grief

Displacement


The new fun thing to do on the widow board these days is to take male profiles from a dating site called Plenty of Fish and post them to the social forum for other women to see and comment on. The comments are invariably cruel. The kind of stuff that passed as fun back in one’s high school or college days. It really wasn’t acceptable back then either, but there comes a point in a woman’s life where it crosses the line from dubious fun to simply a telling commentary on what kind of a person she has become over the years.

One of the less helpful side-effects of emotional pain, of any origin, is the tendency to redirect it. Often we take aim at those closest to us, but our targets can be stereotypical too. If we are suffering from insecurities related to our physical appearance, we might develop a habit of poking fun of the overweight in the form of jokes and snide remarks. People suffering rejection in matters of romance and relationships fall back on unflattering gender stereo-typing and bashing. When we see ourselves as completely misunderstood, we gladly cloak ourselves in martyrdom.  The professionals refer to it as displacement and, lately, I seem to have less and less patience with this in others and in myself.

Try as I might to always put a correct name on the vagueness that is my grief experience now, I am still not always successful. A week ago I turned fear into homesickness and as a result upset my husband rather needlessly. We talked it through and as it turns out I was homesick, but I wish I could sort out my emotions in a more articulate manner. Words are a timesaver that I don’t appear to have when it comes to how I am feeling and it frustrates me. When I watch the schoolgirl boy-bashing on the board, it occurs to me that it would be more productive for those engaged to just admit that they are afraid they are too old or unattractive and with personalities that are an acquired taste for any man to be attracted to them now that they have been thrust unwillingly back onto the “market”. It would certainly be easier to tell them to quit being so stupid if that were the case than to try and wade through the thinly veiled loathing of their situations, and point out to them that what they are doing by ridiculing these poor men is tearing them down in an effort to build themselves up. And that just can’t be done. Self-esteem is not built on the crushed bodies of others. How do I know? I used to be one of those women who engaged in similar sorts of slamming. It was before Will. And it didn’t make me a better person. Nor did it fix the real problem, which was me.

My problem now is to find a way to express what seems inexpressible. Those moments of sadness that feel connected to my now and aren’t. Take today for instance, I had to drive into Sherwood Park to the RCMP to have my fingerprints taken for a background check that Immigration needs to process my residency card application. For some reason, I felt like crying after it was all done. And it had nothing to do with being homesick, though I am a tiny bit, or with Rob and our relationship because I can’t imagine myself anywhere but wrapped up in his arms. What it comes down to is that it is another step away from Will and that past. The trigger was not the fingerprinting, but a conversation with my daughter before we left for the police station. She wanted me to dig up her father and bring his remains here, so she could have a place nearer by to visit him. The other day she insisted that we call him “Will” now instead of “Daddy”. One step and one step more. Thankfully I was able to track down the source and talk with Rob about it when he came home for lunch, and I felt better. It’s not always that easy. Caregiving as long as I did and watching Will die for as long as that took, I couldn’t allow myself to feel everything that wanted or needed to be felt in the instance that it did. Feelings were diverted and renamed for survival’s sake. Useful at the time. Not so much now.

Knowing what is wrong is half-way home to fixing it, I guess.

The Penalty Box


I was surfing the widow board as I am wont to do during my daughter’s evening bath, which given her inherited princess tendencies can be lengthy, and I ran across a reply to a post about people in our lives who overstep. The poster mentioned that someone she knows deals with such folk by placing them “in the penalty box”. Apparently this box of retribution lies in the backrooms of one’s mind and interlopers, idiots and probably in-laws are mentally wood-shedded until such time as one is ready to deal with them. This could be tomorrow or it could be never again. There are no real punishments meted out because it is more like a grown-up version of time-out except that the bad behaving adult in question has no idea that they have been shelved. I found the concept very interesting. When applied to my own life, I realized that I have quite a full inbox.

Earlier today I answered the phone and found one of Rob’s late wife’s aunts on the other end. Dianne has been working on having a memorial bench for Shelley made and placed in a local park and she wanted to run the wording of the plaque that will be on the bench by Rob. We chatted only very briefly, but she was quite nice and genuine. I am not really certain how often Rob hears from his in-laws, but his relationship with them stands in stark contrast to my relationship with Will’s family. Granted, Rob and Shelley were married for 25 years and their actual relationship predates that by a couple more, and I really had no chance at all to get to know Will’s extended family before he got sick. Still, I wonder if the state of the union where my in-laws are concerned is something that I should have worked harder at.

