YWBB

Meanness


moving on

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From the beginning, I mean the very beginning when Will was first diagnosed and I knew he was going to die, I wanted… needed… to believe that the whole light at the end of the tunnel thing was real. I fixated on the hope that someday there would be happiness again. I put all my trust in that one idea and amazingly it seems to have carried me through to the place I am now. But it is not that way for everyone I am coming to learn. Rob reminds me from time to time something to the effect that widowhood does not create saints out of sow’s ears. If you were not an optimistic person before being widowed, you are very unlikely to become one, and the same holds true for being kind and compassionate.

 

I read a column by Leonard Pitts Jr. of the Miami Herald today. It was about the Virginia Tech murders, but the central question of his piece was “Can you fix meanness?” And he was talking about the soul. Some people just seem to have this meanness at their core and nothing touches it. It’s there and it shows through no matter what they do or their circumstances in life. Nothing changes that core personality.

 

It’s hard not to go through the widow journey without hitting patches of anger and resentment and wanting to lash out whenever an opportunity presents itself. I have been there myself. It wasn’t fun though. I felt just as awful when I was in that mode as I had before I entered or even after I exited. There was no release from the anger, and it was wrong to purposefully bring negativity to a place, like the YWBB, where people were doing their best to rise above pain and hurt.

 

I left the board today*. It was time. And it may seem cowardly or defeatist to walk away from trying to help those who are truly in need of solace or advice and reassurance from someone who understands, but there is an underlying negativity about the place, that actually may have always been there and I didn’t notice, and a meanness in the loudest voices that can’t be overcome by just one person. There are dead and dying souls there. People who will never be whole, maybe because they never were.

 

Mr. Pitts posed an interesting question in his column “How can you fix a deadness of the soul?”. I wonder about that too. His reply was that there are days that you can find the answers and fix the problems and then there are those times when the answer is that you must simply accept what is. The living dead wander among us. There is negativity and meanness in the world that cannot be overcome by simply handing out hope and understanding. There are no answers, just more questions.

 

It reminds me a bit of the musical by Steven Sondheim, Into the Woods. There is a scene in the second act where the Baker leaves the others to the mercy of the Giant who has invaded their land because he is overcome with grief over the death of his wife and the belief that his baby son would be better off without him. The Baker encounters the spirit of his recently deceased father who reminds him that running away is not the answer to any problem he sings,

 

Running away, go to it.

Where do you have in mind?

Have to take care.

Unless there’s a where

you’ll only be traveling blind.

Just more questions.

Different kinds.

 

There is meanness in the world. I don’t have to be a part of it. I have a where. Canada. A new life with Rob. And, there are different questions to be asked and answered more in tune with the forward momentum of my life now.

 

I am sure I sounded self-righteous and judgmental in my last two posts today. It was hard to keep a neutral tone, though I did try. There are many people there who are wonderful and thoughtful and positive. They are the majority actually, but like many majorities they are largely silent when meanness rears its head. They are cowed by its shrillness and reduced to its ugly tactics and means when they object.

 

I don’t have answers. I only know what is best for me. To move forward. To acknowledge the sadness when those moments arise and refuse to step back into the darkness.

 

*I left and returned a few more times before I just deleted my posts completely. You will only find my a sign in name and a handful of vague references.
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‘Til Death


"The Garden of Eden" by Lucas Cranac...

Image via Wikipedia

Most married couples have this romantic expectation of spending eternity together. Buried side by side. Reuniting in heaven. It’s the kind of thing Hollywood makes movies about and Celine Dion warbles at us. But, what if there isn’t an eternity. No physical possibility of lying side by side. And heaven isn’t anymore real than the Garden of Eden?

Something I read on the YWBB got me thinking again about being buried. Someday. After I am dead. I have always maintained that my daughter should be the one to decide the final resting place of my earthly remains. Where I am will matter most to her after all. But, that was before Rob. Where I rest would matter to him as well now.

