Searching
I spend a lot of time, maybe too much, reading at the Young Widows Bulletin Board. When I first found it, months ago, it was a lifeline, more applicable to my situation than the general grief group that I’d joined, though the ladies there are very supportive and kind. While pain is pain, the sharing and compassion that can lighten the load, at least temporarily, is affected by the kind of loss one experiences. I will never know what it’s like to lose a child. Someone losing their elderly parent is not dealing with the same things as one’s sweetheart dying totally unexpectedly. It is not a comparison of pain; it’s about the comradeship of similar experiences and challenges. Naturally I feel more connection with those who have been widowed. But my circumstances are unusual, and are, unsurprisingly, not dealt with by anyone at the widow board, either, nor would they necessarily look sympathetically upon me if they knew them.
It has been a little while since I’ve felt like the board was a firm, reliable support for me, maybe a few weeks. However, that doesn’t stop me from reading and reading and reading, even on topics that have no relationship to MY relationship: how the kids are dealing with grief; what to do about finances; headstones; moving; criminal and civil lawsuits. Some of them are about things that would be of interest to me and pertinent, like making plans for funerals and burials, what to do with ashes, what to do with possessions of your beloved, but those things were taken out of my hands, and now to read about them only reminds me how much that still bothers me. I read about evil in-laws, and realize that it could be so much worse for me than it was, and that as hard on me as it’s been, it was hardly unusual. I skip the newly widowed posts; too painful for me in large doses, and too soon for me to tell them it will get better, were I inclined to post. (I don’t.) I didn’t believe it when I was in their shoes, and couldn’t hear it. Plus, the truth is, it’s a longer time coming than could be considered encouraging; who wants to hear that? I read a post from someone who wants the first year to be over already, so she can feel better. I wanted to pat her shoulder and say, “Good luck with that, honey.” She may be in great shape in a year; who knows? It could happen. But I, too, had hoped that the one-year mark would be magical, too; maybe we all do, because it hurts so bad for so long. And I learned what many bereaved folks before me have learned: it isn’t magical; it’s just another day.
So I have to question what draws me back over and over, multiple times a day, and I think I have it: I’m still looking for the silver bullet that will kill the pain. I’m searching the haystack for the needle that will allow me to sew these tattered pieces of myself back together well enough that they will hold for more than a few days at a time. I’m looking for someone to, in a single post, provide the wisdom that will fill my soul with peace, my days with purpose, and my soul with the joie de vivre that has been AWOL for 16 months; 16 months yesterday.
I know that no one has that wisdom to be conveyed to me in one fell swoop, but I’m still looking for it. The search turns up the occasional morsel that I squirrel away to keep me going on cold, bleak days of the heart, and I’m grateful, but still hungry for whatever it is that will satisfy me. I don’t even know what it is, but I know I want it. I tell myself that it is these small bits that will make up enough of a whole to fill the hole in me, eventually.
I tell myself a lot of things, with no way of knowing if any of them are true. I don’t have faith so much as very fragile hope.
I keep thinking that if I could just be adequately enlightened, I would be able to feel peace in my heart and go back to enjoying my life. This presumes that I was always enjoying my life before, which isn’t exactly true. In fact I’d been depressed for a month or so before he passed. I tend to think now it was a prescient sadness, an anticipation of doom, but in any case, I was down.
But even as I write that, I wonder if peace is not the goal at all, or, if it is, it is far more fluid and ephemeral than I’ve been willing to imagine; maybe the enlightenment is going back to your life regardless. Maybe peace is not required for enjoyment. Because when I think “peace,” I think “I’m okay with this,” whatever “this” is. And I cannot see myself ever being okay with the fact that he’s gone. I just can’t. I can work around it, but I can’t be okay with it. Maybe peace comes from accepting the good and the bad, enjoying the former and not beating yourself up for hating the latter.
Maybe I knew that. But I keep forgetting. Or, more likely, I want something more definitive. I merely want the meaning of life, the universe, and everything; me and 6 billion others on this planet. I have to laugh at myself, expecting that I should have, or should receive, the answers to the questions that burn in the souls of all of us, that do no less than define the human quest from womb to tomb. I wonder why those mysteries are so inscrutable, why certainty seems to be prohibited, and then I want the answer to the “why?” of that, as well. I want to scream to the Universe “Well, if you can’t tell me the answers, can you tell me WHY you can’t tell me the answers? I’m smart. I’ll understand!”
Apparently, the Universe is unimpressed by my SAT scores.