If I could figure out what to do next I would post it on every widow’s board I could Google up. I don’t think there is a one size fits all answer though. Widowhood is no different from any other experience in life except that it hurts a lot more like a hot poker on bare flesh – forever searing. What do I want? I haven’t really sat down and had a talk with myself about that. Seriously. Just really thought about it. Like I had to do in the graduate class that gave me the two year plan I used to survive the bulk of Will’s illness. If money weren’t an object and my daughter wasn’t an issue to deal with – where would I go? What would I be or do? I work with this guy. He and his wife plan to move to England in the next couple of years with their two sons. I was telling him how I wished I could just pull up and go – live in New York or San Francisco. He said, then go. I said, no – I have a child. What would we do for money, health ins … He cut me off. Just go, he said, if you want to do it – do it. Nothing is really stopping you but details and details can always be worked out. And he was right. I am stopping me from moving on. Me. So. What do I want? It doesn’t need an answer tonight or tomorrow or even in a month. But, it is really past time to think about it. Because, the answer to that question is what will illuminate the details I need to start sorting through. I worry that time is continuing to pass me by at the speed of sound at the very least. I will be 43 in December and though 60 is the new forty and my teenage students assure me that I truly still look 35, I can’t help but remember that 5 years ago I thought I had my future planned. I have been off-road too long.
Widowed: The Blog
Time does not heal wounds. Time is what passes while you learn to live without the one person who meant the world to you. And it will be the hardest thing you ever do because you have to do most of it alone.
Today was his 33rd birthday. He will never be 33 though. Time, as we know it, stops for them. They are forever the person in the last photo you took of them.
The last picture I took of Will was on Christmas Day of last year. There are several of him and our daughter. She is smiling, holding the doll that I told her that her daddy had picked out especially for her. He is propped up in a recliner. His head lolling to one side. His eyes sightless and staring.
He was slightly agitated that day. Maybe he was aware? As much as I want to believe that he knew we were there and that it was Christmas Day, the bigger part of me hopes that he never had any idea. The thought of him being aware and unable to communicate that. Knowing but completely cut off to the point. That all he heard was noise and every touch or movement was startling and frightening. His every waking moment a nightmare of sensory deprivation. I hope that is not what was happening.
No one remembered that it was his birthday. It was just me, standing in the middle of the kitchen with the only candle I could find, a number four that had sat on our daughter’s birthday cake this last summer. I lit it with one of his old Bic lighters that I hadn’t thrown away. It was pink and blue and had smiley faces on it. I sang “Happy Birthday” to him and cried.
I wonder if that is how it will always be. I fear it might. Time is a bitch. It will not heal me or make anything better. Once again that is all left up to me.
There is an article in the December issue of Oprah about waiting. The author talks about all the time we spend waiting for the various things that we all seem to wait for life to provide and about the mundane types of waiting to: for friends in front of the movies, at the doctor’s office, the check-out line at the supermarket. I didn’t read the whole thing word for word. I skimmed until words jumped out at me and then I read the surrounding sentences and paragraphs. That is about the only way I can read these days. I am waiting for the ability to lose myself in a piece of writing returns. I miss that almost as much as I miss my husband, who I can barely recall as a solid figure anymore. When I was younger and unhappy, I would just read. Find some piece of fiction and lose myself in it for hours. I could project the words onto a screen in my mind and see and hear the characters as though I were sitting in a dark theater for one. It made the waiting bearable. Nothing makes the waiting endurable now. Sometimes writing. But more often everything I find that distracts me from time’s crawl towards – wherever – is just a distraction. Short-lived and disappointing and in the end something that adds to my loneliness instead of lifting it from me. Nearly four and a half years of waiting now and I wonder “what for?”. My life is still something that I live for the benefit of others. My child. My students. My family. I am tired of being a single parent. I wonder why I teach when I am really a writer. I wish I was orphaned. In a month, I will be 43. I was 38 when this journey began and I am more lost than the Hebrews in the desert, but they, at least, had each other.
anniegirl1138 