grief

It’s Not “Getting Over”. It’s Surviving.


 

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.

 

Clarity


 

Sometimes I wonder if I am too abstract and random (a neat trick for a concrete random by the way)  for others to follow when I try to explain my feelings about personal responsibility and owning one’s own life, or if perhaps most adults really do read on a 6th grade level. I actually hope it is the former because it’s too depressing to contemplate the latter. From an educator’s point of view. And from a selfish one. I really like communicating and sharing ideas and views via the written word and especially through the various sites and forums to which I belong. Still, there is the occasional misinterpretation and though sometimes I believe it is an intentional disconnect for the purpose of starting an argument, it’s usually just a case of lack of clarity. Maybe I should have used more or different examples. Perhaps I didn’t preface my words properly. I suppose that just because I know what I said, and my husband/editor has given it the thumbs up, doesn’t mean that anyone else will be able to decipher my decidedly non-mainstream thoughts on things, generally and specifically.

 

Of course there is the other problem of me on the page as opposed to me in person. I have a tendency, when I write informally, to write like I talk. Which, sans facial expression, eye contact, tone and voice inflection and body language (which gives me away most often though my husband has commented on my occasional ability to pull off a poker face) gets me in trouble. A lot. But I am going to suppose, for the moment, that perhaps it’s them and not me at all. Why? Because I suspect it is really.

 

I am not a mystery. My likes and dislikes and viewpoints on just about anything are not buried dead-center in a Sphinx-like tomb in the Valley of the Kings. I say pretty much what I think when I think it and never hide behind aliases or pseudonyms or non de plumes or whatever other term there might be for being cowardly when your opinions differ or make you “not one of us”. My shame, in my opinion and not the opinion of others who could probably list by the dozen things I should hang my head about, lies in not being articulate enough, or so it appears to me today, to simplify or explain my opinions to those who read them. 

 

And every single person is a Slim Shady lurkin

He could be workin at Burger King, spittin on your onion rings

Or in the parkin lot, circling

Screaming “I don’t give a fuck!”

with his windows down and his system up

So, will the real Shady please stand up?

And put one of those fingers on each hand up?

And be proud to be outta your mind and outta control

and one more time, loud as you can, how does it go?

An Interesting Way to Die



Two characters in a movie Rob and I were watching the other night were discussing how to kill off the main character in a book that one of them was writing. They were sitting out in the rain because the author was apparently the method version of a writer. She was soaked to the skin and her assistant remarked that she could end up with pneumonia to which the author replied,

“Pneumonia is an interesting way to die.”

It’s not though. I’ve had pneumonia. Twice. Once when I was eight and was sick for two solid weeks between my birthday and Christmas. The second time was in 1994 after I had spent Thanksgiving in Brooklyn visiting my oldest friend, whom I’d known since the fifth grade. And of course there was that second to the last weekend in January of 2006 when I spent nearly 72 hours watching my husband die from it. 

He had a genetic metabolic disorder called Adrenoleukodystroply. For years it had slowed and then finally stopped his body from producing an enzyme that it needed to metabolize long chain fatty acids. As the acids built up his immune system kicked into action to rid his body of what it perceived as a threat. Slowly at first and then faster and faster, his immune system began stripping nerve endings of their protective coating and scrubbing away the dura matter that protects the brain, allowing it to send and receive messages. When he began to have trouble swallowing as a result of the faulty connections, he would sometimes inhale food or water particles. Eventually this leads to what they call “aspiration pneumonia”. It’s not an interesting way to die. 

Is there an interesting way to die?

This last week I have been reading the blog account of another widow about the last days of her husband’s life. It is the third anniversary of his death today. I am not sure why I have felt the need to do this as she and I are not friends. In some ways I feel a kinship though. Her younger son is nearly the same age as my daughter. She feels, as I do about Will, that somehow she missed important signs that might have saved her husband’s life. Her story, and it’s hers now really not his at all, has pulled up pieces and scraps of memories that I had l stopped dwelling on. But it is not just her. Watching Rob brace himself for his first anniversary has been difficult and brought back those feelings of inadequacy because I really can’t help or make it better. The fall like feel in the air that comes more and more often, reminding me that school will start soon and I am not teaching this year. 

It’s frustrating. Not being able to read or watch a movie or listen to a song that doesn’t give me pause or stir the pot of memories, not all bad, but all connected just the same. I am not the same, and ironically this has made my square shape sharper and the round holes of widowhood that much narrower. 

At the end of the movie, the author has a change of heart and allows her character to live. She feels that someone who would be willing, as her character – a real person it turns out –  is to sacrifice himself for another is someone the world can’t afford to lose. But the real world, the one I live in, has let go of so many real people who given the chance probably would have done anything for those who loved them or even stepped in front of a bus to save a stranger. 

In the movies there are interesting ways to save people from dying too, but not in real life. In real life people just die, and some people mourn them for the rest of their lives and at the expense of their lives. 

And others just miss them. Terribly. Deeply. Forever.