Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I ordered some books that finally arrived, this one suggested by another blogger who recently lost his wife, and this one, with the accompanying workbook, which I found on my own in a desperate search to find something, anything, that would help me make sense of this.

I had intended to start one of the books last night, but decided the Didion memoir might just be too hard. It’s only been 2 weeks. So I was going to read the other one, but instead I took a shower and cried, my head pressed to the window, my hands pressed against the tile, literally holding myself up. When the pain comes, it comes hard and mercilessly, and yet, as awful and wrenching as it is, somehow the crying feels better than the bewildered numbness that is what allows me to get any work done. I couldn’t do Tuesday anymore, so I dried off, put on a t-shirt, turned out the lights, and crawled into bed to cry some more. Nights are hardest, and bedtime can’t come soon enough. A and I would chat for 2-3 hours every night, and when that time rolls around and he’s not there, I don’t know what to do with myself. Plus, I’m tired from the day. Coping takes a lot out of you, even when you’re not doing it very well, so everything that builds up during the day comes out then: all the pretending you do for the benefit of strangers or friends who are worried about you; all the questions running through your head; all the confusion and sadness and missing him that you tried to distract yourself (unsuccessfully) from during the day. It is an avalanche, and the strong woman I always thought I was is nowhere to be found. Or maybe she’s still here; I am still breathing, after all. But I think I may need to take some days; I only took the day of the memorial off, even though I didn’t go. Some days, it feels like it’s just too much to face the lack of him in my normal routines. I keep doing them in a limited way, but I have a deep yearning to stay in bed awhile. It seems that I have a lot of crying and staring into space blankly to do, because I find myself doing it often, and maybe I just need to honor that and let myself do it.

In bed with the lights out and crying is where E found me, and he sat with me a long while and listened to my broken record between sobs. After awhile, a long while, I felt calm enough to turn the light back on and open the book, and what I found there was somewhat comforting, in that I felt it spoke to me directly, addressing, among other things, exactly the disorientation and disconnect I am feeling in regards to just about everything, and it told me that I’m not going insane. It said the things I was feeling because the authors had been through it, too. Of course, there’s a ceiling on the comfort value of being told that grief due to bereavement is one of the most profound and lethal of human emotions, and that everything you’re going through is to be expected. Oddly, one of the authors found out about the sudden death of her brother after a day trip to my former hometown of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. What are the chances? What are the chances that this is my life? If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d say “nil.” Obviously, they are 100%.

I look at pictures of him, and he is so alive, so vibrant, so…here. And I cannot understand the lack of warning; I still cannot believe what I know to be true. “Advanced heart disease,” undiagnosed, obviously, is what his friends told me was the cause, and my research indicates that sudden cardiac death, versus a heart attack, often happens in those cases. He may have had other, mild heart attacks that he ignored because the symptoms are so vague and could be a lot of things. Who knows? He is the 3rd generation of men in his family to be felled by heart disease at an early age. It is not always wise to do research on these things, because now I know that it takes 4-6 minutes for you to die after cardiac arrest. 4-6 minutes of what? Of pain? Of your life flashing before your eyes? Of panic? Did he see god? His friends who identified him, and the police who found him, said he looked peaceful, not panicked or stricken, and for that, I’m grateful. I never wanted my sweetie to have any pain or fear, let alone in his last moments. I hope he didn’t.

As I was reading that book, I was comforted right up until the point where they started talking about a year from now, and year 2, and year 3, and year 4. And then I started feeling sick to my stomach from the emotional conflict between “Jesus, I’m still going to be feeling this awful in 4 years?” and the realization that I will one day look up and realize he’s been gone longer than I had him, and I will feel cheated all over again. And I bitterly think to myself, “Hell, I may not even be here in 4 years, because you never fucking know.” And the book reassures me that such bitterness is fair and expected, because all my expectations of how the world works, and how I work in it, have been violently turned upside down. Everything’s upside down.

All of “our songs,” which used to make me glow, are like a knife. Dusty Springfield breaks my heart instead of bringing happy memories and joyful anticipation of our next dance. When you fall in love, it’s like every love song ever written was written just for you; when you lose your beloved, every sad song of love lost rips your heart out, 3 minutes at a time. The routines you counted on to break up your day with a smile are now conspicuous in their absence, and the clock is a throbbing reminder of how things are different now. Even the afternoon light, which always made me feel wistful anyway, seems sinister. This desert world is colder and darker.

People are already worried about me, wondering how long this will take, trying to cheer me up and distract me, and suggesting grief counseling, because no matter how much compassion you have, if it didn’t happen to you, there’s a limit on how long someone’s passing is going to affect you. It is not a critique; that’s just the way it is. But the world is going to have to be patient with me. It’s only been 2 weeks, and it did happen to me. And because it did, I understand a lot of things now that I didn’t before. I understand how partners can will themselves to die after their beloved dies. I understand why people turn to drink or sleeping pills, or both. I understand suicides, but I do not forgive them, because to do this on purpose to those who love you is unforgivable. For the record, I am not in danger of becoming a drunk, an addict, or a suicide. But I do understand that much pain, now, enough pain that you’d do anything to get away from it. But it’ll wait, and I know that, too, so there’s no point in trying to run.

It waits everywhere. It waits in a link in my favorite places to his briefcase where he put music for me to download. It waits in the blue awnings of an apartment building I’ve driven past a million times and paid no attention to before; his apartments had blue awnings. It waits in the hummingbird that came right up to the kitchen window at work and stayed there, looking in at me. It waits in every instance I look at or pick up a guitar. It waits in every Beatles song, and hundreds of others. It waits in his handwriting on a CD I happen across in a drawer. It waits in the lighthouse bookmark he gave me, holding my place in my grief book. It waits in every memory I take the risk of indulging in. It waits in the pictures of his warm, gentle smile. It waits in the YM I don’t even bother to log in to, because there’s no one to talk to me anyway. It waits on the swing in the back yard where we sat and spotted satellites, and in the mountains he only got to see once, and the monsoon he’ll never see. It waits in each remembered plan we had that we’ll never see through. It waits in calendars and clocks, ticking away the time without him. It waits in having to say the name of a coworker who has the same name as he. It waits in the auto-complete of my e-mail where I start typing his name, out of habit and muscle memory, even when I’m sending something to myself. It waits in the silence from his family, who are my last connection to him. It waits in the gratitude I feel every time I see E’s face, still here for me. It waits in a packet of ramen in the pantry. It waits in my dreams.

It seems the pain can wait forever. Why couldn’t death do the same?