Veteran
I know that for the rest of North America it has been fall for some time, but autumn steals into the desert more slowly, more subtly, and it has just arrived here in the last week or so. I wore socks today because my feet were cold, and I had a sweater on morning and evening, for the first time since April.
Another season passes, and I think of him in reference to that. How when the seasons changed, his hands became dry and itchy, sloughing off skin like he was a lizard. How October was the month he came here to visit, when we saw Santana, and how he was planning to come the following October, too, and he didn’t make it past July. How we’d have to adjust our chat schedule when Daylight Savings ended in October, and I was an hour later than he again. About how I usually made my travel plans for camp in October, which included him.
Something else has left with the summer, and that is, seemingly, the constant, dull ache of his absence. It’s very strange. I still miss him, but it is no longer visceral, if that makes any sense. I feel settled in a different way, and my missing him seems intellectualized somehow.
Frankly, I’m not sure what to make of it. I’ve been trying to just sit with it and see if I could put my finger on it, and am not sure I’ve been successful. But something is missing now: that intensity of feeling. It seems possible (and I may well jinx myself by saying so) that I have finally stepped off the roller coaster, at least long enough to get myself a soda and hit the bathroom before I stand in line for an hour to get back on it.
For so long, my main goal, my sole task, has been to heal from my loss of A and become a fully functional, fully engaged person again, and I have done so cognizant that it would be a bizarre dance of forward and backward; I never quite knew what each day would bring, emotionally, and I understood that as “normal.” So for 2 years and almost 3 months, I have been somewhat single-minded of purpose, and constantly wary. And now I’m on the plane home from the jungle, asking myself, “What now?”
I think the battle fatigue comparison is pretty apt; grieving is a war between your soul and despair, and you skirmish so often for so long, you learn to sleep with one eye open. During the day, your eyes monitor the terrain for new threats and old enemies. Anyone who sneaks up on you is lucky if they’re only maimed for their trouble. You have seen and felt things that no one but those who were there could ever come close to understanding, many of which you can no longer speak of. You’ve seen your comrades suffer injuries that could just as well have befallen you, watched them lose their minds when it all became too much, and know that it is either luck, or grace, or a bit of both, that allows you the opportunity to make it back alive, and relatively in one piece.
And after all that surviving, it’s a little difficult to know how to slide back into suburbia and go about your life like the rest of the civilians who have no idea what things are really like where you’ve been.
Some of my fellow widows have said that they have missed the up-and-down once it was gone, and I thought they were crazy. I don’t miss it; god no. But the change is going to take some adjustment for me, because I don’t remember exactly how life before A died, or before A came into my life, worked. That was four antebellum years ago. Was it this placid? I find myself still on alert for…what? I don’t know. I tell myself to just savor the simplicity of what I have now, and I try, but it’s hard to trust the universe again, (especially with my doctor’s appointment looming this week). And even if you can, when your sole purpose has become obsolete, it becomes a little disconcerting to fill that time.
That’s an echo of this process in the early days. After A died, I had all this time that used to be ours together—time at work e-mailing and chatting, time in the evenings talking for hours. All this time that rang with the emptiness of his absence and my hollow soul. It seemed endless. I had to slowly start to fill it. I watched a lot of TV. I started reading again. Eventually I picked up my guitar again. I started learning inlay, and doing other crafts. And after a year or so I was surprised to find that my life had seeped in and filled those hours.
Now I have healed enough that the bulk of my emotional activity is not focused on grieving and healing, on self-protection, I have a lot of mental energy free. And it can’t really be filled by the things I do, because those have already filled in what they’re going to. So where does it go? What now? I’m adrift again; less painfully so, but adrift nonetheless.
If I could stop sleeping with one eye open, maybe I could dream some new dreams?