Paradigm shift
I’m still not feeling 100%, and at this point it seems to be an unpleasant gastrointestinal issue (as if there’s any other kind. We’ll leave it at that.) It’s a little concerning because despite the fact that I’ve had myriad opportunities to experience a wide variety of physical infirmities in my 36 years, this one’s new. And this is what I told my friend P at work the other day when she came to check on me after I ended up taking another sick day after leaving work early the day I went back.
“You’re too young to have this much going wrong,” she said.
“Don’t I know it,” I replied.
We talked a little about what it could be and she was concerned by the apparent mystery, as I have to admit I am myself. I mentioned that my family (on my mother’s side) seems to have bowel trouble in general. When she asked what kind of trouble, I told her, and then I remembered that my mom’s sister died of colon cancer. I believe she was just 40 at the time. At the time, I was a child, and really had no conception of how young 40 really was; I know now. I probably shouldn’t have told P about my aunt; now she’s really worried. I told her that I was going to give it another week to work itself out, and if it didn’t, I’d go in to see a doctor, though my faith in the local medical establishment has been approaching zero faster with every appointment I have.
I have always thought about my aunt’s death in terms of how it affected my mother, and my cousins. It devastated my mother, as well it might, and my cousins still deal with the effects 26 years later, many of those the result of their mother not being discussed after her death by their father. I always had an impression of how he dealt (or didn’t) with grief, and that was that he kind of went off the rails and stayed there for the last quarter-century. I think it was just too painful for him to deal with. I could be wrong; I am not living his experience. I’m only viewing it from outside, and we all know how inaccurate a vantage point that tends to be.
My own experience now has given me a different perspective, about him and about all the widows that were already in my life before I lost A. I realize how clueless I was; I never gave their situation much thought beyond, “Gee that’s too bad.” In that, I can hardly hold a grudge toward the people in my life who moved on so quickly after I lost A, or never really got it at all. I was exactly the same. You just don’t know until you know. I’m thinking about them now, though.
My uncle was a young widower, with 2 young girls. E’s aunt was widowed in her 50s; she lost her husband to cancer also. My maternal grandmother was a widow at 53, after my grandfather died of a stroke. By all accounts, he was a real asshole, but I know now that that probably complicated her grief rather than made it easier. My paternal grandmother lost my grandfather when she was in her 70s, but she lived another 11 years without him. E’s grandfather was widowed in his 80s, and while most people would not find that terribly unexpected, I remember seeing that very strong, quiet man with tears running down his cheeks as we sat together at the funeral. It was probably the first time, in all those funerals, that I really began to have an inkling of what it really meant to lose you life partner. Of course I could not know, but I was old enough and aware enough to begin to guess. I guessed at the sadness, but couldn’t have begun to guess the pain and the loneliness that they lived with alone in the homes they’d shared with their spouses.
Since A died, I feel like I know so many widows, and am so much more aware of their existence in the world, on TV, in movies, and such, but that awareness has moved backwards in time as well. I have been surrounded by the widowed for years, and never understood what they were going through. And what I’m most ashamed of is that it never even occurred to me to try to understand. And for that, I am more sorry than I can say.