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.
Widowed: The Blog
The previous entry brought this particular topic back to the forefront of my mind again. When something awful happens to you, or when someone close to you dies, everyone offers their assistance. Whether in person or via a note or card, the words vary little. “If there is anything at all I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to ask.” But you do. Hesitate. And invariably you don’t call. But when you do…well, be prepared to not be helped. And that is a best case scenario. The flipside is you will be made to feel as though you are inconviencing the person who so sincerely implored you to allow them to be useful in some small way in the first place. Or worse still, there is the bait and switch in which you ask for something very specific, the samaritan agrees and then turns around and tries to talk you into accepting some other form of “help” in its place. Usually something you don’t need that will actually make work for you but is easier, quicker, less burdensome for the person while still allowing him or her to feel as though another gold star has been placed behind his or her name in that book God uses to assess our worthiness of his love. A little fyi to all, the next time you are overcome with desire to offer your services in a crisis or to the newly bereaved, stop yourself. The last thing this person needs is another obligation on the to do list. It is a burden to be expected to ask for help when it is obvious to one and all that you actually need it. If you see something that needs to be done, simply ask the person if it is okay for you to go ahead and do it. Case in point, the winter after my husband’s diagnoses was a fairly snowy and blistering cold one. My daughter was too small to be outside with me while I shoveled our driveway and sidewalks, but I was very leery of leaving her indoors with her father. He was suffering from moderate dementia already and none too steady on his feet. So, my husband’s uncle called to offer his services to shovel the walks. He had a snowblower and a truck to haul it in. Great, I thought and told him sure. He replied, just let me know when you need me. If you can’t already see the problem then you don’t read very well. Needless to say, Uncle did not help me get the walks shoveled, I ended up with frostbite on all my toes, and my daughter developed a rather strong aversion to being alone with her dad. People mean well, but the road to hell is paved with their selfish souls. We all want to appear compassionate and seem helpful and that is about it. Actually rearranging our own lives to come to the aid of friends and family does not provide the same ego boost as just offering to. The last two days of my husband’s life, everyone descended on the hospice. This after mostly ignoring him for three months he was there. There is nothing like impending death to light a fire under relatives and friends. And they all uttered variations of the “whatever I can do” mantra. And even after nearly three years of mostly being let down, I still asked for help. I didn’t get it. My close friend, Vicki and her husband, were amazing as they had been all along. A few others came through with odds and ends. My aunt and my mother came running without hesitation. My father, who was quite ill himself, was wonderful. But, as for the rest, it was just words.
There is a social isolation epidemic in America. We have fewer close friends than in years past. We have fewer intimates with whom we can share those thoughts that keep us up into the night. We have replaced physical relationships with Netbuddies and conversations with texting.
For myself I am in a friendship drought again, but this is not unusual for me. I have weathered many periods of social solitude over the years, and I have never had more than two close friends at a time.
I was reading the local paper today and my least favorite columnist was weighing in on this particular topic. It was her contention that people in the Midwest are much friendlier than people in larger cities or Europe. She based this on the observations of another woman who had lived in Europe, Boston and then finally Iowa.
I am not sure I buy into the notion that it is geography or ethnicity that make some places less “friendly” than others. I think, like most things, it comes back to you and where you are in your life internally. I have been more open at different times and definitely closed to relationships at others. There have been times even when I thought I wanted relationships but did nothing to further that end because in reality I didn’t want anything more than to be on my own.
Being the caretaker of a terminally ill husband and now a widow, I have come to know loneliness in ways that defy easy definitions. There were days on end when the only people I had to interact with were a toddler and a husband with a short-term memory that was so short he could literally turn away from you and back again and have forgotten everything you just told him. It wasn’t so much losing him physically but the emotional loss. For both of us. He was so disoriented that he couldn’t access the emotions that had pulled us together in the first place.
Now, of course, I face the new burden of making people too uncomfortable for them to want to be around me. I have to choose my words carefully so as not to reference my old life too often. Too many remarks and I am living in the past and too few means that I am in denial or worse, I must not have loved my husband very much in the first place to be moving on so quickly.
An article in last month’s Oprah talked about how the socially isolated bring much of their loneliness on themselves. It gave the standard advice that the shy and socially inept always receive. Practice smiling. Put yourselves in social situations more often. Relax. Blah. Blah. More simply put, try not to be yourself so much and people will like you more for being more like them.
I don’t smile continually and that’s a genetic thing I realized only after my daughter was born. She had the most serious look on her face at all times. “She’s shy,” people would say but I never allowed her to be labeled. “She needs to assess her surroundings,” I would tell people. “When she’s ready, she’ll come to you.” I am not inept. I socialize quite well once I get my bearings, but I admit I am easily overwhelmed by numbers and noise, just like my daughter. It is easy to like outgoing and the pretty. It’s just as easy to find them annoying and shallow because frankly some people are not worth the effort of getting to know them. What they project is what you are getting.
I used to think that my loneliness was my fault somehow, like Oprah said, but it’s not. There are boundaries on my personality which make me who I am and limitations on my life, now especially, that make social situations hard to be a part of or even participate in at all. Am I lonely? Yes. I lost my husband and he had filled in all the drafty, empty spaces in my world. But am I lonelier than ever? Not really. I have been here before. It’s just a lull and it will pass and I know this because it always has.
anniegirl1138 