grief

Positive Attitude Gets a Bad Rap


I ran across a blog post of a woman questioning the feasibility of a positive outlook while going through hard or tragic times.

We are often sold a load of newborn diaper doo when it comes to attitude and reality and how one affects the other. The whole Oprah induced “secret” frenzy set the lucky ducks to head nodding like bobble heads in the rear window of a Pinto and made everyone else feel like a colossal failure at best and cursed by the gods at worst.

There is no reason NOT to attempt a positive outlook in the face of disasters, but reality is reality. Sometimes it will bite your head off if you let your vision cloud over in rosy hues.

A positive attitude can concede points to a dismal reality and still be a useful, worthwhile exercise that will certainly take a person farther than pessimism, anger, blame, defeatism and any other favorite shoulder shrugging, curling into a fetal position posture a person might favor in bleak times.

I went with positive in my own situation with the whole dying husband thing. He’d lost his job due to his illness right before we moved into a larger home with its bigger matching mortgage. I made up my mind early that coming out on the other side and being happy (that being relative) was where I had to focus, or I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed every morning.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t complain or despair or stomp my feet. I would sometimes no sooner solve a dilemma – like needing a daycare for my blind, demented 29-year-old husband – when I was confronted with another problem, but I took things as they came, played it where it laid and tried to focus on the long-term whenever I could. It’s not a perfect plan and I employed it imperfectly just as often as I hit the ball out of the park.

What I think is meant by maintaining a positive outlook during hard times is to just try to balance one’s outlook to mostly err on the side of “everything’s eventually going to be okay”. It does not mean ignoring issues or denying that sometimes it’s hard to be upbeat when the world is raining steadily on your parade while everyone around you seems to be walking on sunshine while draped in rainbows. Being sad, upset, and angry happens. It’s better to admit to and feel these things than stuff them away because they won’t stay where they are stuffed no matter how clever a packer you are. But it does no good to wallow in the negative and allow setbacks and tragedy to define your life or person.

Can you be positive in hard times?

Yes, you can within moderation but isn’t that true of all things?

Lot’s Wife


Once, when I foolishly allowed Q&A from the dear readership, Sally asked me if I ever pondered a future where Will hadn’t died. Hadn’t been sick at all in fact.

Truthfully, I hadn’t and still don’t see the point of such an exercise though I know that it is a common one among widowed folk.

But I was talking with my BFF tonight, making plans for an upcoming trip down south and she mentioned that Will’s best friend, Wally and his wife Cherish were struggling to pay for their son’s funeral last month. I’d mentioned at the time that I planned to send a donation but there wasn’t a fund set up to send anything to, so I hadn’t done anything about it yet.

To be more honest, I discovered that shortly after the funeral Wally made a point of asking BFF’s husband to take him to visit Will’s grave and it peeved me a bit. Not that Wally made the visit. As I understand it, Wally stages regular pilgrimages to the cemetery to see Will. What grates is that he shows more devotion to the rock I buried Will under than to Will’s daughter – his goddaughter, who he hasn’t bothered to inquire about personally for the last three years.

Now that I have gotten that petty digression off my chest, there is a fund-raising effort underway to help with the expenses. Cherish contacted BFF’s husband and told them that the funeral home had given them 30 days to pay off the $12,000 they’d spent.

How they managed to rack up such a bill, BFF didn’t know. Having dealt with these funeral home people, I don’t have the same difficulty imagining it. I do, however, wonder why the funeral home extended any credit at all to a couple who’d recently declared bankruptcy for the second time.

Money is to be sent to BFF’s hubby and he will cash checks and turn it into a money order to send to Wally and Cherish – as their bank is no longer on good enough terms with them to allow for checks to be made out directly to them*.

I told Rob about the conversation later in the evening and admitted that if there was a hell – and I am certain that’s just a Catholic wives’ tale – I would burn in it for my thoughts about the whole situation.

“If Will was still alive,” I said, “I’d be up to my neck in the whole sordid affair trying to keep him from spending our money to bail them out.”

Rob just circled his arms around me, drew me close and said,

“Yeah, you are so going to hell.”

“Maybe not though,” I said. “He’d be 35. He could have outgrown that high school blind loyalty thing.”

“No,” Rob said, “he wouldn’t have.”

Damn, my husband is good. He knows me and he knows Will through me.

But he was right, I’d have spent the last month alternating between guilt and anger trying to reign in Will’s insane devotion to friendship regardless of reality.

Think not?

BFF regaled me with accounts of the funeral. Will’s buddies gathered to be pall bearers. They carpooled to the visitation and then headed off to the hotel where they proceeded to party all night like it was a high school reunion. Not one of them offered to help BFF’s hubby out when it came time to pay for the rooms nor did they offer any assistance to Wally and Cherish.

All but one or two of them have donated to the current fundraising effort. I guess it should go without saying that not one of them asked me if I needed help paying for Will’s visitation or burial. I did, but my aunt helped me out without even having to be asked. She wouldn’t even discuss my paying her back.

So, I guess Sally, I do sometimes play out current day scenarios with Will in them. Usually when something/one from the past disturbs my present. His friends get married or experience tragedy. His mother or aunt sends a card and asks for pictures that I sent already but just haven’t arrived there due to the paranoia at the border thing. When the past intrudes, I wonder what life would be like. Look like. What he would be like as a 36 year old man because I have nothing to base this on as he was 28 when he was diagnosed and effectively ceased to exist as the man I knew. It’s quite the gap to fill and my fiction instincts err on the side of the awful for some reason. I never imagine hearts, flowers and perfection like many widowed do.

*Or so she says. I know way more about their finances than I need to due to the fact that Cherish’s younger sister worked at the health club I went to back in Des Moines and her sister … had a big, indiscreet mouth. If my sister shared that much information about me with strangers, there would be consequences. Let’s just say that the whole story is fishy. Can a couple declare bankruptcy twice in four years?”

Curse You Walt Disney


Friday night movie in the hamlet was Disney fare called The Game Plan with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. He starred as a quarterback for a make-believe Boston team on the verge of its first championship. Completely self-absorbed, he is missing the one ingredient that will take him from “almost” to “legend”.

That missing ingredient?

A long-lost eight year old daughter from a barely remembered college marriage.

His ex-wife withheld the information due to his immature behavior and eight years didn’t age him much.

Being a Disney flick, Dad is inept. Daughter is wise-cracking. The agent (Kyra Sedgwick – looking very, very old) is the foil who is holding Dad back by reinforcing his selfishness and, of course, Mom … is … dead.

Yeah, it wouldn’t be a very Disney story without a dead parent. Mom’s seem to be the corpse of choice anymore, but it’s not a given.

It’s convoluted. The death isn’t revealed until close to the end, but Dee perked up and caught it like a terrier and didn’t let go. Angst about parents who “split up” and worry about dead people followed for a goodly amount of time after the movie ended.

“I don’t want you and Dad to split up,” lip quivering.

It took strength not to roll my eyes. Most of the time she complains that we kiss too much.

“That won’t happen,” I assured her.

So much insecurity and always when I think she is grounded. She’s been calling Rob “Dad” most of time for the last little bit and is busily plotting her eventual name change. Moving first from the diminutive of her given name to her given name (Will insisted she have a “grown up name”. He thought this was important though he seldom used his own “William”) in grade three. In grade four, she plans to adopt Rob’s surname and drop Will’s (her call completely and I refuse to influence her one way or another).

Between Rob and I, the dead parent/spouse thing in movies is something of a joke, but for Dee it is an unsettling reminder of the ease with which life can flip end over end.