young widowhood

There Art Thou Happy


 

In late October of 2005 my husband was in hospice after nearly dying of aspiration pneumonia and blood clots in his lungs, and my father was struggling to recover from a serious of small strokes that nearly killed him as well. I was a caretaker on all fronts because in addition to Will and propping up my mother, I had a three year old and was teaching at-risk high school students in a drop out prevention program. I wasn’t to the point, yet, of being actively dismissive of other people’s problems, but I was close. It’s not that I didn’t complain sometimes. I did. I had friends who listened, but I was still aware that being heard requires some reciprocal listening, and I did my best. At least I hope I did. 

 

When you are in the middle of a crisis, it’s hard to think about anything else. After a while even being asked to consider something other than your own problems seems like your troubles are being dismissed as less than the tragedy they are. There are some people to whom all manner of difficulties are mountains. My youngest sister is engaged to an alcoholic. Around the time that Will was first in hospice and our dad was recovering from his strokes, her fiance was heading off to jail for  a few months. He’d gotten his third DUI over the previous summer while riding his lawnmower home from the bar one evening. I guess he didn’t realize that with a suspended license he wasn’t allowed to ride any type of motorized vehicle on the road though my sister argued that this was unfair as he was on the side of the road and a lawnmower isn’t a threat to anything but tall grass. Anyway, she and her then 11 year old son lived with our parents and since our folks had basically taken over the raising of my nephew, my sister had been free to live the life of the teenager she will always be. Dad’s illness however put quite a crimp in her lifestyle. Mom wasn’t able to take full charge of her son, and she was balking at the idea of having to stay home on the weekends to parent her own child for a change. Being the oldest, I was usually asked to “please talk to your sister” whenever she and Mom were at an impasse. So, I listened while my sister complained about how unfair and difficult her life was. At one point in the conversation, in an attempt to show empathy…..I think….she compared her upcoming separation from her boyfriend to my husband’s impending death. I don’t think I got angry with her at the time. I was too stunned. The comparison went even beyond what could be considered self-absorption, even for my sister, but I think about that incident often now when I catch myself being exasperated with people who can’t seem to realize that the trees hemming them in are part of a vast forest that we all are trying to navigate.

 

After Will died and I had regained enough strength to look around at my new world and pay more than scant attention to the people in it, I had the widow’s blinkered view of tragedy. That is simply, I am widowed…..top that. I am ashamed to admit that I not only felt I had a right to such a view, but I supported others who felt they same way. I am not sure when that started to change. Maybe around the time I began to believe that taking as much time as I wanted to rail at life and the universe was, perhaps, not the best use of my time. It certainly wasn’t making my life better. Didn’t find me a sitter. Wasn’t the recipe for rebuilding my shattered social network. Couldn’t renovate and update my shabby home or find me a job that didn’t alternate between boring me to tears and making me crazy with frustration. What exactly was I doing, standing on the shore and letting wave after wave of sadness and regret batter my soul black and blue? I was told, by people I assumed knew better than I, that this was active grieving, and I wondered, shouldn’t I be just as actively trying to live again?

 

Two years is the minimum  and five the maximum for recovery from the loss of a spouse. That’s what I have been told over and over and I questioned it as often as I parroted it to other freshly minted widows. But the people I knew, my friends and my family, were of a different mind. Partly because they had no frame of reference, but mostly because they loved me and they could see what I already knew which was that grieving was killing me slowly even while it was burying me alive. It was distorting my ability to gauge the height of the molehills that litter that forest in which we all dwell. My husband died, but that didn’t make my troubles more important than those of anyone else.  Not everything that was wrong with my life was the result of his death. I was not cursed by the universe because this had happened. The people in your life generally speak from an understanding of any type of tragedy as their upbringing and life experiences allow and even if their experiences don’t match your own, this doesn’t invalidate their observations. Stuck is fairly easy to recognize. You don’t need much of a background to know when someone is spinning their wheels. Even though I was most ungrateful, I started to realize that despite how I felt, I was surviving this most awful of events and I needed to start being more of an example and a cheerleader to people who needed the same kind of support I had received at my lowest. And not just widowed people, though I have a special affinity for them, but everyone. People who need a sounding board or a bit of verbal hand holding as they make their way out and away from whatever despair or trouble that plagues them is something I see as giving back. It’s tiring though. Some people are “tough rooms”, and there are times I wish I could give a Friar Lawrence scolding to some. He is a character in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the one who secretly marries the two and then comes up with the not so bright idea to have Juliet “play dead”. At one point in the play, Romeo is crying because as a result of killing Juliet’s cousin, he has been banished from the city and his new bride. Friar Lawrence loses his patience and reminds Romeo of all the really awful things that could have happened instead with the following:

What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive,

For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead.

