grief

Last Wishes


There is nothing like attending a funeral to get you pondering your own. We drove up to the Grande Prairie area on Saturday to attend the memorial service and burial of Rob’s late wife’s Uncle Raymond. He was eighty-one years old and, ironically, it was a car accident that took his life. Usually when elderly people pass it seems to usually be related to illness and the wear and tear of so many years. I think of my own father who is slowly being robbed of life by pulmonary disease or my mother and her sister who have hypertension and a family history of strokes and heart disease. When did they stop being middle-aged? Of course, when did I become middle-aged myself? Am I going to know when that day arrives? When I am old like them? When my daughter will start to wonder when she will get that phone call telling her that I am gone, the same way I wait for that call myself?

 

The service took place in the Hythe Legion Hall. Like so many farming communities, every one knows everyone else, and their business, and the hall was packed to standing room. The family gathered in the lounge and since we were late, as always, we went to join them. The tradition is for the family to enter last and seat themselves in reserved rows at the front after filing past the congregants. I wasn’t overly apprehensive about being there. I have already met several of Rob’s in-laws including Shelley’s mother and stepfather, a sister and brother and one of the nieces. They were quite welcoming and though Rob tends to downplay the significance of this because generally most people are on their best behavior when first you meet them, I know from experience that good in-laws are not a given. Not that I buy into the in-law stereotype whole-heartedly. I think that it is a crap shoot really but it tips more to the good side than the bad.  I personally know more people who have wonderful to fair in-law relations than those that are truly awful. Still, I was a bit uncomfortable walking up with the family and sitting in the section that was saved for them. I was also keenly aware that little more than a year ago, Rob and the girls had been in this exact same place, taking this exact same walk for Shelley, and that many of the people who were attending now were there back then, and I couldn’t help but wonder what must be going through their minds.

 

The service was conducted by an older gentlemen, not a minister or anything of the like, but someone who clearly was used to conducting memorial services. He had, in fact, led the service for Shelley.  I kept a close eye on Rob. I am not sure how close he was to Raymond. Not really, though it is always disconcerting when someone you know but only on a “just so deep” level dies. It is not the same kind of sadness. It’s more like coming home and finding that someone has broken in and taken just one thing. You don’t notice outright. Can’t put your finger on exactly why things seem amiss, but there is that one piece missing from the jigsaw puzzle feeling that you just can’t shake off. I knew though that he couldn’t help but go back a year and remember the service for Shelley and when you go back, even fleetingly, the emotions are waiting for you because they always are. More loyal than any friendship you’ll ever have, that’s grief. I watched the girls a bit too. Jordan especially. Her grief is never too far from the surface. She still has the look in her eyes, lurking behind the brightness. Farron keeps it at bay by being in perpetual motion. I was able to do that myself when I was younger. Now I am a virtual empath, swamped by emotionally charged people and situations. I wondered aloud at one point this weekend if I would ever not be able to pick up other people’s pain like an XM satellite receiver. Rob says no. And would I want to be as cold to others’ pain as the majority of people seem to be as their worlds swirl around them as if they were the sun? I guess not, but it does make an event like Raymond’s memorial exhausting.

 

There was music, a eulogy given by two of Raymond’s nieces, a few scripture readings, more music and after the service, the hall was quickly transformed for lunch. The lunch, unfortunately, threw me. It caught Rob off guard because we haven’t been through any similar experience together yet and unsurprisingly, we don’t spend any more time than necessary discussing things like funerals. But I have been this way since my first experience with death at age eight. My dad’s younger brother died in a freak farm accident. He was my godfather and my hands down most favorite relative. Now that I am older I realize that I have partly looked for men who possessed similar traits as my Uncle Jimmy.

