Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

When the news about Ted Kennedy’s brain tumor came out, there was a lot of talk at the widow board about how perhaps this high-profile patient might result in more attention being paid to cancers of the brain, and perhaps more funding for research, so that others might not have to suffer as we have.

I understand their reasoning, and their hope.  I think we all make cosmic bargains at some point in this journey to the effect of "If I go through this, then perhaps other people will be spared."  There’s a little bit of savior in all of us, I think.  Of course, it never works out that way.  I felt like I’d had a bad enough year or two for everyone I know, but it didn’t stop one of my dearest friend’s daughter from falling and fracturing her neck, and her son from ending up with leukemia.  Apparently, the universe doesn’t make deals on the fly, or my pain is not an exchangeable currency.

As I read about Kennedy, and others’ hopes for research dollars, I have to admit, I felt a little ambivalent.  Not about the research, but rather, about the good it would do.  

I, too, gave money to the American Heart Association, because A died (probably) of sudden cardiac arrest, and the autopsy indicated that he had advanced heart disease.  But the more I’ve learned, about heart disease, about him, and about this life, the more I doubt that anything the AHA could do would have him with me today.  There is a very strong predisposition to heart disease in A’s family.  It took his grandfather at 40; it took his father at 39; it took him at 55, and his younger brother and sister, despite living very healthy lifestyles, also are high-risk, based on tests they had in the wake of A’s passing.  Heart disease is stalking this family in their genes; how do you fight that with research?  Gene therapy isn’t a reality at this point, and a dicey practice at best; humankind frequently does more harm than good when it messes with Mother Nature. 

And then I have to consider A himself.  All the research and cures in the world won’t save a man who doesn’t go to the doctor.  He didn’t live an unhealthy lifestyle.  What was he supposed to do that he wasn’t doing?

And that brings me to the undeniable reality that none of us are getting out of here alive; something will take us in time.   When I hear people talking about research and cures to prevent deaths, it almost sounds as if they’re seriously proposing that death can be prevented, that it’s optional, when at best it can be postponed.

Not that I’m against postponing death; I’m for it, and wish my sweetie had been able to postpone it for much longer.  But I cannot help but feel that there is some benefit to be gained from acknowledging that postponement is our best hope, and that prevention is impossible.  What that might be, I’m not sure.  Maybe it comes back to the fear of death and the separation of it from our lives when it in fact walks every single step with us, a shadow that we deny because it makes us shiver.  And we feel like failures when someone we love dies, which implies that we believe we had the power to beat it.  Do we really have that power, or are we just lucky on those occasions where death must wait?

It’s probably easier for me to consider this intellectually when it comes to Ted Kennedy, because he’s 76 years old, and he’s no one I love.  Considering that many of us have learned the hardest way that even getting to 76 is not guaranteed, you have to figure that if you make it that far, the odds shift significantly against you and every day is a gift.  That every day is a gift anyway is a bit of understanding almost always gained through ordeal.

But I know that those who love Senator Kennedy don’t think he’s lived a long enough life; I can’t blame them.  And I know those whose spouses died from the same thing at an even younger age would love to have those years that they didn’t have.  I would.  And if I had my way, I would fight tooth and nail to forestall death as long as possible for anyone I love, knowing all the time that it was mostly out of my hands.  The metaphysical problem for me in fighting a disease is that we do not know if it’s the battle that is intended to be the most important part of our journey, the death, or both.  I feel like there might be comfort in knowing, but maybe I am wrong.  In any case, even in hindsight, we are only given hints. 

However, if life goes on, as I believe it does, and that death is a doorway rather than an ending, can we assume randomness?  I don’t think I can; and yet, there is little comfort in that, because A is still not here, talking to me every day.  And I don’t know how to live in the tension between the tangible and the unknowable with any sort of grace.  The possibility and hope inherent in such an unseen world is simultaneously my comfort and my curse in my grief.  Had my sweetheart not gone on without me, I wouldn’t care.  I would live my life as I always had; it was his leaving that opened my heart and eyes to this inscrutable something, and that frustrates the hell out of me.  The only non-maddening course of action is to not think about it, but how do you do that once you’ve been introduced to reality beyond what you already knew?  How can you stay down on the farm, focused on an udder and the mud beneath your feet, when you’ve been forced by circumstances to peruse the brochure for Paris and consider your own some-day trip there?

