For most of this week, J was sick. And without over-dramatizing things or going into great detail, suffice it to say that it was one of those rare and exceptional hand-wringingly-intense, cause-for-real-concern, bordering-on-kind-of-genuinely-scary types of illnesses. For the past several days I consciously and absentmindedly fretted over how he was doing, checked in on him multiple times throughout each workday, and admonished him for not taking better care of himself, just as I would have back when we were still together as a couple. Two nights this week, when he was in particularly bad shape, he slept on the couch downstairs, at my urging. And, truth be told, I slept easier knowing that since I was just a few footsteps away I could be there for him at a moment’s notice, if needed, to help.
Maybe this is strange, I don’t know. What’s normal in these situations? Is there a normal?
Through all of this I found myself thinking that, however unconventional, at bottom this is what family is, what it means. This is my family now, my family still. We are a broken home, sure, but there will always be a kind of home between us. We will never stop being family. In five, ten, twenty years, we will still be family.
It’s reassuring, I guess. Maybe a little daunting too, the longevity of that connection. But more reassuring than anything else, really.
I’ve long known that my heart is stubborn. More stubborn than most people’s, I reckon. As anyone who knows me very well can tell you, it takes a lot for me to let people in — to let down my guard fully, to allow myself to be truly vulnerable. But once I do, once I really let you in, you’re IN. There have been a few times in my life that I’ve let the wrong people in and lived to resent and regret this aspect of my own nature, because even when given every indication that I should cut ties and run like hell, I’ve found it hard to let go, to give up on people, to simply brush them off into the dustbin of my personal history and move on. Stubborn. My heart is a stubborn muscle.
There’s another word for that kind of heart-stubbornness, of course. That word is devotion.
