Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

Tuesday has been a day of memories, unexpected minor ambushes.  The first happened this morning.  I had a dentist appointment, and there was nothing unusual about that until I was actually sitting in the chair, thinking about my last dentist appointment.  It was raining that day, too.  It was a Thursday, two days before I was supposed to go visit my sweetie, a visit that had been canceled two weeks before when he died.  I’d been glad about going to the dentist on that date 6 months before, because I’d be able to flash him my brightest smile when he picked me up at the airport.  It was a long time before I flashed a smile at anyone, as it turned out.  I sat in that chair and debated mentally with myself as to what the point was of taking care of my teeth if a person could just up and die anytime.  I might die before I wore them out.  I didn’t share my dark musings with my hygienist, however.  And now it’s 6½ months later.  No cavities, but for the slowly healing hole in my heart.

Later that morning, a friend turned me on to a library organizing website that would allow you to enter your book collection by ISBN and it would grab all the information for you, or it would search on an author or title.  It would even allow you to import your past purchases records from Amazon, which I thought was cool.  And then I pulled up all my records, and went to add a book only to realize I no longer had it in my collection; I’d lent it to A, and when his family cleaned out his apartment a week and a half after the funeral, they took all his stuff.  There were a few that are now missing; I have no idea where those books are.  It isn’t the books that are important; it’s the many reasons why they are no longer mine that hurt.  And as I went through them, I found gift after gift I’d bought for A.  What was supposed to be an exercise in book organization became a well of memories and melancholy.

I didn’t actually cry, but I felt sad and full of sighs.  I suppose that’s a sign of progress, but the day is still young, and I have hours to go before I sleep.  The inventory of losses from grief is an endless process, usually completed accidentally as things as mundane as the dentist and organizing your books remind you of connections you didn’t even remember you’d forgotten until they were front and center.  It is in this juxtaposition of ordinary activities with memories now sacred that love and connection show themselves, where you realize just how deeply and widely your beloved permeated your life.  My life is just shot through with him, and that’s how I liked it.  

I suppose I like it now, too, but it is bittersweet.  While I’m comforted to know that he is not slipping away from me, that the memories will constantly be refreshed by stuff like this, every memory announces itself as being just that:  a memory, a reminder of what remains to me.  The loss is implicit in every single memory.

You tell me I have grieved enough,
That this is life, and life is tough;
That time will heal, I’ll love again,
That the world is full of plenty of men;
That I have other children to raise and to love,
That I cheat them when the one missing I think of;
That it was my mother’s or father’s time to go,
As if you could possibly know;
That I have more than one sister or brother,
As if one could ever take the place of another.
That I need to move on and quit my wallowing,
When you have no idea how many tears I am swallowing;
That I shouldn’t show my deepest heartbreak,
For the children, and everyone else’s sake.
That I should be happy for the time that we had,
To focus on the good times instead of being sad;
It can only be deep ignorance that you emboldens,
In which case, remember this:  Silence is golden.

When my sweetheart passed away in July, his daughter was a few months pregnant with her second child.  A was a wonderful grandfather, and a father, and he doted on his girls on a level that brought you joy just to know about it.  The way he smiled when he held his granddaughter was like the sun; even in photos, you could see how happy he was, and so he was excited for the new baby on the way.

I worried for his daughter, then, in July.  Grief is bad enough, worse than I could ever have imagined; I didn’t know what effect it would have on a pregnant woman.  But with my only conduit of regular news having passed on, I didn’t get to follow her progress.  It was another secondary loss; he and I talked often of his family, especially his daughter and granddaughter and son-in-law.  I am invested in his family in a way none of them will ever know or understand, and I don’t imagine that will change, despite my not hearing about them.  I was never directly involved in their lives previous to his passing, so nothing’s changed for them.  But much has changed for me.  I love them all, through him, because of him.   I do.

She was due the week I was headed to camp, and he and I had talked about how that might complicate our usual annual trip, never imagining that other vastly more difficult complication would arise in the meantime.  I finally had an opportunity to ask his best friend if he’d had any news about the baby, and I found out my sweetie now has a grandson, whose middle name is the same as A’s, A’s brother, A’s father, and it was his grandfather’s name.  That pleased me.  Those two kids don’t know it, but there’s a lady they’ll probably never know about who loves them.  

