The saying goes something like “life is what happens while you were making other plans”. One of those walks, talks and quacks like a duck cliches whose truth you can’t deny. Life doesn’t tolerate back seat drivers, and that is what most of us our. If you aren’t going to get into the driver’s seat then I guess you shouldn’t be surprised at where you end up. Bad analogy? Not really. You have only so much control when you are driving. You are governed by traffic laws, weather and road construction. Life throws up its own versions of roadblocks and it has its own set of rules, one of them being mortality. There is an endpoint to every journey and life is no different.

A common theme among the widowed is a sense of the surreal when assessing their lives. Places that once seemed as familiar as your own face suddenly are as unrecognizable as the face that stares back at you from the mirror each day.  The strong desire to let yourself drift along fights a daily battle with the sense that where you are heading is not someplace you would have ever chosen to be. It reminds me of that Talking Heads song,

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful

Wife

And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here? 

It’s easier to let things happen to you than to take charge and change your life or in the case of being widowed, salvage it and start over. I have seen many a person just give up and bend over. And why not? It’s effortless Being a victim of circumstances may suck but it doesn’t require any planning or major expenditures of anything other than the willingness to prostrate yourself before every ill that comes your way. And I suspect (actually I know) that those of us who do not fire up the GPS and look for a new route have probably always ridden at the back of the bus. How does the chorus go?

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

One of the founders of the WET widow group back in Iowa, Sandy Searcy, suggested that I start a widows group when I was settled in up here. Rob has even brought the idea of my doing that up from time to time, but like my working with At-Risk students, I would eventually find it too difficult to be supportive in that benign Oprah-ish way. Eventually I would start kicking asses and I won’t add “in a loving and supportive manner” because I doubt that it would be perceived in that manner. Some people are too much the author of there post-disaster lives for me to muster sympathy enough to mask my total frustration with them. While I can completely empathize with the need to sort things our, I can’t understand letting your life go down the shitter while you are assessing and reorganizing.

There is another song by a group called Switchfoot that I began listening to after Will died. It talked about how the past is over. There is no “do over” and in the now you have to take stock and ask yourself the hard question.

this is your life, are you who you want to be

this is your life, are you who you want to be

this is your life, is it everything

you dreamed that it would be

when the world was younger and you had everything to lose

I am not always the decisive, move ahead person I portray myself to be. I have moments when I am stuck and exasperating as my husband can attest to, but even when I don’t have the answers and the GPS is down, I have a sense of the need to know, to think, to reevaluate and to move. Even if the move is lateral, as long as its not back, it’s all good.