I guess my issue is, what do I do with this newfound knowledge that I cannot find a way to apply in my mundane life to any good effect?  There is a Zen saying that goes, "Before Enlightenment chop wood carry water, after Enlightenment, chop wood carry water."  I’m chopping and I’m carrying, same as always, but I guess I’ve yet to see where the changes wrought by bereavement and grieving have in any way changed me for the better, as one would expect of enlightenment.  As much as I’ve learned, I feel, diminished as a human being by the experience, less than I used to be before, although I suppose that perception is based on the premise that joy is my birthright, when in fact, maybe my birthright, my raison d’etre, is experience.  In which case, I may now be augmented as a human being by having gone through this and lived as both a diurnal creature and one of the darkest night. 

I wish I knew.

I suppose it’s a good sign that I have been looking forward to Memorial Day weekend, instead of sinking into a deep funk.  Memorial Day 2006 was the last time I touched A, kissed him, hugged him, and watched him through tears in my eyes as I went through security at the airport.  He always told me not to cry, that we’d be together again soon.  He was wrong that time.  I have had a few thoughts in the last week or so of “Memorial weekend was our last trip together,” but that’s as far as it went.  Mostly, I’ve really been looking forward to the extra day off, and that has been my focus.  Another sign of healing.  And it’s not the only one.

In other news, I’ve been doing a lot of shopping lately—dresses and skirts and cute tops.  Things that are not at all the uniform I dressed myself in the day after I found out he died until recently:  t-shirt and jeans, or shorts.   Every day.

It started as a form of mourning, black for the 21st century.  I was clean, not naked, and at work.  It was all I could manage, and accomplishing even that much wore me out for the rest of the day.  I wore no makeup, no perfume, no jewelry, and just combed my hair once in the morning, and that was it for the rest of the day.  I just couldn’t care about such frivolous things.  And I found I had new contempt for the human body in general, given that I was living the proof that it could just betray you at any moment, and the idea of attending to the aesthetics of such a flaky piece of equipment seemed absurd.  Plus, if the soul was the important bit, as it seemed to me it was, the meat hardly mattered.

Yeah, I was bitter.  And lost.

The jewelry was the first to come back, and then only earrings, because I always wear earrings, and anything else seemed to lack propriety.  Plus, you can only wear so much jewelry with t-shirts and jeans.  The perfume took a lot longer, because I always sprayed the cards I sent him with my perfume, including the one that was going to go out in the mail the day I found out he’d died.  I didn’t put on makeup until 18 months out, in January of this year, when my friend and I were hanging out at Saks in San Francisco and I had an impulse to have my makeup done at one of the counters.  

The clothes took longer, because it was still my signal that I was not myself.  Not that anyone else noticed or cared; I doubt anyone at work wondered, “What happened with her?  She used to be such a sharp dresser, and now she’s just given up.”  But I knew, and I didn’t want anything to be expected of me if I decided to spiff up.  There was an additional complication, too:  after the initial grief weight loss, when I lived for weeks on Pepto and very little food because the thought of eating was repulsive to my mind and stomach, I have put on weight and a lot of the clothes I was wearing at the time before his passing no longer fit.  And I felt pretty crappy and defeated about that, too.  So I wore what I had that fit, which was jeans and t-shirts.

I’m not even sure now what the trigger was that made me decide I needed new duds, but in addition to all the healing I’ve done on the grief front thus far, I’ve been doing some work in the realm of physical self-acceptance, and am giving up self-hate and body shame.  I won’t bore you with all the details of my inner process, but the end result is that I decided I deserved clothes that fit, flattered, and made me feel good, even though I am and will continue to be a fat woman.  So I’ve been buying pretty things and if I do say so myself, I look damn good.  And what’s more, I feel better when I look good.

Shopping.  She’s writing about shopping.  Yes I am, because it is not the shopping that is important here; it’s what it says about where I am:

• I’m caring again how I look.
• I get out of my head occasionally and am living in my body a bit more lately.
• I’m not trying to hide behind my own drab camouflage; I don’t feel the need to be quite so protected anymore.
• Working on my self-acceptance issues means that grief has moved, at least slightly, out of the spotlight as my greatest psychological task of the moment.
• Life is a little lighter now, in that I don’t think automatically of shopping and fashion as completely useless and beyond trivial.  Sure it’s trivial, but I’m ready for a life that isn’t quite so fraught at all times.
• I realized that I really like wearing dresses.  I’d forgotten, I guess.  I used to wear them, almost exclusively, for work when he was still here.  So in wearing them again, I’m regaining more of myself, bit by bit.
• He’d really like these dresses, I think; the thought makes me smile…a bit wistfully, but smile nonetheless.

