Preparation, by Gillian

Oh, Heavens! The things that spring to mind! An ounce of preparation is worth a pound of cure,  Preparation H, emergency preparedness, hope for the best and prepare for the worst, look to the past to prepare for the future, and prepare to meet your maker.

In my younger days I suppose I did quite a lot of preparation. I recall preparing, with my mother, for my first day of school, for my church Confirmation and after it for my first Communion, and probably many more firsts. They tend to pile up on you in your youth. Then, in school and college, there were endless tests and exams to prepare for. I prepared to go to college and, in what seemed like no time, prepared to leave.

Then, without any conscious intent, I seem to have entered a long phase of my life when I made little, if any, preparation for anything. Events occurred in an apparently random, haphazard, way. This went well; that did not. This happened; that did not. Oh well! Shrug it off. Move on. I most assuredly did not prepare to come out; certainly not to myself, anyway. You cannot really prepare to be hit by a runaway train.

Now, in the latter part of life, I find myself regressing, in the matter of preparation as with many other things, to the ways of my youth. If I don't prepare for just about anything and everything, I shall forget some vitally important words or deeds, or both. When we prepare for camping or road trips, Betsy and I now set up 'staging areas' where we collect things for weeks before we leave, so as not to forget some essential. We used to basically just get in the car and start driving, and get wherever we got. Not anymore! We plan the route, fussing over getting through congested areas before or after rush hour. Or sometimes we plan quite lengthy detours to avoid braving six lanes of freeway at 5.00pm. On the other hand, we need to prepare a route that gets us to a campground in time to settle in before dark. No more midnight arrivals for us!

One thing I know for sure about preparation; it can be incredibly beneficial when it comes to practicalities, but for emotions it's a bust. At least for me. I tried, if only vaguely, most of my life, to prepare myself for the death of my parents. That is, after all, the normal natural course of events for most of us. It didn't work; I might as well never have given it a thought. I was simply felled by their deaths. Devastated. And the heartbreak went on and on. It was at least ten years before I was really OK with it, and that was only after a lot of work on my spirituality. We have too many friends ending up in hospice lately. Naturally, given those circumstances, we give it our best to prepare ourselves emotionally for imminent loss. It doesn't seem to help. Grief remains grief even though it is not accompanied by shock. Even though we tell ourselves it was for the best they didn't linger longer.

When Betsy and I decided, two years ago, to get legally married while we were on a visit to California, we truly meant it when we said to family and friends, 'Oh it's no big deal. We've been together for ever after all. It's just signing a piece of paper.'

Wrong again! We were both completely taken by surprise by the strength of emotion we felt. Both so close to tears, we could barely say those words we had waited almost thirty years to say.  We had thought we were completely prepared, and once more might as well not have given it a thought for as wrong as we got it.

So all I'm trying to do now, as far as emotional preparedness goes, is preparing to be surprised. I shall prepare by acknowledging that I don't have a clue how I'm going to feel, wherever and whenever, about anything. And again I surprise myself. This unpreparedness actually feels good. It's liberating. It's living in the moment.

I shall know what I feel when I feel it. What on earth is wrong with that?

© 24 Aug 2015 

About the Author 

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30-years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have been with my wonderful partner Betsy for thirty-years. We have been married since 2013.