Getting the last word
Time has passed since my sweetie died. Oceans of tears and torrents of words have passed. Pages and friends have turned.
I realized the other night that on some level I thought this was temporary, and I suppose it is. I get stronger every day, so the active grieving is temporary, and this life is temporary. This body is not immortal. But that’s not what I mean. I think I just realized that A was no longer a part of my daily life, unless I evoked him. It’s not that I didn’t know that; a person cannot drop out of your life for a year and a half without you noticing, especially when that person is important to you. I guess what I realized was that I was no longer looking for him in my daily life. I no longer miss our habits that were, so out of practice are we; I just miss him.
It sneaked up on me, as so many of these epiphanies do. Those moments are bittersweet, when I realize I’ve let go of something I had been clinging to so tightly, with a death grip, as it were. It gives me pause, this loosening of my grasp on some aspect of him, because I never wanted to let him go in the first place, and here I am doing it by such infinitesimal steps that I am surprised to find that I had done so before I quite noticed it. On the other hand, I realize it means that I am healing, and that I have become more comfortable with his place in my life, in my world, in my spring sky, and in my quietest heart.
Part of that is just accepting reality. I read a book once where the author said that it’s up to you if you fight reality; you’ll only lose all of the time. And, I would add, you’ll wear yourself out. I accept reality, sooner or later, because I just get tired of fighting it. It takes a lot of energy to live in a world of “should,” and anger at being consistently betrayed by reality takes up a lot of that.
Years ago, in my twenties, I was a worrier. I worried and obsessed over situations, rewriting them in my head, and mentally role-played a million conversations that never ended up happening. And I was tired of it. I found Dale Carnegie’s book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, and it changed my life, or at least started me down the right road. I finished the book and had a handful of good stop-worrying thoughts to get me off my hamster wheel. One of them was, “Accept the worst and work from there to improve things.” That’s what I’ve tried to keep in mind throughout this journey with grief. The worst happened, and my only goal since A died was to work from there to improve my life. Early on, it didn’t take much; I can remember the amazement I felt when I caught myself smiling sincerely. I suppose, given a few minutes thought, I could imagine things worse than what happened to me, but what purpose would that serve other than to scare me?
The result of having come this far is that I now find myself processing the things that happened to me during grieving my loss of A as often, or perhaps more often now, than the loss itself. It’s a little weird, like analytical déjà vu. But I think it needs to be done, to put the grief resulting from grieving to rest as surely as the grief resulting from A’s death.
Like last night, I was put in mind of something that one of my best friends in the world said to me in the weeks after A died. I was railing about how unfair it was, and why couldn’t we have had the 20 years we envisioned and the usual “Why???” And she said, “Would it have been easier for you if you’d had the 20 years?”
“No,” I said.
“Then why not now?”
The implication was that now was as good a time as any. I thought it was a horrible thing to say, cavalierly dismissing my desire to have time with my loved one as foolish and ungrateful. I still do. There were a pile of similar comments launched my way, as well. My friend loves me, but it seemed she had little patience with my grief for A, and it hurt, because there are few I trusted with everything, and she was one of them.
And then one day, when I’d been on about it again, she said to me that I should count myself lucky for having had the two years, as some people didn’t even get that. She said she’d have gladly taken two years of wonderful, even if it ended the same way. Many years and 3 marriages didn’t bring her that kind of love. And I realized that maybe she couldn’t be sympathetic because she was jealous. Because it is true that I have been very lucky in love, lucky beyond expectation, beyond the norm, beyond, frankly, what is orthodox. She told me, in almost as many words, that I should be grateful and shut up because some people never had what I had to lose.
That said, I realized that as shocked as I’d been at the time, and as baffled as I was later as I pondered her coldness, I had never really been able to respond, to her or to my own satisfaction. And the moment had remained a burr under my saddle. But last night, I was ready to tackle that little bit of history. I’d become strong enough to examine it, and say my piece.
What my friend didn’t understand is that gratitude and grief are two very different things, and the former doesn’t mitigate the latter. Of course I was grateful to know him and love him, and be loved by him. Of course I am. But that doesn’t make his absence okay; it doesn’t make me stop missing him; it doesn’t make me stop yearning for his brilliant conversation and his loving touch. Gratitude is what’s left as the pain fades, but for it to be left behind when the grief tide recedes, it had to be there to begin with. The pain is a sovereign power in its own right.
Would it have been easier to lose him after 20 years than after 2? No. It would’ve hurt just as bad as it has. But I would’ve had 20 years of enjoying him, and that would’ve made my life better. And had he passed at 75 instead of at a too-young 55, it would’ve made more sense to me. I don’t expect to make it much past 75 myself; the actuaries tell me it’s a long shot.
I was grateful. I knew I was lucky. Of course I wanted him to stay in my life in the same way as he had been. And I wasn’t wrong to want that.
*deep breath*
There. I’ve been waiting a year and a half to say that.