A dark and tarnished coin
“It’s so hard to say this, as hard as it’s been for me, but it really could’ve been, and could be, worse. How is it possible to feel “lucky” in my bereavement, when it is absolutely the worst thing that’s ever happened to me? That blows my mind. Feeling grateful you made your death so “easy” on me because of our circumstances, because of the way you left, because we were in love when you died. All those things have made this harder on me in some ways, and yet it removed me from sources of pain at the same time. Man, that’s a mindfuck. I don’t know how to reconcile that, other than to not even try, to accept both as the whole reality, two sides of the same coin. But regardless, I just wish you hadn’t died, and left me here, missing you and pondering Zen koans of the most cruelly unanswerable kind.”
The above is an excerpt from a recent journal entry, a journal in which I write to A. It was a brief mention of something that has occurred to me here and there in this journey, and which struck home again recently as the result of reading the widow board and chatting with a member there. But for the first time the other night, I realized that some of the sources of my greatest pain in this journey may well have been my unwitting saviors in same.
I had no warning at all of A’s heart disease. I had no expectation that death was imminent, but for a vague sense of doom I felt the month before. He was here one day and gone the next, and I still do not understand how a person just…stops. I have a picture of A at a lighthouse. The lighthouse is still there, but nowhere in the world does his body exist anymore, except for ashes sifted to the forest floor at the feet of giant redwoods. You could search the whole world for the man in my pictures and never find him, despite the fact that the pictures prove he was here, that I touched him. My mind has wrestled with this from the first moment I knew he’d died, and again and again and again. Every match ends up with me surrendering, exhausted. How does a seemingly healthy man just die, just disappear?
And yet, the fact is, I did not have to watch him suffer the ravages of disease and time, as others have. We were both spared that. Every memory I have of him is of a vibrant, strong, active man. As time goes on, I see that as a strange gift unto itself, knowing what horrible memories assault others who were there until the bitter end, and thereafter.
My being here and him being there caused no end of problems for me after he died; far more problems than the distance ever caused when he was alive. I wasn’t there when he died. I never saw his body. I wasn’t there for the memorial (though would’ve been, if it had been up to me.) I wasn’t there to help go through his things. All of these things have tormented me.
But I wasn’t there when he died, desperately and futilely waiting for the ambulance that almost without question would’ve arrived too late. I will never have the image of his body, bereft of the soul that I love, seared into my memory. I never had to make the heart-wrenching decisions of what to keep and what to get rid of, or shed the tears over the terrible wrongness of being in a position to make those decisions. I was visiting my friend and her mother, newly widowed, this past weekend. Part of why my friend was in town was to continue taking care of her father’s affairs, and she asked her mother for her father’s wallet, because she needed his driver’s license. Her mother went to get it, and when she brought it back, I thought how wrong it is for any wife to have her husband’s wallet. It’s supposed to be in his pocket, not on a shelf or a cabinet or in a drawer. I never had to face that.
Because of our circumstances, I had no legal rights in regards to him. But neither did I have the responsibilities that those rights would’ve conferred upon me. Your average widow has to deal with a mountain of painfully practical stuff for a much longer time than is reasonable, and often has to fight to get it done, and that’s just for starters. Not me. In the end, all I had to worry about was dealing with my own grief. And E kept the household functioning for a year and a half until I started being a functioning member of the family again.
A’s family and friends washed their hands of me within year of his death, and it hurt me a great deal. I still regret that things turned out as they did. I would still do just about anything for any one of them, despite everything, and I doubt they ever even think of me. I think that’s a shame.
But I read stories of those whose “outlaws” are making their lives a living hell, actively harassing them, stealing from them, making mischief with the kids, judging them for what they do and don’t do, evicting them, and I realize that there are worse things than being ignored. Much worse.
I don’t know what to make of this. Is this the silver lining on a receding thunderhead? The very things that have caused me so much pain have also potentially spared me even more. And yet, I never asked to be spared; I would’ve done it all. I would’ve been there until the end, no matter how bad it got, because that’s what you do when you love someone. I would’ve been the one to identify him, and pass my hands over his eyes to close them, even though it would’ve devastated me. I would’ve run my hands through his ashes and scattered them to the wind as the tears joined the rain running down my face, if I’d been given the chance. I would’ve sorted through every single thing of his and filed paperwork and taken the shingle down from in front of his shop after locking the door for the last time. And every one of these actions would have hurt like hell; of that, I have no doubt. But I would’ve done them for him, and for his family, and for me, because that’s what love does.
But this cup, overflowing with the bitterest wine, passed from me, and I don’t know why, any more than I know the why of any of it. Perhaps I was spared nothing at all. It didn’t feel like it at the time, but the more stories I hear and read, the more perspective they give me that perhaps I didn’t experience all the colors on the spectrum of pain and difficulty. And while I can recognize that, I can’t quite muster up gratitude for it. Not yet, anyway.