young widowhood

A Month from Today


Wedding Dress For Happy Couple in Love

Image by epSos.de via Flickr

On the morning of June 27th at just about this time in the morning, I will have been married for just a bit more than half a day. Rob and I remind ourselves often that time is too precious to wish away, but as I gear up for another week of separation I wish I owned a Toynbee Convector.

 

There is an old Ray Bradbury short story that I used to teach to my seventh graders back in the day. It is about a man who fakes a trip to the future in order to give the world hope of a better world to come. The faked proof he presents inspires people to go out and actually create the world he only imagined for them. I remind myself when I am feeling impatient and missing my love’s physical reassurance that what we are doing in our time apart is giving substance to our dreams.

 

You can’t build a future if you aren’t able to envision it in your mind’s eye.

 

 

Facing the Truth


Heaven

“He’s dead, Jim,” Dr. Leonard (Bones) McCoy (2227-?) chief medical officer on the starship, Enterprise

During the first year, when I was trapped by responsibilities I did as best I could to keep hopelessness at bay and anger to a minimum. But I longed to live life again. To be happy. To set goals and reach for them. To be out in the world and experience things again. Certainly I would have preferred to have had Will by my side, but that wasn’t the reality. He was gone, and I was still here.

Why do some of us see the world for the possibilities it holds for us as opposed to some sort of solitary confinement to be outlasted?

My husband’s dead. I don’t expect phone calls. He isn’t going to turn up in the kitchen one morning when I come down to get breakfast for my daughter. Although there are moments in the beginning when there is a Twilight Zone feel to this, I have a difficult time with widowed people who are further out than I am and still talking about grappling with the reality of their now. They talk about “diverting” themselves with projects and dating and getaways. How does one “divert” grief? It hangs on you like a too large coat, smothering you almost with its omnipresence. I guess what most annoys me about statements like these, and it is annoyance because I can’t empathizewith it  and it is for the rare one that I feel pity, is that they refer to life as a distraction. Living is a distraction? Reality is a time filler on the way to the grave?

Reunification seems to be the goal of many widowed people. While it is a nice thought, I am not so sure that it is the reality that awaits any of us when this life is over. I often have the feeling that Will is farther and farther away from me all the time, and that he is moving forward in much the same way that I have. A dear friend of Rob’s told him that he shouldn’t worry about the configurations of the next life in terms of our earth bound relations. The next plane is not bound by the rules that reign here. I don’t worry about it much myself, but I wonder how I could ever give Rob up. He is too precious and too much a part of me now.

A common question of the widowed is how do you make room in your heart to love another? There is a feeling that a broken heart is just not capable of being repaired to a point where this will be possible. The thing is, though, that your heart isn’t really broken. It still beats. It still feels and aches and has love to give. There is just no one to ease the ache or accept the love anymore. Fear is what holds us back from loving again at some point. Those who have trouble reconnecting with their ability to love and risk not being loved in return more than likely had difficulty with this before they married. I know that when I first tried to date I fell back into the bad relationship habits of my life before Will. It was as though I had forgotten everything I had learned from him and with him about relationships. It was only when I stepped back and acknowledged what I was doing and made an effort to put the lessons of my marriage into practice again that I found my footing and ultimately was able to build a relationship with Rob.

Often I hear widowed people say that though they are in a new relationship, or open to one, they will never love someone else as much as they loved their late spouse, or be loved as comparably. I just cringe. I love Rob as much as I ever loved Will, and I feel as loved as I have ever felt. Beyond that I can’t make any other comparisons. It is not possible and it’s not wise. “That was then and this is now.” Mark says that to Byron in the S.E. Hinton novel of the same now when he is asked why things can’t be the same between them. In the novel it is a rather cynical and very hard assessment of the reality experienced by these teen-aged characters. The two boys had survived hard childhoods and yet the severing of their near-familial relationship was one of the most difficult challenges either had faced yet. Life is hard sometimes, but reality must be acknowledged for what it is. Life is not static. It is ever changing, and it’s direction is only marginally ours to control.

I can’t imagine who I would be were it not for Will. I can’t imagine a future without Rob. My truths.

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Rights of the Mourning


風雨蘭 Zephyranthes macrosiphon 花朵

Image by 澎湖小雲雀 via Flickr

Newsweek online has a regular feature called My Turn where ordinary people submit essays on topics they are passionate about in hopes of seeing them published to be shared with others. Recently I read an essay by Jess Decourcy Hinds, a twenty-five year old college writing instructor, on the do’s and don’t’s of expressing condolences to the grieving. Ms. Decourcy Hinds lost her father a year ago to cancer. Although she was concerned with society’s tendency to hurry the grieving through the “process” and back to a state that makes everyone but the bereaved person more comfortable, she was truly torqued about the way people phrase their expressions of sympathy. Her essay reminded me a bit of a list that circulates with regularity on the YWBB which is meant to help the non-widowed avoid irritating the widowed with their well-intentioned, but basically clueless and clumsy, attempts to help us feel better.

 

There are all sorts of pat phrases that the newly bereaved will hear during the first hours to months after a loved one dies. Frankly, I don’t recall all the platitudes that I know were offered up to me as balm for my seared soul. The only one I do recall that I still take great issue with is “I understand how you feel” because few people do unless they have been widowed themselves. I only understand bereavement from my own perspective and suspect that I am not alone in this. A point that I think would be lost on the author of this article. My parents are still alive. I haven’t lost a sibling. Though I did lose children to miscarriages, I have not lost a baby or a child. I don’t know what that would feel like. I don’t know how I would react for sure. I do know that based on how it felt to watch my husband slip away from me over months and years and then die, that I can’t imagine the pain of other types of loss of loved ones, and this is mostly because I don’t want to. I have enough pain and memories of pain without imagining losses that have yet to or may never occur in my lifetime. I am honest now when I express my sympathies to those newly laid low by grief. I am very sorry for the pain they must be feeling, and I really can’t imagine what it must be like.

 

A good friend from many years back lost her son when he was just a bit younger than my daughter. He was murdered by her now ex-husband. We have fallen out of touch over the years and those times when we have reconnected, we haven’t discussed him. Since that time she has moved forward, married again and has a little boy who is two years younger than my Dee, and I have lost a husband. The one time we did tiptoe around the edges of our losses, we both came to the agreement that there is no road map for grief. No handbook to follow. And we are left to struggle through as best fits our needs. I think that probably this can be said of those around us as they grope for words of sympathy. Because it is sympathy they are expressing, not empathy. They don’t know.