Routine

I have found uneasy comfort in routine. Managing the daily activities of eating, sleeping, toileting, medicating, and generally tidying up provides me with a sense of order and the delusion of control. The trouble is that our routine is essentially a response to the external, or the imposed. It is easy to allow the recurring needs for basic care and maintenance take center stage. When we allow these to become the whole show, the days run one into the other with little to distinguish them, one from the other.


It’s been 32 days since Sherry’s brain surgery when the biopsy was taken and the diagnosis given. Time in. Time out. So many days, so soon.

Life seems to happen in the cracks between the necessary and mundane. A poem read, a song heard, a phone call from a friend, a card, a visit are all the sort of things that makes our days count; breathes life into them.

We also have come to distinguish between routine and ritual. Each morning Sherry lights a candle given to her by my sister, Marla Morrow. The candle is in a sterling silver candlestick holder which was a wedding present to Sherry’s parents, Edith and Clarence, from Sherry’s paternal grandmother. While the candle burns Sherry focuses on five things for which she is grateful. It doesn’t take much of the candle for her to pick five out of the multitude of gifts she is receiving. This ritual puts perspective into life.

Still, there are dark times. I believe that our grieving, when it clouds routine and ritual shrouding life, is not based on fear of death, rather from an awareness of what we cannot do, or perceive that we will not be able to do. This thinking shifts our focus away from what we can do to fully live our lives and to fulfill our life together. The antidote is to focus on what we can do. Simply doing this seems to lift the clouds.