One-note samba?
I’ve been wrestling for some weeks with a bit of blogger identity crisis, related somewhat to the identity crisis all widowed persons face: if you pull yourself together and try to have a reasonably normal day, or try to string those normal days into a normal life, you must be “fine” and if you fall apart “after all this time,” then you must be mentally ill, or at least in need of a kick in the pants. You can’t win for losing, and you are as likely to be judged by your fellow widows as the uninitiated.
There is, for many widowed, a very small box that constitutes proper widowhood. Naturally, those who would draw these boxes fit comfortably inside them and are looking askance at all those outside their own experience of loss. Your spouse had to have been largely perfect in action, profession, and manner of death to be worthy of mourning, and for those left behind, there are even more expectations as to how you should be acting, thinking, feeling, planning, and if you step outside the lines drawn, you do so at your own peril. When I had lunch with Alicia, I told her how I was careful at the widow board, believing that full disclosure would’ve resulted in my being virtually lynched. She agreed that would’ve been the case. We live in a contradictory society that thinks nothing of saying “Be yourself…just not too much.” It affects our grieving as much as any other aspect of our lives.
Honestly, I find it a little strange that widows would hold to, and attempt to enforce, their set of rules so strictly, since I imagine the rules they had before went out the window as soon as their beloved died. Rules like: Young people don’t die. People who are deeply loved don’t die. People who eat well and exercise don’t die. People who were not sick and showed no symptoms don’t die. The universe rewards the good and decent and punishes the evil. Children in loving families do not lose parents. Things like this don’t happen to ME. For me, all the rules I thought I knew regarding how the universe worked evaporated when A died, because his death broke every single one of them. I haven’t replaced them with new rules, because what would be the point? I’ve gotten pretty used to “I don’t know” being my response to most situations now. And I snort inwardly at anyone who pretends to know the answers to the big questions. They don’t know any more than I do.
I have largely absented myself from the widow bulletin board since the new year, because I didn’t think it was helping me anymore, but I still go back from time to time, usually when I’m killing time at work. This going back has only reinforced my decision that it’s not the best place for me anymore—it’s gotten somewhat Jerry Springer-like lately, which is entertaining, I suppose, if I could get entirely past my horror at some of the behavior. Apparently, a group of widows who have, if you’ll pardon the expression, a death-grip on their identity as “Widow” with a capital “W” have sent hate mail to a woman who described her divorce as a “death of a marriage,” and put a paid advertisement in the paper to that effect. They sent angry e-mails to her personally and to the newspaper editor as well. How dare she compare divorce to death? They were extremely offended, to a level of torch-and-pitchfork outrage.
I don’t get it. What does this woman have to do with them? I know that A was wrecked when his wife asked for a divorce, and it took him years to work through the pain and bewilderment, both of which made occasional reappearances in his life. Was it the same as my pain in losing him? How the hell would I know? I’ve never been divorced. These, I suppose, are the same kind of folks who feel their marriage would somehow be threatened by gay marriage. Their widowhood is threatened by anyone who isn’t packed into their very tiny box with them. For my own part, I’d be happy to have passed on widowhood entirely. It’s not an identity I ever hoped I would apply to myself, nor, given my circumstances, have I been able to do so anywhere but here. I hope I never have the opportunity to experience it again.
I have been disheartened to find that the one-dimensional view of what grieving is is as likely to be the perspective of those who should know better as those who are clueless. And I am chagrined to find that I have been spending a considerable amount of energy walking the fine lines that describe that box.
What concerns me is that I have become somewhat too audience-aware as I do my writing here. It started a few weeks back, when I shared some other writing I’ve been doing with someone who really only knew me through this blog, and the context of our meeting, which was at a grief group. It was a bit of a shock to that person, to see other facets of me that aren’t necessarily evident here. This is, and has always been, a grief blog. I write here when I’m chewing on something related to A’s passing and my dealing with that. That is why I post irregularly. It’s not a general “life” blog, nor should it ever be taken for one. Why is that important? Because if this is all you knew of me, you might assume that this is all there is, and that mine is a pretty sad and stagnating life. I hadn’t considered that until my friend’s perception made it shockingly clear that that’s what was being conveyed. I knew that this blog represented only a single facet of my life, so it never occurred to me that any other reader wouldn’t get that, given the title, the purpose, and the URL. A little clueless on my part, I admit, but I think it’s a forgivable and understandable myopia.
But with that realization, I began to feel I owed it to myself and my readers to give a broader perspective of who I am, and also where I am, grief-wise, and maybe even to write more positive posts to encourage those who are earlier in their journey. But when I sat down to write them, it often felt forced, not because I lack positive feelings, but because, for me, that was never the purpose of this blog. This blog exists for my therapy, first and foremost, and if what I write here resonates and comforts anyone else who may be reading it, I am glad. But where I went off the rails is when I suddenly felt a duty to try to make comfort and hope priorities in what I’m doing here.
