young widowhood

Awkward


That’s my daughter’s favorite phrase. Everything is “awkward” from her nearly eight year old perspective.

We shop at the Safeway and like many chains, they have a discount card that lures people in and promotes loyalty by tossing bones here and there in the form of special member promotions and discounts at the gas bar. Rob gave me Shelley’s card to use after we moved in with the assurance that we’d get it replaced later as it had her name on it.

It was a hectic time. Moving from Iowa to Alberta. Getting married. Unpacking and packing and enrolling Dee in school and applying for residency and now it’s nearly three years later and I am still shopping with Shelley’s card at the Safeway.

And I don’t think about it very often. Oh, sometimes when a clerk makes a scrunchy bunny face at the card and my credit card but thinks better of asking why the names don’t match before handing it back. On those occasions I think “oh yeah, the names don’t match” or “whew, dodge that awkward conversation”. Well, not so much “conversation” as painful monologue because there is no conversation after the words “yeah, that’s my husband’s late wife’s card”. Although there probably is quite the conversation after I’ve left.

Today there a woman was being trained on the register by a clerk I am familiar with who smiled her recognition as she bagged the groceries.

“Are you a new club member?” the trainee asked.

“Excuse me?” I replied. Because I forgot about the name thing.

“Your club card has a different name on it.”

And instead of saying oh … nothing … or agreeing or anything else than what I did, I said,

“Oh, that. It’s my husband’s late wife’s card. We just haven’t gotten around to changing it.”

Silence.

She hands the card back and looks at the other employee, the one I sorta know but who probably didn’t know this, and she is looking wide-eyed back.

Awkward.

Very, very awkward.

Patanjali Says it All


Yoga training typically culminates on a late Sunday afternoon with the Sutras. We’ve hit chapter two, which is the meat of the mental practice – because yoga is all about reaching the interior whether it be the muscles and organs or the thoughts and emotions.

We spent a great deal of time on teaching beginners, so Patanjali got shorted. Thirty-five minutes is inadequate to the task of fleshing tapas.

Tapas?

Tapas is all about the pain and the letting it go. Emphasis on “letting it go”.

Patanjali insists that we are only anchored to the physical world through the pesky inconvenience of having bodies. Bodies that are not us.  The true “me” of me is not my body at all. Therefore, all experience happens to the body and what “I” should be doing is experiencing, acknowledging and then letting it go.

Everything. Good, bad, meh and bloody awful. Feel it. Know it. Wave goodbye.

“Nothing is permanent,” Cat, our instructor, pointed out.

True. It’s our attachment to the idea that good things should have no end and bad things are unfair (I’m overly simplifying) that leads us into the mud and mires us there.

I just listened.

Not because I have no thoughts or concrete experiences to share, but because I know that this is one of those deceptively simple ideas that become nightmarishly difficult when reality envelopes a person.

“Our reactions are choices,” another woman chimed in.

Essentially, we can shape our lives through letting go or just acknowledging that all experiences are finite.

And here the conversation veered into the anecdotal experiences that, I think, aren’t helpful.

A fellow student was in a serious accident and was told by her doctors that she would never regain the use of her arm. She told us that had she listened to the doctors, she would indeed have no function, but she chose to ignore them and rehabbed herself to the point where she is now able to use her arm – not 100% – but no one could tell by simply looking at her that she has difficulties.

I hate these analogies. They are exceptions and they lead others to believe that we are all destined to be exceptions when we aren’t.

We are the rule. Sometimes reality is what it is. No exceptions.

This doesn’t preclude trying to be an exception but it does mean that more often than not, one will have to accept that they are the rule and then – let it go.

“We can change our reality,” Cat said.

But we can’t. Reality is. Sometimes all we can choose is our reactions and how to live within the reality. There are some realities that can’t be let go. They can only be managed.

Managed isn’t the best term, I’ll admit, but there are experiences that stick even though we have let them go.

Will is dead. I have a dead first husband. Not much I can do with that. Very little to work with. Certainly can’t change it.