It’s 97 degrees in San Jose today, as a heat wave toasts the Bay area.  I saw that, and was thinking that if he were here, he’d be downing liquids by the quart in his shop, wearing one of his sleeveless tops and his requisite Cabela shorts.  His shop had a large garage-type door that opened to the outside that he’d have open while he worked, so while he was sheltered, he was virtually outside, and didn’t have any air conditioning.  And then I was sad as I "realized" that he wouldn’t be drinking anything on this hot day; man doesn’t even have a body anymore. 

It’s funny how the mind works.  My first thought was "if he were here…," so clearly, the fact that he is not is not lost on me, and yet somehow it was the second thought that surprised me with an emotional response to that fact.  Same brain, same train of thought, but the emotional content of two adjacent thoughts was so different.

If I cannot understand my own mind, how could I ever hope to understand the entire universe?

The most horrifyingly awful time in my grieving journey was (unsurprisingly) in the first days and weeks, because I felt like a vault door had been irrevocably slammed shut between me and A.   That I was literally cut off from him, with no hope of appeal, or goodbye, or either of us passing through that door ever again.  It seemed the cruelest of cruelties.

He was an atheist with an open mind.  He could not say there was not a God, or no afterlife, but nothing he’d experienced had made him believe that there was.  I was an atheist with a few unexplainable experiences under my belt.  I had no use for religion (still don’t), but my default was that there were things that happened that we could not explain…yet.  Human conception was a mystery until this century, too, and it stood to reason that other mysterious things might turn out to have natural causes as well.  We both agreed that we didn’t know, though, and made a pact that if one of us died and found out we’d been wrong, we’d try to let the other one know.  Funny how we did that, never once imagining that events would test that pact sooner rather than later.

He sent me a sign the very day I found out he’d died, but I was in such shock I wasn’t sure what to think of what had happened; all I knew was that it was highly unusual, and it certainly would not have escaped my notice.  My A is a patient soul, however, and though it took some time, he made it known to me that he was around, through signs and dreams and numinous experiences so life-altering and personal I don’t know that I want to share them.  But they made (and continue to make) all the difference for me, and made it possible for me to try to live again.  It wasn’t easy, of course, but it was easier knowing he was out there, even as much as I hated that he wasn’t here. 

A lot of my anger was, and remains (when it flares up), about how we were cheated, separately and as a couple.  He was starting a new life, had a beautiful grandchild he was smitten with and another grandchild on the way.  He was in love with a woman who made no secret of the fact she adored him.  I hated that it had all been cut short for him.  Now I take comfort from the belief that he goes on, living his new life even if I cannot imagine what it’s like. 

I go forward in my life with him as not only a part of my past, but also as a part of my present.  I live my life knowing he is with me, and I’m grateful he lets me know that he is.  Allowances have to be made for the new context, of course.  We are never going to make love again in my lifetime, but for in my dreams.  Our days of talking back and forth for hours are over for the time being.  I will never again sit next to him in his truck, picking out music for us to listen to as he drove us out to explore the Golden State.  And I don’t like it, but there’s nothing I can do about it.  Nevertheless, I absolutely continue to have a relationship with him.  I believe A is just in the next room, that he does communicate with me in his way, and that there is absolutely no reason I cannot talk to him, share my day with him, as I always did, work out any unfinished business with him that comes up, and continue the relationship that has been going on literally forever, if it’s true that we are as old as the universe itself.  If I believe that his soul lives on (and I do), what sense would it make for me to put a moratorium on talking to him, thinking about him as an active, living being living his own new life, as I am, for the next 0-50 years of my life until we are once again in the same plane of existence?  Why would I give my beloved the silent treatment for decades upon decades?  That doesn’t work for me.

And yet, that seems to be the prevailing paradigm for grief work, at least in popular culture.  Set aside the past and move on from it.  What’s done is done.  Stiffen that upper lip, and head once more into the breach.  Life goes on.  I cannot disagree that life goes on, with or without our approval; however, I do disagree that life must go on entirely without our loved ones who have passed.  And know I’m not the only one.