There art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee,

But thou slewest Tybalt. There art thou happy too.

The law, that threat’ned death, becomes thy friend

And turns it to exile. There art thou happy.

A pack of blessings light upon thy back;

Happiness courts thee in her best array;

But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,

Thou pout’st upon thy fortune and thy love.

Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.

 

Not that it’s always possible to find a “bright side” but there is usually something to be grateful for and something worse that could have resulted. Worse than  dead spouse? No, but worse circumstances to find yourself in after than most people experience. If it weren’t for my aunt I would have lost our house after Will took sick and was diagnosed because we lost nearly half our income overnight. If it weren’t for a righteously indignant email to my state senator, Will would have died before we could have gotten him on disability. If I didn’t have friends in the home health care and social work industry, I wouldn’t have found a nursing home to take him when it was clearly time. If I hadn’t worked in a really great school with an awesome principal and coworkers who believed in circling the wagons around colleagues, I could have lost my job. There art thou happy. People don’t do that kind of assessing enough and aren’t encouraged to either. It’s easier to pity and enable self-pity then risk a bit of hurt and anger. 

 

And just as there is nearly always something worse, there is eventually something better. Faith and hope are either good things to spread via your own examples or just an annoying Pollyanna optimism. 

 

 

An Anniversary Gift


On Rob’s wedding anniversary last month, he was awakened early in the morning by the feeling that someone was touching his leg. He thought it was me. I often put my leg on his when we have drifted away from each other in the night. But, when he checked, he realized that I wasn’t touching him at all. It was a nice gift on this first anniversary of their wedding day that he and Shelley could not spend together. Other women, even widowed ones, might have found this revelation by their new husbands a bit strange, but I was glad that they were able to have this bit of contact. And I was a little jealous. I didn’t “hear” from Will at all last August on our first anniversary apart. To be fair though, I was in a lot of pain and feeling frustrated by my lack of ability to redirect my life. My new singular life was quite different from the limbo-ish widow in waiting life I had lived for the well over two years before his death, so even if he had sent me some kind of sign, I wouldn’t have noticed. I went to the State Fair that day with Katy, a place and event that Will loathed to his core. Nothing but overweight people and numerous opportunities for food poisoning in his opinion. The last place on earth my late husband would have chosen for a visitation which could be why I chose it. Who knows.

 

Today I woke hoping for some kind of sign from him, but instead I was greeted by my daughter looking for a snuggle. It was as good a gift as I could ever have hoped for in any event. After that I went about my morning in a state of hurried purpose. There was breakfast with Rob and getting Katy ready for Kinder-camp and no time to ponder the significance of the day. Any significance is part of my history now anyway.

 

As noon approached, Katy and I were back in the truck and headed home from town. Between dropping her off at camp and collecting her again, I had gone to the fitness center for a run, hit the grocery for supplies and picked up a few forgotten items for my home office. Katy watched Zaboomafoo  on the DVD as I absently listened to XM and pondered a predicament on the widow board that in retrospect wasn’t worth the time I had spent on it. I was thinking about my next move in said problem when I realized that XM was playing our song. The song that was always on the radio whenever Will and I went just about anywhere that first year and a half we were together. I can’t think of a single time the radio was playing that we didn’t hear it. He joked it was our song. I even suggested we dance to it at our reception, jokingly though he didn’t find it too funny. Why should have he? It’s a depressing song, What it’s Like by Everlast. I tuned in to the lyrics from my reverie to hear:

 

God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in her shoes 

‘Cause then you really might know what it’s like to have to choose 

Then you really might know what it’s like… 

Then you really might know what it’s like… 

Then you really might know what it’s like… 

Then you really might know what it’s like… 

I’ve seen a rich man beg 

I’ve seen a good man sin 

I’ve seen a tough man cry 

I’ve seen a loser win 

And a sad man grin 

I heard an honest man lie 

I’ve seen the good side of bad 

And the downside of up 

And everything between 

I licked the silver spoon 

Drank from the golden cup 

And smoked the finest green 

I stroked the fattest dimes at least a couple of times 

before I broke their heart 

You know where it ends, yo, it usually depends on where you start 

I had to smile. Two husbands and both telling me the same thing. Rob is constantly reminding me that widowhood, and any life-altering event really, doesn’t change who people really are inside. It just magnifies what is already there. You can’t fix stupid, Rob says, quoting one of his favorite comedians, Ron White. He’s right of course. And Will was, in the subtle way that circumstances permit him, telling me the same thing. He understands where I am because he knows where I have been. He was there too. A helpless prisoner of his own body, but he was there. Not a bad gift really. And a really good song in retrospect. 

 

Happy Anniversary, baby, and thank you.

It’s Not “Getting Over”. It’s Surviving.


