grief

Grief Groups and the Four Seasons


We had hospice last week. Katy loves to go and see the other kids and do the activities. She has improved a lot since she started going to the children’s grief group. For Rob and I though the parents’ version hasn’t had the same effect. Rob finds that it simply digs up things that he has put to rest (no pun intended and naturally he knows that you can never truly put grief behind you yet it does become something that isn’t constantly in your face all the time too), and I find that I am a bit annoyed with the way the group functions. There is a trained grief counselor there but lately she has been working with training sessions for volunteers and so we are left with a hospice volunteer to lead the group. She is an older woman who reads prompts to us from handouts and speaks in platitudes. 

So this last week, she had a video for us to watch. As a former teacher the moment I am told I have to watch a video, I immediately suspect the worst and I am seldom disappointed. This particular one was circa 1989 and was little better than a slide show. It was a narrator talking us through the four seasons with lovely flora photos and inspirational sayings from famous people who have lost loved ones. The four seasons thing was enough to set my teeth on grind because I heard more than I cared to about the importance of living through widowhood for four seasons before one could do anything from sell the house to go out for coffee with someone of the opposite sex, and frankly, I find the idea to be some of the worst nonsense ever, but I am digressing. The video was supposed to set up talking points and to that end our facilitator planned to pause the tape after each season.

The first season was fall. After viewing it, we were asked to comment. I had already decided to not comment. I know, from years and years of faculty meetings and inservices, that the fastest way to kill a crappy exercise is to sit and say nothing. A good teacher (or facilitator) can deal with this but there aren’t that many people who are good at either of the aforementioned and usually they cave fairly quickly. My dearest husband though works for a large multi-national corporation and his training says “When something is bullshit – speak up.” And so he did. He said he felt that the video would have been useful to him in the first month or so but that now it merely dredged up things that didn’t need to be reviewed. We watched the rest of the video without stopping and then we moved on to other topics. 

I love my husband. 

Lisa Parker lived close to the heart


Like most WordPress bloggers (or any blogger really) I am fascinated by the searches that people do that lead them to by blog. Probably the search term that comes up most often here is the name Lisa Parker. I first wrote about her in a piece called Going to the Movies. Rob and I had taken in the Viggio Mortensen film, Eastern Promises. Parker was the production unit manager for the film and it was dedicated to her, which is not uncommon in the movie industry when a member of the cast of crew dies during its production. Being me, I googled her at the first opportunity only to find that while her body of work is well-documented, there was little to no personal information to be found. That was frustrating to me at the time but now I find it quite fascinating. The public has this image of those in the movie world being eager for recognition to the point that any and all things about them are fair game and here comes Lisa Parker. A film is dedicated to her memory. A good film. And there is nothing to be gleaned about her save the work she left behind. How about that? Being remembered for your accomplishments only and not your dress size or tumultuous personal life.

I have searched and searched, in vain mostly, for more information on Ms. Parker. I haven’t uncovered much. She was just 39 when she died on June 4, 2007 at Charing Crossing Hospital after a brief illness. She was well-known in the Irish film industry and had worked on international films as well in many capacities. Her funeral was held shortly after her death in London with another memorial service in Dublin, Ireland the following fall. She was survived by her mother, sister and many friends. Donations were asked to be given to the Battersea Dog Home.

The second tim I wrote about Lisa Parker was in a piece about search terms. I thought it an odd memorial to her that people would find in the original blog piece that often brings them here. One of her obituaries carries the quote “she lives life close to the heart”. What a beautiful thing to have said about a person after he/she has gone. To me it means that she lived out her life doing what she loved and with that people who mattered most. What a lucky woman. And what better way to be remembered than as someone who followed her heart.

Something in Common


I seldom buy The Edmonton Journal these days. I am a Globe and Mail girl. However this last weekend I was compelled not once but twice to grab it as I hustled in and out of the Safeway. The Saturday Edition featured the story of a young (very young) widower on the front page. His wife had been murdered by his brother and it inspired him to crusade on behalf of the victims’ rights movement which inadvertently has become the start of a promising political career. My friend, Marsha wrote a blog piece recently about finding the good in tragedy and this young man is a prime example of this idea. An idea that not everyone shares but I believe is true. Something good is meant to come from loss. Even it doesn’t then the lesson was lost and the tragedy is magnified. Lessons? Yeah, lessons. We weren’t put on this earth to accumulate stuff and make imaginary friends on Facebook. There is a higher purpose.

The Sunday Journal did not appear to have any widows hiding in it, but on the inside of the Culture Section there was an op-ed that first ran in the NYTimes by an author named Patty Dann. The piece detailed her relationship with another widower and how it went from the sharing of a mutual experience to friendship and love. He had written a review online about the novel she had written detailing her late husband’s illness and death. She sent him a note and they eventually became e-mail pals. The whole thing reminded me of Rob and I. How we’d started out on the e-mail and somehow what was just support and an opportunity to “talk” to a like-minded adult of the opposite sex subtly and suddenly became oh so much more. As often as I was told back then that it wasn’t possible to know something through their written words it’s nice to be validated by Ms. Dann’s story. Not that it surprises me. She and her husband to be are writers and Rob and I too. People who don’t know how to make themselves heard through the printed word or to hear someone in kind couldn’t be expected to understand how powerful a medium the writing is.

I am not sure why but I don’t relate to every widowed’s story. I understand the emotions because they are common to us as a group but the deaths themselves are so varied. The young man whose brother killed his wife had no warning. His brother was a drug addict with a mental illness who’d been released from jail on bond without any warning to his family despite his harassing them. That’s awful and too common but not something I can relate to. Just as I know that very, very few widowed can understand what it is like to care for a 29 year old man with dementia or be married to a non-responsive invalid you only see on weekends in the nursing home or hospice. I was widowed long before my late husband actually died and will never accept the idea that was so forcefully pushed at me that there is no such thing as anticipatory grief. It’s real. And I know that from ugly experience. So I find what similarites I can with others who lost spouses to long illnesses but know that I likely won’t find anyone who was emotionally and mentally cut off from their spouse for years prior to the end. One thing that draws me to some widowed people are tales of their loved one who changed mentally. Personalities flip-flopped by diseased brains. Ms. Dann’s husband had glioblastoma and lost his memory. My late husband’s memory was wiped clean by a neurodegneration caused by an inherited metabolic disorder called x-ALD. Her husband was terminal from day one. So was mine. It’s different when there is no hope. It just is.

She was luckier than me though. Most people with determined outcomes are. Her Willem understood what was wrong with him, and my Will never did. He was able to help her make final arrangements for himself. I had to do that alone, guessing at what he would have wanted as we’d never had a whole conversation about it. I dug through my memories for anything I thought might help. The only thing he did give me was the headstone. I knew that he wanted one and a place to put it. She got to make love with her Willem again and I did not. Will was uninterested in anything but pacing in circles and Mountain Dew, which he would have consumed non-stop had I not hid the cans. He didn’t know who I was. He called me “Babe” and called to our daughter as though she were a puppy  “SweetiePie. Here Sweetie Pie.”

Ms. Dann wrote a book about her experiences. It seems to be what widows do, if they have any inclination or ability (and even when they don’t have the latter at all). I honestly haven’t read anyone’s first-hand account of widowhood in book form even though I know that I need to write my own story and might benefit from seeing how others have done it. Or not. 

For now though, I have found a widow with whom I feel a bond. We fell in love again with men who wrote us e-mails.