The "move on" path of grief work, as it turns out, doesn’t reflect how it actually works for many, many people who end up feeling like they’ve somehow failed the grieving coursework if putting their loss of a loved one behind them is not something they can do, or is not something they necessarily want to do.  The bereaved, among ourselves, sometimes make the distinction between "moving forward with" and "moving on from," but overall the tone within this community, and definitely from the outside, is that we’re suppose to place our past, and the people who existed within it, firmly behind us, dust ourselves off, and start this new life with nary a backward glance, and feel a little guilty, inadequate, and "stuck" in those moments where we find doing so impossible.

I thought I’d bought my last grief book awhile ago, but the other day I ordered a new one.  This one promises to discuss the grieving process from a point of view different from the traditional "it happened, accept it, and move on from it" stance that is the thrust of so much grief therapy.    This author posits that it is the creation of a new relationship with the dead that makes healing possible, rather than the divorcing of oneself from them.  The latter will just cause trauma on top of trauma, discouraging healing rather than promoting it.  This is of interest to me, because it’s what I believe.

I have found my way to a belief, a belief many others have found before me, that this world is separated from the next by only a veil, and that while we do perceive reality, we do not perceive all of it all the time.  It is a milestone of a child’s development when they begin to understand that an object out of sight still exists; perhaps it is a spiritual milestone when we begin to understand that reality we cannot see still exists as well.  We are sometimes given hints and brief glimpses of the greater reality, just enough to give us hope, or pause, or food for thought.  This has been my experience, not starting with the loss of A, but absolutely brought home for me since he died. 

We had one kind of relationship.  Now we have another.  C.S. Lewis, in his book A Grief Observed, talked about the inevitability of widowhood in a marriage:  "…for all pairs of lovers, without exception, bereavement is a universal and integral part of our experience of love.  It follows marriage as normally as marriage follows courtship or as autumn follows summer.  It is not a truncation of the process but one of its phases; not the interruption of the dance, but the next figure.  We are ‘taken out of ourselves’ by the loved one while she is here.  Then comes the tragic figure of the dance in which we must learn to be still taken out of ourselves though the bodily presence is withdrawn, to love the very Her, and not fall back to loving our past, or our memory, or our sorry, or our relief from sorrow, or our own love."

It is the rare couple who will die simultaneously, and this, too, is a stage of the relationship, to live and love through like other hardships.  That’s the deal when you love someone forever.  On my wiser days, I feel that bereavement has taught me the meaning of true unconditional love.  There is little that A can do for me now; all he can do is be and all I can do is know that he is.  The very Him of him IS, and that is the part that I have always loved.  And in that one sense, that very important sense, nothing is changed between us, despite the appearance that everything has changed.

I don’t know what will happen in the coming years.  I don’t know if I will rely on him less or more, or how that relationship will evolve.  What I do know, though, is that my love for him is in the presence tense.  And it will remain so.

I haven’t been writing because I’ve been teetering on the brink of a true depression, the kind where you feel totally hopeless, helpless, and tears are always just at the surface.  I’ve been there before; I don’t want to go there again.  And I had this sense that writing about it might end up being the thing that would send me right over the precipice.  So I waited in nervous, concerned silence to see what would happen.  Depression, once you’ve made its acquaintance, can be like some creepy, over-familiar guy, and you know that if you give it more than a nodding acknowledgement, it will take that as all the encouragement it needs to camp out on your porch and stalk you day and night, breathing down your neck and never giving you a moment’s peace.  I am still at a point in my grief journey where, while I’m doing pretty well most of the time, my moods are still variable, my surefootedness vulnerable.  I cannot afford depression on top of that.  I just don’t know how I would deal with that, but it would probably be poorly.

Depression scares me, because this, like the bad one I once went through, seemed to have no obvious and discernable genesis.  It’s just that a few things go badly, and then seem to get worse, and the disequilibrating power of every new genuine issue that could reasonably expected to tank your mood is magnified.  Bizarrely, it was easier when grief was my biggest problem, overshadowing all other stuff now made petty in comparison.  If I was despondent, sad, irritable, it was clear why, to me and everyone else.