 

I guess I could try to be remorseful about feelings that are inadvertently hurt when I base my advice or responses to queries on my own experiences rather than adhering to the accepted standards of the majority. Which rules by the way. Most emphatically. But, everything I know about widowhood, surviving in general really, I learned from my family. The standard response to death (or lesser tragedy or even just upheaval) was that life goes on, and no one can live your life for you. If you have issues, deal with them. If you need help, ask. Whining is okay but be prepared for solutions to be offered when you do, and be equally be prepared to be told to knock it off if you are “all whine and no work”.  Grief is never over, but living isn’t over either until you’re dead yourself. 

 

In the beginning, people play the event, or events, over and over. As if in doing so they can change the outcome. Then comes the unrelenting pain and despair that just guts you. That doesn’t last though. Eventually, what trips us all up is living again. And that is where people get stuck. How do I do such and such now that XYorZ has happened? The answer is, of course, differently. From many of us this answer is compounded with….alone. It’s easy from there to allow yourself to slip from grief to self-pity and finally into learned helplessness, but it is not inevitable.

 

From day one of Will’s illness, I was a problem solver because I had to be. Did I whine. Yep, a lot. Was I a drama queen? Sure, often. Were people patient with me? Most assuredly they were. When it was clear that was what I needed, they were there to listen, and when it was just as clear I was past my “born on date” for a particular issue, I was told that too and in no uncertain terms. And was I appreciative. No. But, it usually brought me back to my senses, and I found a solution to whatever was plaguing me, or I learned to wait it out. Make a plan and work towards it. Can anyone do that? Most people can. Most people do. At a certain point past whatever their tragedy might be, and it’s not as long as some people think, most people begin to move forward. They have a goal. They make a plan. They put it into action, and they work at it and tinker with it until they reach that goal or discover they need a different one. 

 

And I wasn’t always like this. For example, during the days when Will and I were struggling to have a baby, I found it easier to ask “why me?” and spin all manner of drama queen scenarios out of my frustration. I taxed people’s patience. Will’s especially. And I wish now that I had been mature enough, and secure enough in myself, to have approached things differently. I eventually pulled things together, worked a plan and we had Katy. But even as we went through that last IVF attempt, I had already mapped out a fall back plan. I was learning. Moving forward.

 

It’s not a magical day, the day you take those first steps. It’s just a day like the ones that led up to it, and the ones that follow. For me, the day I began my forward momentum in earnest after Will died, was the day before the first anniversary of his death. I sat in my kitchen and had a talk with him. It was time to move forward. I knew that and in a way he confirmed it for me. The heart rendering grief served no healthy purpose and even though it would have been easier to let it continue, it was time to stop. 

 

The people I admire most worked early on to integrate their grief into their lives in a positive, future oriented way. They taught me all I know. They showed me when and how to use my life as an example. How empathy and compassion are healing for the giver and the receiver, and when the best thing you can do for someone is to tell them, it’s time to pick up the pieces and begin the process of putting life back together. 

 

A friend is in the process of deciding to separate from her husband. It’s painful to me because I know how hard she has worked on her relationship and how much she wants to still be able to save it, and how badly she is hurting. I hope she can turn things around. At one point a few months back, when things were very rocky, she joked that it was a good things she had gotten a life insurance policy on her husband and that perhaps when she returned from vacation she would find he’d been in a car accident and killed. Problem solved. Of course she didn’t mean that. Didn’t mean it anymore than my mother did when she used to wish that my dad’s drinking would just kill him, so she wouldn’t have to put up with it anymore. Having lost my husband, statements like these, even when they aren’t meant, bother me a lot. I can’t imagine wishing that kind of pain on myself as a solution to a problem. Widowed people are often driven to distraction by the marital complaints, griping of any kind really, of their family, friends, coworkers and total strangers overheard at the grocery. It bothered me a lot too in the beginning too, but now I just marvel at their naivete. These people are lucky to be able to “whine”. Lucky to be so innocent. Lucky to have not been so sorely tested. Now I am bothered much more by those who have been where I have been and still can waste time on the most trivial of things. Life is too short to choose to chase your tail on a regular basis. I can listen to someone talk about their spouse, their sadness , their attempts to redefine their lives forever, but I can’t listen to these same people on subjects that aren’t that big of a deal because they are fixable.  Ot understand how everything in life is suddenly the direct result of being widowed. Most problems that arise have solutions if you take the time to sit and figure them out.

 

I guess it all boils down the that “eye of the beholder” thing I have written about in other entries. What I see as surviving, someone else sees as “getting over”. What I consider a mole hill is the Andes to someone else. Still, in my opinion, it’s better to push through and take what control you can, rather than let the events of your life sweep you along to places you might have a hard time getting back from.