Where I went wrong was in forgetting that what you think of me is none of my business.
All the crap we get from others about how if we’re smiling, we must not miss them that much, and if we’re crying, we’re just not coping (and often it’s the same people who make both judgments), I started putting on myself, at least as I chose what to express here. I was dancing the line between being too sad and not sad enough, at least as I imagined you reading and evaluating my words. I fully admit, it’s a little neurotic, which is why it’s been bugging me, and why I’m writing this post today. I am shining a light on this particular neurosis, in the hopes of disinfecting my mind.
My inner life is complex. This makes me different from absolutely no one on the planet. It was complex before A died, and it will be complex the day I die. Grief has added a level of bizarreness to the general ups and downs of daily life that I couldn’t have anticipated, of course, but my emotional state is rarely an all-or-nothing proposition, and never has been. No one’s is. Hell, even in the midst of the most painful periods of grief, I wavered between nervous breakdown and numbness. There is more than one note in my song.
I laugh a lot. I crack a lot of jokes, and take pride in the fact that most of the people who know me think I’m very funny, and those who don’t clearly lack a sense of humor. I lost that for awhile, but it’s back. The return of my sense of humor was the first sign I had that I was healing, and that there was hope yet for me and my broken heart.
I’m as competent as ever at my job, even if my devotion to it (always questionable) is purely mercenary.
I have a lot of hobbies that satisfy my creative impulses. The return of creative impulses is by itself a cause for celebration. Some I was doing before A died, some I started after to fill the many hours that used to belong to him. I cuss a lot when I do some of them, but even so, I feel pride, and accomplishment, and growth as I engage in them.
I love and am loved, in this world and from the next, and appreciate that whole-heartedly now, rather than merely intellectually, as I did early on in this journey.
I have a full life, with a lot of good stuff in it, and I enjoy it as much as possible. And some bereaved folks don’t want to hear that. I didn’t want to hear that when I was new to this road. And yet I did, because I needed so badly to have hope that I wasn’t going to feel that awful forever. But I say “as much as possible” advisedly.
I have my tough hours, days, weeks. I am “better,” not “all better.” I lost a true love and I miss him every hour I’m awake, and a few when I’m asleep, too. There is not much to say beyond that now, although I think it’s enough. I don’t think one can overestimate what it is to miss someone this much, but it’s mostly a silent thing for me now, and if I don’t broadcast it, I think people assume it’s not there. I guess what I’d like to say to the world is “Assume nothing.” If I am not crippled by my pain anymore, do not assume that I don’t hurt. And if I have misty moments when something seemingly innocuous has been said or done, do not assume that I am not moving forward in my life. I am. It’s just that my whole life comes with me, just as yours does. I’m living with the loss; but I am determined to live. And that determination is evidenced by choices. I didn’t have a choice in whether A died or not. But I had other choices to make after. I had to choose to re-engage in my life in progress, and rebuild the parts that had been totally destroyed. I have to choose it every day. I have had to choose to claw my way out of a very deep, dark pit, and have worked hard for every ray of sunshine that now falls on my face.
I think have made significant healing progress in these 18 months. I don’t spend a lot of time rehashing the awful days at the end now. I don’t spend a lot of time asking “Why?” now. I don’t spend a lot of time wishing for things that cannot be, like him coming back. I don’t spend a lot of time being angry at his family, or at circumstances, or at myself. That is not to say I don’t spend any time doing that; I’m only human, and of course I do. But I have done all that, and plenty of it. It was necessary to the process, I think, but for the most part, I’m done with it. My journal entries to him are growing shorter each night, because I only need to tell him what I did with my day, thank him for any signs he sent my way, and tell him I love him, I miss him, good night, and I’ll talk to him tomorrow.
But the loss of him, and the feelings that go with that, will always be there, because there is no undoing it. I will never not miss him. And some of those who haven’t lived through a major loss don’t want to hear that. It scares them. And those who are newly bereaved don’t necessarily want to hear it, either. They’d like to believe there’s going to be a well-marked exit off this highway, unaware for the moment that each of us builds the road we’re on from the crushed boulders of our respective pasts. I wanted to believe that, too, but I suppose that life now isn’t any less linear or tidy than it ever was. It just seemed cleaner and easier in comparison to the unprecedented upheaval and unimaginable pain that losing A brought.
I do not define myself by my loss, but neither do I deny the deep and lasting effect it has, and will have on me. It is the Colorado River to my Grand Canyon. Time may fade the memory of the river that cut it, but the result is indelible and spectacular.
I don’t have it all figured out; I don’t expect to anymore. At the end of the day, I’m just muddling through. I pay attention when I fuck up. I pay attention when I do something right, and I do the best I can at any given moment, just like everyone else.