Hurricane Sandy and Losing Control

I like to believe I am a calm, controlled kind of woman.

So when I heard about the storm of the century heading our way, Doug and I took all the necessary precautions.

We filled the tub with water, charged up our battery-powered lights, moved all of our deck furniture, brought in all the pumpkins and Halloween decorations, made a pot of soup, did all the laundry and checked bits of advice of preparations lists.

Then, we waited.

And watched the news.

Always a mistake. But, how do you pull yourself away from it?

The more I watched, the more my anxiety grew.

The sky darkened, the rains poured down, and the winds picked up.

I pestered Doug with questions like, “Should I move that bike out of the backyard? Should we go to the basement now?”

I also kept returning to the bags of Halloween candy like they were the last bags of candy I would ever see in my life.

I wrote a couple of storm stories for the Deseret News to stay busy.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865565510/Northern-Virginians-hunker-down-during-Hurricane-Sandy.html

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865565593/Tens-of-Thousands-Without-Power-in-DC-and-worst-is-yet-to-come.html

I checked Twitter and Facebook obsessively and I looked out the window repeatedly.

Doug told me to relax and sit down.

Relax?

We  have a hurricane the size of Texas heading our way!  The weatherman says we could lose power for weeks!

How can I relax?

I could not relax.

More TV, more Twitter, more Facebook, more window watching, and more candy.

Finally, it was bedtime.

Every time I closed my eyes a gust of wind or a heavy downpour jolted me out of bed.

I kept looking toward the window to make sure the streetlights were still on.

Finally, I fell asleep and empathized with Dorothy and Toto.

The next day, I woke up and it was over.

Trees standing. Power still on. Basement dry.

Enormous relief and gratitude washed over me.

Then, I turned on the news and saw what was happening to our neighbors in Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York.

And while my personal worries had evaporated and my high level anxiety had subsided, I felt guilty.

Why did we get off so easy while they got totally slammed?

As I watched homeowners standing in their vanished neighborhoods holding their children and shaking their heads in disbelief, I was reminded of  how desperately we all want control over our lives and how tragedies like this prove to us that we never really have it.

When I was going through chemotherapy (a recurring theme in a lot of my blog posts, I know. I know…), I stood over my jewelry box one afternoon and dumped everything out on my dresser.

Feverishly I focused on sorting all my jewelry and organizing it neatly into little compartments.

I took such deep pleasure in that moment because I had total control over  that one small thing.

Waiting for a hurricane to land is like staring at a messy jewelry box with your hands tied behind your back.

You desperately want to put everything in its place, and you can’t.

So, you pace the floor, eat the candy, try to read a book, put it down, and keep watching disasters on TV.

Today I put the pumpkins back on the porch, the furniture back on the deck, and tried to walk away from the bags of candy.

Those small things helped my life feel normal again.

Except for the pangs of sadness I still feel for those with the overwhelming task of trying to turn chaos back into order.

In my helpless state, I looked for opportunities to help, hoping to lessen my feelings of guilt and to give me some of that elusive feeling of control over something, anything.

Maybe somebody has a jewelry box I could organize, a child I could hold, or a water bottle I could hand out.

I read an article by Sandy Wallace at examiner.com, that said, “”Hurricane Sandy may have taken a lot of things away from New York and New Jersey, but the storm known as Frankenstorm and Superstorm Sandy can’t take away the resilience of the people.”

http://www.examiner.com/article/governor-christie-and-mayor-bloomberg-teach-resilience

This article reminded me that this is when we choose resilience over control, and take a moment to recognize the ultimate power that resides in the elements, over which we have absolutely no control.