Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I have returned from vacation, a little more sunburned and a little less rested than I would’ve liked, but otherwise it was a good trip.  I’m glad I went.

I learned that that I can be 2000 miles away from anywhere we’d ever been together and still miss him a great deal, regardless of how much fun I’m having.  This was not a particularly shocking realization, I must admit.  Upon my return, I caught up on blogs, and Annie wrote of living and grieving, that the two were not mutually exclusive, or serial, but rather that you can, and do, do both at once.  I think that’s an excellent point.  I think that’s what I’ve been doing, trying to do so consciously whenever the grip of grief let up enough to let me pull just a little bit further away from the pain of my loss of him.

Part of the reason I agreed to go on this trip is that my parents aren’t getting any younger, and I am too, too aware that people can just disappear from your life without warning, leaving you with a heap of regrets to sort into piles of “shoulda,” “woulda,” and “coulda.”  I do not delude myself that I can avoid all regrets when the end comes, but sometimes we have the insight to know there are some we can avoid.  I didn’t want the phone to ring one day and leave me hating myself in hindsight for having skipped the trip.  I would never say so to them, of course; I just add it to the list of things we don’t really talk about.  But I would wager that a great many things in this life are done in service to our knowledge of our mortality, a keener awareness for some than for others.

My parents are in their late 50s, not old, but then again, neither was A, and yet it seems Death was unimpressed by his relative youth and disinclined to spare him for my sake.  I look into their faces and I cannot help but think of A, who was younger than both of them when he died, but is no longer here.  Would I trade?  There is a selfish part of me that would have him back at any cost.  But at the cost of having one of my parents know the pain that they have no idea I carry the scars of?  A pain that must come to one or the other of them sooner or later?  Perhaps I’ll just consider myself blessed that that choice will never be mine to make.  

I cannot help but wonder, “Will they be here a year from now?”  I have no reason to believe they will, or that I will, or that anyone will.  Not anymore.  I assume nothing; actually, that’s not true.  I assume the worst now.  A dozen times a week, I ponder the early death I’m sure is going to be mine.  And then I think about how I have my paternal grandmother’s mouth, and how she and her sisters lived into their late 80s and mid-90s, and if I follow the female side of that line, the bitter laugh will be on me as I live long enough to bury another husband.  I fear that possibility, but am half-resigned to it, because that would just be my luck.  Not much I can do about it, regardless; I know that.

My mother has a heart condition she doesn’t give us all the details of; the episodes are worse and more frequent than she lets on.  The men on my dad’s mother’s side have a tendency to die 20 years before their sisters did, and I don’t know which side of the family my dad will favor.  My brother, because I dared to discuss it with him, suspects that one or both of them will be gone within a decade.  I would not be surprised if he’s right, and I can never decide if I’m being morbid or realistic.  Perhaps they are the same, have always been, and only are differentiated by those who still possess the comfort of their myths.

I missed A there.  I missed E terribly as well.  When you are the only singleton with 3 other couples, you tend to be more aware of all that is missing.  And I noticed that while I’d imagined that this vacation would be a break from my “real life,” it was really only a break from work.  My real life goes with me everywhere; that is the way of things, I suppose.  I had no major epiphanies, no signs that spoke to me of his presence while I was there, no insights into my journey other than that it continues.  All I had was the dual tracks of the external moments and the internal ones that sometimes played in harmony and sometimes clashed, and I just tried to keep time.

My last full day there, I went out late in the hot, humid afternoon with my brother and sister-in-law for coffee and to get a souvenir shirt for E.  I found one, paid for it, and then I found myself strangely drawn to the sleeveless shirts on another rack, and as I flipped through them I realized that E would never wear such a shirt.  But A did, all the time.  I was looking for a souvenir shirt for a man whose strong, beautiful body has been scattered to the winds for well over a year.

These things are only mildly surprising now, these orphaned impulses of love.  And I have never in my life been quite so eager to get home.