 

I don’t switch emotional gears easily. I need to wind down from highly charged events. The practice of going from grief to the light social interaction of the funeral dinner is too wide a chasm for me to cross quickly. My parents could never understand and it caused no little bit of friction. I can remember being sent to the car on one occasion though I can’t remember which relative’s funeral it was, and I earned a reputation of being incorrigibly shy amongst my extended family as at least half our gatherings were wake/funeral related. It didn’t help Saturday that I couldn’t eat a single thing being served. Farm folk, ironically really, don’t hold with veggies. Add to this a hyper five year old and I didn’t stand a chance. Rob managed to extricate himself from family and other acquaintances to rescue me. He generally goes practical when I am having one of my less than stoic, as he calls it, moments. We drove back to Beaverlodge for a veggie sub before heading to the cemetery.

 

After the interment there was a get together at the home of one of Shelley’s cousins. A mix of family and friends. I was my characteristic quiet. I need to assess and warm up. Katy is the same but where she can fly through the process in minutes, I need hours to several days worth of exposure. It sucks but it’s me. All in all, I did okay. Okay enough to earn actual applause for attending from Shelley’s family. At one point during the weekend Shelley’s sister Cindy told me she thought I was a very special person. As I have stated in the past, I am not special in any particular way. If Rob’s in-laws hadn’t been as open, accepting and inviting a group of people as they are, things could easily have ended differently. Their behavior just confirmed for me once again how special a person Shelley was.

 

But how has any of this led me to think about my last wishes for myself?

 

On Sunday, we gathered at Uncle Raymond’s farm to bury some of Shelley’s ashes near a tree that Raymond had planted in her memory. It stands right under the shade of the two large trees where she and Rob were married twenty-six years ago this past July. The farm had originally belonged to her grandparents and she had always felt that her grandmother, who she was quite close to, was still lingering there in spirit and she wanted to be there too. It was one of her last wishes. So Rob had brought her ashes along with us to conduct a little memorial and fulfill one of the two requests she had made before she died. As I stood in that shady place listening to Rob speak over the rustling leaves of the trees that sheltered the front yard, I realized that though I had spent some time thinking about the what ifs of dying, I hadn’t really considered what comes next for my earthly remains. I had always assumed that funerals and whatnot were for those left behind and not for the deceased, but both of my parents have their entire wake, funeral and burials scripted. There is really little for my siblings and I to do but follow the directions. My aunt has pre-planned, as they call it. I only know that I want to be cremated and having the experience I have had with burying Will, I have come to the conclusion that the interment of ashes is a silly thing to do. But where to be once I am dust? I don’t know. I told Rob that I haven’t been much of anywhere over the course of my life. I hadn’t any favorite or special place. He thought that perhaps it was because I haven’t been there yet. Maybe so. Bodes well for the long life we wish on each other too in some ways.

 

I am not really ready to think about my last wishes. I have too many others that need attending to right now, but the thought has been planted firmly. 

There Art Thou Happy


 

In late October of 2005 my husband was in hospice after nearly dying of aspiration pneumonia and blood clots in his lungs, and my father was struggling to recover from a serious of small strokes that nearly killed him as well. I was a caretaker on all fronts because in addition to Will and propping up my mother, I had a three year old and was teaching at-risk high school students in a drop out prevention program. I wasn’t to the point, yet, of being actively dismissive of other people’s problems, but I was close. It’s not that I didn’t complain sometimes. I did. I had friends who listened, but I was still aware that being heard requires some reciprocal listening, and I did my best. At least I hope I did. 

 

When you are in the middle of a crisis, it’s hard to think about anything else. After a while even being asked to consider something other than your own problems seems like your troubles are being dismissed as less than the tragedy they are. There are some people to whom all manner of difficulties are mountains. My youngest sister is engaged to an alcoholic. Around the time that Will was first in hospice and our dad was recovering from his strokes, her fiance was heading off to jail for  a few months. He’d gotten his third DUI over the previous summer while riding his lawnmower home from the bar one evening. I guess he didn’t realize that with a suspended license he wasn’t allowed to ride any type of motorized vehicle on the road though my sister argued that this was unfair as he was on the side of the road and a lawnmower isn’t a threat to anything but tall grass. Anyway, she and her then 11 year old son lived with our parents and since our folks had basically taken over the raising of my nephew, my sister had been free to live the life of the teenager she will always be. Dad’s illness however put quite a crimp in her lifestyle. Mom wasn’t able to take full charge of her son, and she was balking at the idea of having to stay home on the weekends to parent her own child for a change. Being the oldest, I was usually asked to “please talk to your sister” whenever she and Mom were at an impasse. So, I listened while my sister complained about how unfair and difficult her life was. At one point in the conversation, in an attempt to show empathy…..I think….she compared her upcoming separation from her boyfriend to my husband’s impending death. I don’t think I got angry with her at the time. I was too stunned. The comparison went even beyond what could be considered self-absorption, even for my sister, but I think about that incident often now when I catch myself being exasperated with people who can’t seem to realize that the trees hemming them in are part of a vast forest that we all are trying to navigate.

