Project Coping

In previous posts I have talked about Patrick and his multiple projects going on at one time. If you know him you are probably smiling and shaking your head at the same time. This is not something new for him. Before we were married he loved working on cars and to this day he still does. I am pretty sure he has owned at least 10 vehicles since he got his drivers license. He currently has 2 project cars and 1 truck that he drives daily but most would consider it a project truck. So to say Patrick LOVES car projects (and really any project) would be an understatement but he and I both know that his projects are actually his way of coping.

The Project 1964 1/2 Mustang

September 2007 was the first time we heard the words Duchenne. At that time Patrick was working on a skiff in our garage. We still disagree on how long he was in the garage working on that boat while I was inside doing research and planning to run a marathon (yeah that running a marathon never happened). What I remember is that he was in there for at least 6 months after the final DMD diagnosis but he says it was just a few weeks. He may be right, I doubt it, (lol) but when faced with a terminal diagnosis the world feels like it is just going on without you while you try and figure out what the heck just happened. I guess since everyone copes and goes through the grieving process differently I just might have felt like I was inside (alone) coping with the diagnosis for 6 months while he was outside coping and working on his projects.

One of the current projects is his truck...it started out by just putting it on airbags... so it would lower all the way to the ground and Wyatt would be able to get in and out of it easily. We were ALL excited about it. But of course he could not stop there. He has now put in a new engine and lots of other things I don't understand and apparently others don't either because he can't get it to work "just right" yet. This has been going on for over 3 years! I think he is close to being really finished but as he gets closer another project gets put into the line up. I hate to say that I hate all of the projects but sometimes I wish they would all be complete and we could just enjoy all of his hard work. (Well I know he is reading this now, so I guess now I don't really have to say it out loud.)

The Lowered Truck

I know that grief is a not a straight line, it's more like a maze. It doesn't just happen and you move on. With a chronic diagnosis the grief hits you over and over again. As something else is lost in either expectations or abilities, I can feel Patrick and myself get knocked down by the grief again and again. This is called chronic grief (or at least that is what I call it) and it can hit you like a bat out of no where. So in order to manage it we have found ourselves coping in very different ways and Patrick's is mainly these projects. It is hard to not get frustrated when his way to deal with grief is to be somewhere else but I guess when you can't fix the issue, fixing a project is something that you can actually do.

I am so thankful I have a marriage where we can cope in our own separate ways and yet grieve together when it is too much for one of us. Together we process the progression of the disease and come out stronger on the back end of it.

Stronger Together