THERE ARE, in any relationship, several categories of disclosure. There are the things you talk about when you get together, as you are getting to know each other. Those are the surface things – what you look like on the outside and who you are. There are the things that you learn about the other person as you interact and face challenges, either together or separately. That’s when you find out how they deal with things and what kind of person they are. And then there are the things that go unspoken – the things that came before, the things that contributed to making you who you are today. Those are the
whys.
It’s been my experience that you get them in approximately that order. The
whos you get right off the bat. You are X years old, you have two brothers and one sister, you work at Y corporation, you have two kids. You have brown hair, blue eyes, and love baseball, beer and dogs. The whos are the initial attractants, and the sorters. We use the whos to decide whether or not this person is compatible enough to get to the next category.
The
hows come a little later in the relationship.
Does this person have a long or short fuse? Are they respectful? Are they the kind of person who chews out the pizza delivery guy when he comes two minutes late? Does she kick the dog when she’s had a bad day at work? If I were at the airport needing a ride home at 3 a.m., could I call him? The hows are the trustbuilding questions. The hows build a foundation upon which the relationship is built. When we know the hows about our partner, we can establish a predictability. Maslow calls this stage “safety and security” in his hierarchy of needs. These needs have to do with people's yearning for a predictable, orderly world in which injustice and inconsistency are under control, the familiar frequent and the unfamiliar rare.
The
whys are unpredictable. Sometimes we get them in the beginning: the disclosure that a partner has an ex-spouse with whom they had an abusive relationship. The parents that died before their time. The confession of an incurable disease. For the most part, whys can be deal-breakers. They are the big disclosures, more weighty and fraught with emotion than the simple facts of age/appearance/disposition. Whys are the skeletons in our closets. We bring them out when we finally feel safe, and we generally haul them out one by one, instinctively comprehending the devastating power of a sudden and all-inclusive dump.
It’s been my experience that the whys trickle in throughout a relationship, usually triggered by some precipitating similar event. It might be a family secret, exposed by an unexpected outside contact. It might be a wild oat, come home to roost. Or it may be as simple as another drop of truth seeping out from underneath the finger held on the hole in the dam.
B told me when we first got together that his parents were both gone. It was something that affected him profoundly. I never really had a clear picture of what his relationship with his father was. He talked a lot about his mother and how they were close, but all he really talked about his father was the fact that he had a bad heart and died from it, a condition that he passed down to B’s older brother.
A little later on, as we got to know each other more intimately, we talked about the years that had come before we met. B talked about his young adulthood, and how he’d spent a few years down south taking care of his uncle, who was elderly and very ill. And if my memory serves me right, that’s how he put it – ‘very ill’. He talked a lot about the good it did for him, and how much he got out of spending time with his uncle, who taught B a lot of things about being a man.
We had been trying out the new sushi restaurant the night he talked about his uncle, and it was my first time having sushi. I asked him where he’d had it before, and he talked about the time he’d spent with his uncle, and how he’d introduced him to a nicer lifestyle than he’d known before. I remember him telling me all about the places they went and things they’d done, and that finally he had died.
After that B came back up to home where his father had also taken ill. He told me that he’d taken care of the business for his father when he was unable to, and had cared for his father as well, but didn’t go into a whole lot of detail. I knew that his father had died of heart problems, and had had several surgeries, so I assumed that was what B was referring to.
We have danced around the subject of Parkinson’s since the very beginning. I knew, of course. B ‘came out’ at work shortly after he was diagnosed, and it’s just been a fact about him, like his blue eyes or his wavy hair. I did not understand all of the ins and outs of PD when we were just friends, but you can believe that when we became romantically involved, I took the crash course. I know now just about everything there is out there except what it really feels like to live in his body, which I can only know secondhand.
We talked about Parkinson’s in the context that he did not initially want me to fall in love with him, because he was afraid of hurting me. He told me I would be a young widow. He fought me in every way that it is possible for a man to fight the love of a woman, but I persevered, because I love him as much as I love myself and I knew that we would both suffer a great loss if we were to pass this thing by. I knew we could not let fear take control.
B is one of the bravest people I know. A large part of his bravery, I suspect, is on the outside. We both fight our fear with some parts denial. As long as he feels pretty good and the meds are working, we can pretend this elephant is not in the room with us, and indeed, we avoid talking about it like the plague. We have to talk about medication, and we have to talk about doctor’s appointments, and he knows I notice when he has a bad day. We talk about it for the most part as if it were any other thing – as if it were just a headache or a sore neck. I see it, I acknowledge it, he confirms it, I commiserate, we move on. He prefers it that way. I think that’s his own survival mechanism; if he does not wallow in the disease, it has no additional power over him. He keeps on going precisely because he keeps on going. And I celebrate that.
But occasionally, I get another drop or two that seeps out from beneath his finger on that dyke. It seemed like an innocent drop, the one that trickled out the other day, but it took me by surprise.
He posts occasionally on the caregivers’ bulletin board that I frequent. Mostly he does it in support, because sometimes they like to take a chunk out of my posterior, whereupon he sails in with white hat and charger ready to do battle for my honor. Lately, his posts when he makes them have been aimed at the caregivers’ disgust and frustration with their PWP. He has made several posts about how it feels from the other side of the fence. The caregivers shoved back, telling the patients on the board (there are a handful) that they should not be there, because they could not understand what the caregivers points of view were and that the board did not apply to them.
And my beloved B posted back. What he posted was a
why – one that we had not even shared between us, as intimate and close as we are. I had thought that I knew everything about him after these two years, but I’m coming to understand that there is far more water behind that finger than I thought.
B’s father and uncle both had Parkinson’s too.
That was why he was caring for them.
That was the end that he saw.
I thought it was denial, but now the blinders have been slipped from my eyes.
It’s not denial.
He knows. And that’s what makes it so hard. He knows, firsthand.
Does it change anything for us?
Only in that my heart has cracked open a little wider for this man, my brave man. I know that there are more drops and trickles and whys to come, and all of them paint a picture of a person that I not only love most dearly, but greatly admire.
There will always be secrets, I know. But these, our skeletons, once they come out from the darkness can only set us free. Painful as they are, they are still valuable pieces that connect the dots between who we are, who we were, and who we will be. We will make our way through them all, in time. And I know that once our fingers are removed and we have all of the whys on the table, we can finally, finally, be free.
