Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

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.