Once I found my way back to the land of the living, (or at least the walking wounded), I realized that all the emotional up and downs that are the human condition were still there; they had just been eclipsed by my grief.  My friend, the massage therapist, tells me that the body can only deal with so much pain at one time, and attends to the worst pain.  Which is why when I finally got that knot in my right shoulder blade worked out, I could recognize that the left side was pretty bunged up, too.  When did that happen?  Well, it had been happening all along, but I couldn’t feel it when I was too busy feeling the other pain.  This phenomenon seems to be true for emotions as well. 

I am not grief-free now; I do not expect to be impervious to grief at any point in the future, though I do expect I will get stronger.  As it stands, though, my grief has moved out of the spotlight most of the time.  It is no longer a howling storm that threatens to topple me with each gust; it’s more like an ever-present wind that rustles the very tops of the trees.  It’s there; I can hear it, but it doesn’t really threaten me for the most part.  Of course, that does leave room for the occasional weak branch to have been rustled one time too many, broken off, and sent crashing down upon my head.  But that’s an unusual event.

Despite all I have learned from grief about not trying to think your way through feelings, not intellectualizing an emotional process, when depression sets in and threatens to stay, it’s only natural for me to consider sources and solutions.  There’s a certain amount of reflection that is prudent and necessary to engage in if you want to be reasonably self-aware in this life, and I figure it’s better for me to stop it sooner rather than later, if I can.  I thought a lot about it, wondered what had brought me to this place.  Maybe it was the sadiversary of my dog’s death.  Maybe it was all the repairs I’ve been doing on the house.  Maybe it was my friend dumping me.  Maybe it was unarticulated grief.  Maybe it was just April.  Maybe it was none of those things.  I couldn’t put my finger on what might’ve brought me that low, and why now.  And as I tried to figure it out, I realized that in addition to all the other feelings I was stewing in, I was angry. 

I resented having to figure anything out.  I resented having to fix me.  I wasn’t the one who broke me; he did that, when he died and left me.  I was just fine.  And now I have to figure out how to clean up a mess inside me that I didn’t make.  It would be one thing if I was out engaged in self-destructive activities; I’d have to take responsibility for the clean-up of that.  But I wasn’t.  I was just loving a man and loving my life, minding my own damn business.  I didn’t sign up for this.

Neither did anyone else whom tragedy struck.  And I know that.  Shit happens; terrible, tragic shit, and I know I have two choices:  be destroyed by it, or fix me, whether I did the breaking or not.  That’s called "being a grown-up"; you have to fix all the messes, because no one else is going to do it for you, especially when it comes to the emotional realm.  I can have my tantrum; I can have it again and again if I want to.  I think I will; I think being able to say, "I resent the hell out of this," while it doesn’t solve anything, is at least self-validating enough for me to feel heard, if by no one but myself.  More often than not, I’m the only person I have to convince of the validity of my feelings, choices, and life, anyway, and it’s always the hardest sell, isn’t it?   But in the end, I will still have the same choice, and I don’t want to choose destruction.  Yet I’m not sure how "fixed" I am able to be on this score; how much "better" is possible?  I will have to live into that knowledge, I guess, one day at a time.

I decided that I wasn’t going to be able to figure out what was causing my funk, not definitively anyway, so I decided to focus on trying to get out of it, regardless.  I brought out strong medicine last Monday night:  a DVD of my favorite comedian, Eddie Izzard.  And it worked as I’d hoped; I laughed and laughed despite not feeling much like laughing the whole day up until that point, or the two weeks prior.  In the middle of all that, I had the strongest image of A laughing until his eyes teared up when we watched the same video.  Until that moment, I’d forgotten we’d watched it together, and hadn’t really connected him at all with that particular video.  Had I, I might’ve chosen a different one, just to avoid the sad connection.  The memory wasn’t sad; what’s sad is that memories are all I have now—that’s what gets me.  And I was trying to get out of sadness, not fall back into it.  But I loved nothing better than to make him laugh, or see him laugh.  To have that vivid memory of his laughing face come back, unbidden, seems more like a gift than anything else. 

And it started me back from the edge, one tentative step at a time.  When I went to bed Monday night, I said "Maybe tomorrow will be a little better."  And it was, a little.  When I went to bed Tuesday night, I said the same, and Wednesday was a little better yet.  I kept that up, until Saturday when I felt safe saying that I had averted depression (this time).   And yet I could only write about it today, feeling like I had enough distance and enough strength to talk about it without feeling it.