Currently, I haven’t heard from Will’s two uncles or his aunt in almost a year, and this is discounting the last minute message I found on my phone inviting my daughter and I to the clan’s family Christmas the night before the festivities. My mother-in-law’s siblings and their children haven’t had any contact with me since well before Will died and some of them have never even seen our child in person. The mother-in-law herself is a long and ugly story that I am through telling. The long or short of it is that they don’t know about Rob or that we are married or that we live in Canada now. Frankly, and surprisingly, this has bothered me all along. And, I thought the reason that I was bothered by it was because I hadn’t tracked them all down and told them about the current events of my life. It’s not though. The reason I am bothered, upset actually, about their not knowing is that they don’t want to know. Katy and I are not important enough to keep in regular or hell, even semi-regular contact with and because we aren’t worth that very minimal effort, I know exactly what Will meant to them. He meant the world to me. He was the world to Katy. He was an afterthought to them and now he isn’t given any thought at all. Not even by his mother, you might be thinking? Surely she mourns him? I have no doubt that she does, but she does so in a way that I have trouble recognizing as love. 

I have decided to close the door on the penalty box of in-laws now. It was not my job to keep them interested and around over the last how ever many months it has been since Will’s death. They are all grown-ups with access to the many modern wonders of communication that are available to us all these days……and they knew where to find me and Katy. Now that they don’t, I doubt they have noticed. When they do, if they do, I will reassess the situation. Until then, I have more important things to do.

Owning Your Life



The saying goes something like “life is what happens while you were making other plans”. One of those walks, talks and quacks like a duck cliches whose truth you can’t deny. Life doesn’t tolerate back seat drivers, and that is what most of us our. If you aren’t going to get into the driver’s seat then I guess you shouldn’t be surprised at where you end up. Bad analogy? Not really. You have only so much control when you are driving. You are governed by traffic laws, weather and road construction. Life throws up its own versions of roadblocks and it has its own set of rules, one of them being mortality. There is an endpoint to every journey and life is no different.

A common theme among the widowed is a sense of the surreal when assessing their lives. Places that once seemed as familiar as your own face suddenly are as unrecognizable as the face that stares back at you from the mirror each day.  The strong desire to let yourself drift along fights a daily battle with the sense that where you are heading is not someplace you would have ever chosen to be. It reminds me of that Talking Heads song,

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack

And you may find yourself in another part of the world

And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile

And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful

Wife

And you may ask yourself-well…how did I get here? 

It’s easier to let things happen to you than to take charge and change your life or in the case of being widowed, salvage it and start over. I have seen many a person just give up and bend over. And why not? It’s effortless Being a victim of circumstances may suck but it doesn’t require any planning or major expenditures of anything other than the willingness to prostrate yourself before every ill that comes your way. And I suspect (actually I know) that those of us who do not fire up the GPS and look for a new route have probably always ridden at the back of the bus. How does the chorus go?

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

Same as it ever was…same as it ever was…

One of the founders of the WET widow group back in Iowa, Sandy Searcy, suggested that I start a widows group when I was settled in up here. Rob has even brought the idea of my doing that up from time to time, but like my working with At-Risk students, I would eventually find it too difficult to be supportive in that benign Oprah-ish way. Eventually I would start kicking asses and I won’t add “in a loving and supportive manner” because I doubt that it would be perceived in that manner. Some people are too much the author of there post-disaster lives for me to muster sympathy enough to mask my total frustration with them. While I can completely empathize with the need to sort things our, I can’t understand letting your life go down the shitter while you are assessing and reorganizing.

There is another song by a group called Switchfoot that I began listening to after Will died. It talked about how the past is over. There is no “do over” and in the now you have to take stock and ask yourself the hard question.

this is your life, are you who you want to be

this is your life, are you who you want to be

this is your life, is it everything

you dreamed that it would be

when the world was younger and you had everything to lose

I am not always the decisive, move ahead person I portray myself to be. I have moments when I am stuck and exasperating as my husband can attest to, but even when I don’t have the answers and the GPS is down, I have a sense of the need to know, to think, to reevaluate and to move. Even if the move is lateral, as long as its not back, it’s all good.