grief

Get Happy Already


“Happiness is not given to us, nor is misery imposed,” Matthieu Richard, Buddhist monk and author. In his book, “Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill” he contends that happiness can be cultivated in spite of a person’s situation. I read this today in the Q section of The Chicago Tribune. It was in an article called “Hurry Up and Get Happy Already” by Tania Padgett.

I don’t know if I agree or not. I wouldn’t characterize myself as unhappy at the moment however, discontent, impatient and frustrated would come closer. Read Full Article

Life After Death


Just to pick up on yesterday’s topic a bit, my least favorite columnist at the local paper published her latest article on surviving the death of a spouse today. I understand the obsession.

She is only a widow of about six weeks or so and in the beginning it consumes you. You replay those last moments on a continual feed in your brain. It’s not painful in any way that you can explain to someone who has never been through it. It’s not pain at all. It’s an altering of reality that permeates existence to the point where you are not sure if you are part of the real world anymore. Everything is so removed and even for me, someone who often doesn’t feel visible to the world at large, this was eerie.

There are a lot of things about the aftermath of death that are annoying. People want to hug you; even people who know you would rather be peeled like a grape than be embraced by them. People you don’t like, and who are aware of this fact, impose their guilt-ridden amnesia on you as they make their worthless offers of assistance. They try to feed you. A lot. And usually baked goods. You spend a lot of time making other people feel better.

The night of Will’s wake I smiled and hugged and pretended to listen to an awful lot of people who frankly were a drain on my rather limited emotional reserve. And then they retreat, waiting maybe for you to “get over it”? Everyone you remain in contact with treads carefully in word and deed. You want to tell them to save their energy because most of the time you aren’t really paying any attention to them anyway, but you don’t because you know that these small acts of kindness will disappear quickly enough without any help from you at all.

Everyday activities that are actually necessary like cooking, cleaning, laundry, shopping, paying the bills seem to require Herculean effort. You live off PopTarts and feed your kid lunchables (okay maybe that was just me). You don’t sleep. The house makes noises it never did before, and in a last ditch effort to stave off complete insomnia you leave all the lights in the house on except the one in your bedroom. At some point you start turning them off, mainly because the electric bill is looking scary, until only the hall light is on. I’ll let you know when that one goes out.

You start to worry that possibly the stress has given you early-onset Alzheimer’s (and a veritable medical dictionary of other diseases while your very patient PA reassures, you during office visits that are fast becoming weekly, that you are fine). Every place you go you remember a time when you were there with him too, to the point where you stop frequenting those places and develop new haunts that aren’t so haunted.

And you desperately want to rebuild your life. Start over. I cleaned out closets. Threw things away that I had actually never used (mostly things from his mother so the guilt was minimal) and hauled the rest to the Goodwill. Then there was getting used to my single status. Even though Will hadn’t lived with me or our daughter in fifteen months, I was still married and people treated me as though I was.

Funny thing that ring on your left hand. It is a powerful talisman that confers great status on the wearer. I took it off the day after the wake. I had been wearing both his and mine that whole week but I knew that if I didn’t take it off, I never would. So, now in the eyes of the world I was just another single woman with a child.

Funny, but no one asks me about my daughter’s father when I talk about her. At the graduate seminar last week, a man from Madison chatted me up a bit and very obviously checked out my ring finger when I made mention of my little girl. But he never asked about her dad, even though he mentioned his ex-wife a lot. In our modern world I am a divorcée until proven otherwise, I guess.

The need to begin again becomes almost as palpable as the grief itself. A release from limbo. I don’t really cry. Now and again a song on the radio or something my daughter will say or do will bring tears to my eyes and that awful strangling feeling. I’m not angry. At least not with God or my husband. I don’t spend any time at all asking or wondering why this happened to us though I am annoyed at the time it has stolen. I’m a plane circling, waiting for permission to land and not really certain if I need to be granted the privilege or if I am supposed to plow through a forest and create a landing strip for myself. I’m thinking the latter while preferring the former.

Back to Normal


I was reading a post on a message board for widows, and the poster wanted to know if it was reasonable of her co-workers to expect her back to work only a month after the sudden death of her husband. Most of the replys tried to assure her that it was okay to not be ready though a few touted the great balm that keeping busy – at anything – can be. I went back to work three weeks after my husband died. My employer generously gives a week paid leave and I am not being facitious when I say this because many jobs give much less time. Fortunately I contracted shingles around the same time and was able to take anouther two weeks of sick leave but I went back not because I was ready but because I felt obligated to do so. I wasn’t ready. My head was never really in the game. This was in mid-February and by mid-April I broke. There was just too much for me to deal with in addition to trying to be “normal”. Because, that is what people wanted. They wanted me to be okay so they would not feel uncomfortable around me or unreasonable when they expected things of me that I simply didn’t have the emotional reserve to handle. I brought some of this on myself. I had started a new position at a new school and delibrately withheld information about my husband’s illness from most of the people I worked with. I wanted to seem normal. I had spent the previous two years at a middle school where everyone knew my situation (though this didn’t keep some of them from expecting things of me that were far beyond my means) and I was tired of being “handled”. Still, the price for being strong and being able to cope is that people begin to expect it of you even when it is obvious you can’t do it. It was a stupid thing that tipped the scales and reduced me to a puddle. You should never cry in the workplace experts tell you and with good reason. People tend to think you are crazy when you do. My principal sent me home for two days and when I got back my vice-principal (probably because she knew me a little better than the others) tactfully approached me about taking some time off. I think she was surprised with the speed at which I excepted that invitation. My job is working with at-risk students who can be very sweet and caring but they are also emotional vampires. So, today I went back into work to pick up some things to work on and get ready for the new year which begins in about 6 weeks. And I am not thrilled. And it is not just hangover from my husband’s death. Being away from work as long as I have been has been a revealing experience. One of the things it has revealed is a genuine dissatisfaction with my job. Not the teaching. I love to teach. I make a difference even on my worst days. Reevaluation is good and I have been doing that a lot where my career is concerned and perhaps I am worried about nothing and I will quickly fall back into my work with the same gusto I had before. I think though that it is time to consider that this may not happen and a back-up plan would be a good idea. When I was in LaCrosse at the Viterbo campus, I fell in love with the idea of teaching someplace like it. Having a little office and meeting with classes in the different buildings and then walking home to a house nearby before going to pick up my daughter from school. Idyllic nonsense. But still, it got me thinking and the more I thought about it the more I realized that I could be really happy in a life like that. So, does this mean I am not back to normal? My normal before did not put my desires and needs first. My normal now seems to think that what is good for me is the only things worth working on. The thing is that I am nowhere near the woman I was three years ago or even seven years ago when my husband and I got married. And this idea that I should be over the pain of Will’s death or that time heals is just for the convience of other people who need me to be the person I was. The saying goes that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, but hell, I was an Amazon already. There is another that goes, “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle”, but that is crap. God is not the source of the misfortune in any of our lives. The fault lies in our mortality and human fraility. I am more inclined to go with Granny Clavert in Gone With The Wind when she tells Scarlett that the worst thing that can happen to a woman is surviving the worst thing that can happen to her. When that happens no one is ever going to let you lean on them again.