years, I’ve made all major decisions in concert with Michael, so I try to discuss the options with him. It’s impossible; he has no capacity to make such decisions. He needs to be in bed, and here he is sitting in an uncomfortable waiting-room chair.

Finally, our colleague puts him in a wheelchair and takes him on a tour of the hospital to give me the space to really drop into this decision. While they are gone, I finally have a clarifying phone call with the gastroenterologist, in which I learn that she has not done one of these delicate procedures in a year because she was on maternity leave, and while there will be a physician with four years of experience in the operating room alongside her, she will be the one doing it. Even more important, the doctors in this practice only do one of these stents every couple of weeks. I realize I can’t put my husband into their hands.

By the time Michael has returned from his hospital tour, I have made the decision for him. One thing I know for sure: This is such a delicate procedure that it must be done by the most experienced doctor. I decide we will go home and work on getting him into Memorial Sloan-Kettering.

As Michael’s illness progresses, I bless Ann and Jason over and over for pressing me to the wall with this decision. It is the first of many critical decisions that I make alone. Our marriage has tilted overnight.

The following days rush headlong towards hospitalization. The next day, friends and I begin a united effort to get Michael to the best doctors at Sloan-Kettering. Michael’s dearest friend, Barry, best man at our wedding, locates the top surgical oncologist in the country, Dr. Yuman Fong, through the help of his father’s oncologist at Sloan. Ann, in Boston, is forging ahead as well; she has found a leading gastroenterologist at Sloan who will review the CAT scan if Ann Julia hand-delivers it. Then she secures an appointment with Dr. Fong for the following Monday. Later I learn it is rare to be able to get into this hospital so quickly.

Friday is more than eventful. In the morning, Michael calls each of his clients and closes his business. Then he climbs into bed to wait for Talia, our acupuncturist, who is driving up from Philadelphia to treat him. I call the physicians at Sloan-Kettering and learn they have presented his case to the staff of the best team of doctors: They understand the urgency of his situation.

Meanwhile I am getting calls from Sloan-Kettering about all the paperwork I need to bring and the office buildings in New York City where I have to take him on Monday for an MRI and then to be seen by Dr. Fong. I also have a visit with the office to make sure we have the necessary insurance to be admitted to this hospital. This piece of information prompts me to call our insurance broker to make sure we are good to go on that account.

I am eternally grateful that I made that call. Within an hour she returns my call from an Amtrak train in transit from Boston. She asks a fateful question: Did he sign up for Social Security? Is he on Medicare? I say no, the Medicare office advised him to