 

After Will died and I had regained enough strength to look around at my new world and pay more than scant attention to the people in it, I had the widow’s blinkered view of tragedy. That is simply, I am widowed…..top that. I am ashamed to admit that I not only felt I had a right to such a view, but I supported others who felt they same way. I am not sure when that started to change. Maybe around the time I began to believe that taking as much time as I wanted to rail at life and the universe was, perhaps, not the best use of my time. It certainly wasn’t making my life better. Didn’t find me a sitter. Wasn’t the recipe for rebuilding my shattered social network. Couldn’t renovate and update my shabby home or find me a job that didn’t alternate between boring me to tears and making me crazy with frustration. What exactly was I doing, standing on the shore and letting wave after wave of sadness and regret batter my soul black and blue? I was told, by people I assumed knew better than I, that this was active grieving, and I wondered, shouldn’t I be just as actively trying to live again?

 

Two years is the minimum  and five the maximum for recovery from the loss of a spouse. That’s what I have been told over and over and I questioned it as often as I parroted it to other freshly minted widows. But the people I knew, my friends and my family, were of a different mind. Partly because they had no frame of reference, but mostly because they loved me and they could see what I already knew which was that grieving was killing me slowly even while it was burying me alive. It was distorting my ability to gauge the height of the molehills that litter that forest in which we all dwell. My husband died, but that didn’t make my troubles more important than those of anyone else.  Not everything that was wrong with my life was the result of his death. I was not cursed by the universe because this had happened. The people in your life generally speak from an understanding of any type of tragedy as their upbringing and life experiences allow and even if their experiences don’t match your own, this doesn’t invalidate their observations. Stuck is fairly easy to recognize. You don’t need much of a background to know when someone is spinning their wheels. Even though I was most ungrateful, I started to realize that despite how I felt, I was surviving this most awful of events and I needed to start being more of an example and a cheerleader to people who needed the same kind of support I had received at my lowest. And not just widowed people, though I have a special affinity for them, but everyone. People who need a sounding board or a bit of verbal hand holding as they make their way out and away from whatever despair or trouble that plagues them is something I see as giving back. It’s tiring though. Some people are “tough rooms”, and there are times I wish I could give a Friar Lawrence scolding to some. He is a character in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the one who secretly marries the two and then comes up with the not so bright idea to have Juliet “play dead”. At one point in the play, Romeo is crying because as a result of killing Juliet’s cousin, he has been banished from the city and his new bride. Friar Lawrence loses his patience and reminds Romeo of all the really awful things that could have happened instead with the following:

What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive,

For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead.

There art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee,

But thou slewest Tybalt. There art thou happy too.

The law, that threat’ned death, becomes thy friend

And turns it to exile. There art thou happy.

A pack of blessings light upon thy back;

Happiness courts thee in her best array;

But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,

Thou pout’st upon thy fortune and thy love.

Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.

