I guess I could try to be remorseful about feelings that are inadvertently hurt when I base my advice or responses to queries on my own experiences rather than adhering to the accepted standards of the majority. Which rules by the way. Most emphatically. But, everything I know about widowhood, surviving in general really, I learned from my family. The standard response to death (or lesser tragedy or even just upheaval) was that life goes on, and no one can live your life for you. If you have issues, deal with them. If you need help, ask. Whining is okay but be prepared for solutions to be offered when you do, and be equally be prepared to be told to knock it off if you are “all whine and no work”.  Grief is never over, but living isn’t over either until you’re dead yourself. 

In the beginning, people play the event, or events, over and over. As if in doing so they can change the outcome. Then comes the unrelenting pain and despair that just guts you. That doesn’t last though. Eventually, what trips us all up is living again. And that is where people get stuck. How do I do such and such now that XYorZ has happened? The answer is, of course, differently. From many of us this answer is compounded with….alone. It’s easy from there to allow yourself to slip from grief to self-pity and finally into learned helplessness, but it is not inevitable.

From day one of Will’s illness, I was a problem solver because I had to be. Did I whine. Yep, a lot. Was I a drama queen? Sure, often. Were people patient with me? Most assuredly they were. When it was clear that was what I needed, they were there to listen, and when it was just as clear I was past my “born on date” for a particular issue, I was told that too and in no uncertain terms. And was I appreciative. No. But, it usually brought me back to my senses, and I found a solution to whatever was plaguing me, or I learned to wait it out. Make a plan and work towards it. Can anyone do that? Most people can. Most people do. At a certain point past whatever their tragedy might be, and it’s not as long as some people think, most people begin to move forward. They have a goal. They make a plan. They put it into action, and they work at it and tinker with it until they reach that goal or discover they need a different one. 

And I wasn’t always like this. For example, during the days when Will and I were struggling to have a baby, I found it easier to ask “why me?” and spin all manner of drama queen scenarios out of my frustration. I taxed people’s patience. Will’s especially. And I wish now that I had been mature enough, and secure enough in myself, to have approached things differently. I eventually pulled things together, worked a plan and we had Katy. But even as we went through that last IVF attempt, I had already mapped out a fall back plan. I was learning. Moving forward.

It’s not a magical day, the day you take those first steps. It’s just a day like the ones that led up to it, and the ones that follow. For me, the day I began my forward momentum in earnest after Will died, was the day before the first anniversary of his death. I sat in my kitchen and had a talk with him. It was time to move forward. I knew that and in a way he confirmed it for me. The heart rendering grief served no healthy purpose and even though it would have been easier to let it continue, it was time to stop. 

The people I admire most worked early on to integrate their grief into their lives in a positive, future oriented way. They taught me all I know. They showed me when and how to use my life as an example. How empathy and compassion are healing for the giver and the receiver, and when the best thing you can do for someone is to tell them, it’s time to pick up the pieces and begin the process of putting life back together. 

A friend is in the process of deciding to separate from her husband. It’s painful to me because I know how hard she has worked on her relationship and how much she wants to still be able to save it, and how badly she is hurting. I hope she can turn things around. At one point a few months back, when things were very rocky, she joked that it was a good things she had gotten a life insurance policy on her husband and that perhaps when she returned from vacation she would find he’d been in a car accident and killed. Problem solved. Of course she didn’t mean that. Didn’t mean it anymore than my mother did when she used to wish that my dad’s drinking would just kill him, so she wouldn’t have to put up with it anymore. Having lost my husband, statements like these, even when they aren’t meant, bother me a lot. I can’t imagine wishing that kind of pain on myself as a solution to a problem. Widowed people are often driven to distraction by the marital complaints, griping of any kind really, of their family, friends, coworkers and total strangers overheard at the grocery. It bothered me a lot too in the beginning too, but now I just marvel at their naivete. These people are lucky to be able to “whine”. Lucky to be so innocent. Lucky to have not been so sorely tested. Now I am bothered much more by those who have been where I have been and still can waste time on the most trivial of things. Life is too short to choose to chase your tail on a regular basis. I can listen to someone talk about their spouse, their sadness , their attempts to redefine their lives forever, but I can’t listen to these same people on subjects that aren’t that big of a deal because they are fixable.  Ot understand how everything in life is suddenly the direct result of being widowed. Most problems that arise have solutions if you take the time to sit and figure them out.

I guess it all boils down the that “eye of the beholder” thing I have written about in other entries. What I see as surviving, someone else sees as “getting over”. What I consider a mole hill is the Andes to someone else. Still, in my opinion, it’s better to push through and take what control you can, rather than let the events of your life sweep you along to places you might have a hard time getting back from.