I felt better, knowing that he’d arrived.  I’d been waiting.  It’s so hard to be on the outside of things you were on the inside of before.  I understand completely why things are the way they are.  But I can’t help being a little bit wistful about it.

I was out at lunchtime Saturday, and drove past the cemetery.  This would be the same cemetery that, on a day early in my bereavement, made me go from laughing to bawling in an instant, just upon seeing it.

It didn’t have that effect on me this time, I was surprised to find, and I watched as I traveled the length of it on the road in front of it, almost as if I were testing myself.  Would I cry?  Would I be overwhelmed?  Would I go numb?

As I was staring at the cemetery, I noticed a burial in progress in the far back corner, a small tent set up, people on all sides dressed in black.  I am surprised when I see weekend funerals; I don’t expect them, but unlike weddings, most of which happen on Saturdays, most deaths are not planned; they happen when they happen.  Death doesn’t keep bankers hours, and its schedule is unknowable.

I was neither overwhelmed or in tears.  I felt for those mourning, and my heart went out to them because I know how hard their road will be for quite some time, but what I felt was more a sigh and a shrug.  It is their turn, I thought, and not with dark glee, but rather, an acceptance that this is how life works.  It includes death.  That reality is very present for me now, since A passed away.  I cannot escape it.  You can try to outrun the firsthand knowledge of death, but once it catches you, you belong to it forever after.  You cannot unring this bell any more than you can any other.

It is hard to say how this knowledge has affected me.  I think I live a more present life, if not a more exciting one.  Excitement has never been my major motivator.  But I frequently stop and look around my life, and think “If I went tomorrow, would I be okay with how things are?  Would I be upset that this project was unfinished, those words unsaid?” And I think I would be okay.  My life has shrunk to manageable size based on focusing on priorities.  I want to love my loved ones well, and not spend too much time being angry, petty, or difficult.   Everything I do is to further those goals because now that I have lost someone that I loved deeply, that meant the world to me, I have an unasked for, yet valuable, perspective.  I know what has become important about our relationship, and which things that, while seemingly important at the time, have turned out not to be in the hindsight of grief.   To put it bluntly, the question I frequently ask myself these days when my nose is out of joint about something, or headed that way, is “Will I care about this when s/he is dead?”  Generally, the answer is no, and if I wouldn’t care then, I decide not to care now, and focus on the love.  Because I would give anything to have him tune me out and tune into the TV instead, again.  I’d give anything to hear him snore.  I’d give anything to wash his dishes up after dinner.  I’d give anything to talk to him when he’s crabby.  At least he’d be here.

When I was a little girl, and feeling unloved, or that my folks were being mean, I would go sit in my tiny closet with the light out and the door shut.  The bizarre kid logic behind this demonstration was to make myself suffer even more, to make myself so pitiful that my mom or dad would come rescue me and feel great remorse at my ending up in such forlorn misery because of their actions.

I would go into the closet, shut the door, sit on the floor in the dark and wait for someone to notice my absence, wait for someone to notice my abject despondency and do something about it.

No one ever did.

And eventually I would get bored, get up, and go back into my room and play.  I played out this little one-girl show more than once, with the same result every time.  Eventually, I learned that it wasn’t working for me.

What made me remember that?

I have been gratified by people expressing their admiration for my strength in the midst of grief, for my openness to experiencing enjoyment despite everything, including my own misgivings.   It makes me feel like perhaps I’m doing something right, making progress, and I’m glad that someone thinks so.   But in my heart, I don’t feel it as strength.  It is all far too precarious for me to claim it as such, or even claim it as my own.  The most I can claim is that I’ve made a decision to try to follow Goethe’s advice, enjoying when I can and enduring when I must.  To do otherwise is to go sit in the closet in the dark.  Nobody feels bad about it but me, and to insist upon sitting in the dark on some bizarre indefinite principle or mistaken sense of propriety makes me nothing more than my own victim.  It makes me ungrateful, too.  If I can laugh, I have a duty to do so.  Because I know without question that there will be times, again, when I will not be able to.  I try not to suffer any more than I have to; sometimes I’m successful, sometimes I’m not.

"Suffering is not holding you. You are holding suffering. When you become good at the art of letting sufferings go, then you’ll come to realize how unnecessary it was for you to drag those burdens around with you. You’ll see that no one else other than you was responsible. The truth is that existence wants your life to become a festival."-Osho