 

Not that it’s always possible to find a “bright side” but there is usually something to be grateful for and something worse that could have resulted. Worse than  dead spouse? No, but worse circumstances to find yourself in after than most people experience. If it weren’t for my aunt I would have lost our house after Will took sick and was diagnosed because we lost nearly half our income overnight. If it weren’t for a righteously indignant email to my state senator, Will would have died before we could have gotten him on disability. If I didn’t have friends in the home health care and social work industry, I wouldn’t have found a nursing home to take him when it was clearly time. If I hadn’t worked in a really great school with an awesome principal and coworkers who believed in circling the wagons around colleagues, I could have lost my job. There art thou happy. People don’t do that kind of assessing enough and aren’t encouraged to either. It’s easier to pity and enable self-pity then risk a bit of hurt and anger. 

 

And just as there is nearly always something worse, there is eventually something better. Faith and hope are either good things to spread via your own examples or just an annoying Pollyanna optimism. 

 

 

An Anniversary Gift


On Rob’s wedding anniversary last month, he was awakened early in the morning by the feeling that someone was touching his leg. He thought it was me. I often put my leg on his when we have drifted away from each other in the night. But, when he checked, he realized that I wasn’t touching him at all. It was a nice gift on this first anniversary of their wedding day that he and Shelley could not spend together. Other women, even widowed ones, might have found this revelation by their new husbands a bit strange, but I was glad that they were able to have this bit of contact. And I was a little jealous. I didn’t “hear” from Will at all last August on our first anniversary apart. To be fair though, I was in a lot of pain and feeling frustrated by my lack of ability to redirect my life. My new singular life was quite different from the limbo-ish widow in waiting life I had lived for the well over two years before his death, so even if he had sent me some kind of sign, I wouldn’t have noticed. I went to the State Fair that day with Katy, a place and event that Will loathed to his core. Nothing but overweight people and numerous opportunities for food poisoning in his opinion. The last place on earth my late husband would have chosen for a visitation which could be why I chose it. Who knows.

 

Today I woke hoping for some kind of sign from him, but instead I was greeted by my daughter looking for a snuggle. It was as good a gift as I could ever have hoped for in any event. After that I went about my morning in a state of hurried purpose. There was breakfast with Rob and getting Katy ready for Kinder-camp and no time to ponder the significance of the day. Any significance is part of my history now anyway.

 

As noon approached, Katy and I were back in the truck and headed home from town. Between dropping her off at camp and collecting her again, I had gone to the fitness center for a run, hit the grocery for supplies and picked up a few forgotten items for my home office. Katy watched Zaboomafoo  on the DVD as I absently listened to XM and pondered a predicament on the widow board that in retrospect wasn’t worth the time I had spent on it. I was thinking about my next move in said problem when I realized that XM was playing our song. The song that was always on the radio whenever Will and I went just about anywhere that first year and a half we were together. I can’t think of a single time the radio was playing that we didn’t hear it. He joked it was our song. I even suggested we dance to it at our reception, jokingly though he didn’t find it too funny. Why should have he? It’s a depressing song, What it’s Like by Everlast. I tuned in to the lyrics from my reverie to hear:

 

God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in her shoes 

‘Cause then you really might know what it’s like to have to choose 

Then you really might know what it’s like… 

Then you really might know what it’s like… 

Then you really might know what it’s like… 

Then you really might know what it’s like… 

I’ve seen a rich man beg 

I’ve seen a good man sin 

I’ve seen a tough man cry 

I’ve seen a loser win 

And a sad man grin 

I heard an honest man lie 

I’ve seen the good side of bad 

And the downside of up 

And everything between 

I licked the silver spoon 

Drank from the golden cup 

And smoked the finest green 

I stroked the fattest dimes at least a couple of times 

before I broke their heart 

You know where it ends, yo, it usually depends on where you start 

I had to smile. Two husbands and both telling me the same thing. Rob is constantly reminding me that widowhood, and any life-altering event really, doesn’t change who people really are inside. It just magnifies what is already there. You can’t fix stupid, Rob says, quoting one of his favorite comedians, Ron White. He’s right of course. And Will was, in the subtle way that circumstances permit him, telling me the same thing. He understands where I am because he knows where I have been. He was there too. A helpless prisoner of his own body, but he was there. Not a bad gift really. And a really good song in retrospect. 

 

Happy Anniversary, baby, and thank you.