But I can acknowledge it and let it go, knowing that its effect on me is permanent and that “letting go” might have to be revisited periodically throughout my life.

Same holds true for my classmate. If she had not been able to regain the use of her arm, she would still have had to let the experience go and live within the parameters of her altered reality.

I don’t know if Patanjali addresses this later on, but letting go is a process and it can take years or a lifetime. The choice – I believe – is the attempt to let go in the first place or to cling and not bother.

Distraction/Denial Po-tay-toe/Po-TA-toe


Two things inspired me to trip across the keyboard instead of take the nap that my yoga training weary self needs, first was a discussion about Patanjali’s sutra on the benefits of distraction during hard times and the second was the search term that turned up today on my blog.

The search?

grief denial through remarriage

Classic.

There is a school of thought in the grief is practically a 12 step program camp that says that anything short of total immersion in the grief “process” is denial.

Oh, okay, a vacation with the kids here and there is fine, but only if one goes all angsty about it because it feels wrong to have fun when someone – a dead someone – isn’t there to have fun too*.  Holidays are permissible too if the travel destination is one that the dead person loved. Plenty of garment-rending opportunities in emotional minefields made tangible. Very good grief work for the committed.

But I heard this a lot in my day, remarriage before your kids were grown or a decade or two had gone by – whichever came first – were sure signs that a person was “running away from his/her grief”. And there’s a footrace I’d like to see. Outrunning one’s self is an Olympic caliber event.

Here’s what baffles me – beyond the idea that grief requires active, directed participation – the act of dating, falling in love and remarrying are probably three of the top ten biggest drivers home of the undisputable fact that your spouse has died.

Sure, there are stories here and there of people who rushed into marriage and “came to their senses” in the ensuing months or first years and then divorced. I am not convinced that grief was the blinder or the resurrector of good sense. These were people, generally speaking, who never had or seldom employed sense pre-widowhood.

People who don’t do well in the dating world after a divorce or death probably didn’t date at all or very well prior to their marriages.

Tragedy doesn’t rend you. You aren’t a different person. Tragedy – like a yoga practice – just exposes deficiencies that were already present. Or in some cases, forces recognition. People tend to drift, or coast, through life once they’ve snuggled into the equivalent of a gerbil’s nest. They might have doubts, dissatisfaction or realize they aren’t living in accordance to what they’ve been taught or believe, but they are content, warm and cozy, and that’s enough. Until it’s not. Hard times shine bright harsh light on our realities.

So what do the Sutra’s say?

The Yoga Sutras are amazing. It’s like the Bible or the Koran minus the fairy stories. Unvarnished universal truth that is no different today than thousands and thousands of years ago. It predates Christ or Mohamed or Buddha. Human beings and their basic “issues” are as predictable as the trauma/drama of teenagers. Self-interest is hardwired.

According to the sutra’s the distraction is the life obstacle and what you do to get through, around, over or under it is the solution. Taking that and applying it? Falling in love again is the key to overcoming the death of a spouse.

Maybe not “the” key. Patanjali provides a long list of “distractions” that a person can immerse themselves in when obstacles come along. An asana practice or meditation being among the ways a person can go about righting themselves after being upended, but at the end of the list he concludes that whatever a person chooses and devotes him/herself to will serve equally well. It’s individual, so some divorced/widowed people might choose to rebuild their lives as a single. They cultivate careers, hobbies and children. They volunteer. They nurture friendships. How’s that different from choosing to love and recouple? It isn’t unless you factor risk because there is always risk when people connect with each other. I would argue that there is risk in going it alone as one can never know if the safety net he/she weaves will hold over the length of life any more than recoupled folk do.

But it’s a fascinating discussion, isn’t it. And to think, Patanjali wrote it all down for the edification of others before Buddha sat under a tree or St. Patrick drove the snakes out of Ireland or John Paul II ignored pedophilia in the priesthood so he could be adored. Boggles the mind.

*And seriously, where is the glorious after-life in all this lamentation? Sometimes I wonder if people who proclaim a religious belief in the here-after have less faith than Thomas. One would think all these dearly departed had been packed off to a hell dimension or something.