It’s been a month since my husband had open-heart surgery to repair an aortic aneurysm and we are exhausted.

We knew old age was going to hurt, but it hit us rather all at once last month, when this person I married 18 years ago, who is 46 and was cutting down trees pretty constantly after working all day as a teacher, went to the cardiologist to get the results of a test. He thought they would say it was inconclusive and that those strange symptoms he had experienced a month earlier at work might have been the result of too much caffeine or some unexplainable fluke. Instead, they told him his aorta was about to explode and that he couldn’t leave until they cut his chest open and reconstructed it.

From the time we got the news, I learned some things about the stages of grief. There are five: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. We would go through all of them in a day and start over. They also talk about hope, which might fall under acceptance or come after that. You have to allow yourself the luxury of hope, even if you are not naturally optimistic. I’m not.

And I don’t know if you would call this hope, but there are times you find yourself thinking about something dumb, even in the midst of an ongoing personal crisis. You might even find yourself laughing at some snarky thought that runs through your mind. You might want to post something totally unrelated to your ongoing personal crisis. Something like this: If you ever get the urge to cut your hair too short to pull back in a ponytail, don’t! I know from experience now that you have these thoughts and sometimes you want to think or talk about something other than the very serious painful thing.

But wouldn’t it be inappropriate, under the circumstances?

The heart surgeon told me before they went in that the surgery would be complicated. Even so, it took a few hours longer than he thought – about 12 in all. By the time he came out to talk to me, I was pretty crazed from standing in the waiting room outside the ICU by myself, answering texts from my husband’s mother and stepmother. They were wondering what was taking so long. I was catastrophizing, not just because that’s what I do, but because the doctor had told me this was not exactly going to be his routine day in the OR. This was different. And he was an experienced doctor, older than us by a decade or more.

After the surgery, I tried to thank him, but he wouldn’t let me. It was too early, he said. Let’s get through the next 24 hours.

Which were horrible.

When I saw my husband in the ICU, unconscious with a breathing tube, I started to cry. I felt ashamed, even though crying had to be normal for someone in my situation. But I saw the ICU doctor trying not too look at us. The nurse came in and tried to comfort me. Told me to go home. So I did go home and I lay in bed in a fetal position staring at my phone all night. If it had rung, I am sure I would have screamed out loud.

At 5 a.m., I called the nurse, who tried again to be comforting. She said my husband was awake and they had taken the breathing tube out. She said I should wait until visiting hours started in the morning to come. Then she put him on the phone with me and asked him to say something. I could hear her say, “Tell her go back to sleep.”

What I heard from him was a breathless “hi.” It wasn’t proof of much, but it was comforting enough that I fell into a fitful sleep and dreamed he was there with me.

After 18 years of marriage, we were far from the honeymoon stage. We’d had more than our share of fights. And yet the prospect of losing the strongest, most competent person I had ever known was terrifying. Even worse was the possibility that he would be irreparably damaged.

My family used to run a nursing home. I knew the worst thing that could happen to a person was not actually death. Even though I knew I didn’t get to decide, I told myself I hoped I could get 80 percent of him back, and I wanted his mind more than his body. If he was physically disabled, we could deal with it, but I didn’t want him to be a soul trapped in a disabled body and unable to communicate. To me, that is the worst thing that could happen to a person.

Of all the stages of grief, the weirdest is bargaining. It makes no sense to say to the universe, if you grant me this wish, I promise I will or will not do the following …

I think we do it because that’s how it works in human relationships – you do this for me and I will do that for you. Logic tells me you can’t bargain with the universe. I won’t say it is always merciless, but it certainly can be. And I knew we were due to pay some kind of dues. A few friends our own age had died of natural causes. Others had lost children. When would it be our turn to really suffer, to regret all those petty squabbles and vanities?

And then it was our turn. And I found myself bargaining even though I knew it was so pathetically … human.

So I have given up some of the glibness I used to think was amusing. I’ve been more sincere and wasted less time. Certainly, there is less time to waste. There are a lot of prescriptions to sort and doctor’s appointments to schedule after a major surgery. Thankfully, Dan’s father has been staying with us, helping a lot with Dan’s recovery.

I took a week off work to be with Dan after the surgery. When I went back the next week, people asked how he was. Some said, “I’m surprised you’re here.” I thought about that a lot. Did I go back too early? Our goal was that we would both keep our full-time jobs, with him returning to work … eventually.

Right after the surgery, when the nurses first helped him sit up, someone read his chart and saw that he was an English teacher. They wanted to see if he could respond to questions logically, so they asked him, what was his favorite book?

“The Road,” he said, referring to the Cormac McCarthy novel.

Not familiar with it, the nurses smiled and nodded. It meant more to me because that was his favorite book before the surgery, so it was confirmation that some part of Before had survived.

He was so weak and in so much pain right after the surgery, he could only speak in a whisper.

“What if I can’t talk?” he asked me.

I told him there was a teacher where I work who had heart surgery, and his voice is soft, but he’s still a good teacher.

The truth is I didn’t know what would happen if Dan’s voice didn’t come back. I’m a teacher, too, and I am not naturally a loud person, but there are times at school when I have to be louder and more assertive than I ever wanted to be.

Gradually Dan’s voice has come back, but it is still not quite the same voice as before. Not yet anyway.

And he still can’t sleep through the night very comfortably, and he gets tired a lot faster.

I would be lying if I said I have not had any resentment or self-pity. I’ve had plenty of those paint-it-black moments when someone else’s carefree happiness made me shudder a bit.

But the mind is curious thing. It clings to hope and the comfort of meaningless things. Even though I have no time for nonsense, I make time to write. I even baked cookies with pastel M&Ms and sent the surgeon a box with a thank you note. He probably doesn’t eat cookies because he’s a heart surgeon. Just a card would probably have been more appropriate. It’s just that every once in a while I still make decisions that are somewhat about the person I was before, a person who bakes cookies and paints pictures that look like a toddler’s artwork.

One of these days, I’ll post something dumb and funny again, like another photo of one of my baking or cake decorating fails.

But the thing about grief and recovery is you can’t go around them. You have to go through them. That’s how you know you’re alive.