Dee’s father is buried in a little Catholic cemetery in a little town in Iowa where the bar that he played pool league out of is located. Will didn’t want his ashes scattered to the wind, even if I could have found a way to place him in the end zone at Heinz’s Stadium, because he didn’t want to be ashes. He wanted to be buried. He never specified where though he ruled out a few places most emphatically. Like Pella, where both of his parents are from and his father is buried. He hated Pella, and he didn’t much care for his father either. And Norwalk. The bedroom community he grew up in and considered a splat on the map for the most part – though I suspect he knew if he was buried too close to where his mother lived, she would cover his grave in death swag and bling. He loathed the idea of becoming a shrine like the ones you see along the side of the road.

Economically, a full burial was never an option I could promise him. It was partly luck that I learned of St. John’s and was able to afford to intern his ashes there. His name alone is on the headstone though there is room for mine, I suppose if I planned to stay in Iowa. But that was never the plan, even before Rob, I didn’t see myself here in another year or maybe two.

Will believed that a person’s soul went to heaven when he/she died. He believed that you met God. He told me once that he it would “suck” having to wait all those years for me because he knew I was going to be very old when I died. I told him not to worry that he would have my second husband to keep him company. He didn’t think that was funny, but I never could make him laugh. “You’re just not that funny, babe,” he used to tell me. Ironically, Rob holds much the same opinion of me.

I didn’t save any of Will’s cremains. I buried the container unopened. I literally buried it. With no money it was just me, Katy and the sexton standing over this little hole in the ground. The sexton, a very nice old man who had showed me his own plot the day I went to pick out Will’s, recited the “Our Father” and I placed the urn in the ground myself. I am a bit sorry now that I don’t have some of the ashes to take with me to Canada, but there is nothing to do about it now. As I told Rob when he asked, I am fairly certain there are laws against digging up your dead husband’s urn simply because you’re moving to another country, but to his credit, Rob offered to sneak out there with me under cover of darkness and help me dig Will up. Being arrested for unearthing my dead husband’s remains was not high on my bucket list, so I declined.

Truthfully, I feel only a sense of failure when I visit his grave anymore. It will actually be a relief not to feel obligated. In the beginning I went simply because it was something tangible to yell at or complain to or beg for help. Now it’s just a rock. He isn’t there. He was never there.

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Imagine There’s No Heaven


Red sunset

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“Use your imagination not to scare yourself to death but to inspire yourself to life”

Adele Brookman

Rob sent me today’s quote. It is appropriate and timely for us both. Imagining one’s life, planning the dreams you have dreamed for your future and putting them into action can be overwhelming, but re-imagining the future after your original hopes and dreams have died? Stymied stronger individuals than myself I’ve no doubt.

My imagination’s lowest setting is hyperactive. I can scare myself with relative ease. Probably the years of practice I’ve had. Lately I have been scaring myself a bit with doom and gloom scenarios as I make preparations for moving to Canada and the wedding. Rob reminds me that it is just our heightened widow’s sensitivity that makes us more susceptible to this kind of thinking but also helps us be more compassionate of others too. Kind of like a super-power, although not that cool. Actually it would make a pretty dorky super-power.

I was actually less of a risk taker in the past than I am at present which is interesting given the events of the past few years. I know many would simply be content to shore up the walls around the lives they have salvaged from the wreckage and be grateful for a little peace. But I was just not content. The last months before the first anniversary of my late husband’s death were painful. I hurt for him and me and our daughter, and what we had all been through, but mostly I wanted to move forward. And at that time, I didn’t know where or what to move towards. I only knew what I didn’t want.

There was this urge to imagine a life away from where I was and doing something that was fun and meaningful for a living. In your mind you can go anywhere and I did. Tried on all manner of places that while they might have been comfortable, didn’t fit the way a good pair of jeans do. The difference between comfort and fit is the difference between Old Navy and Lucky Brand. When Rob and I were first friends, he was always quizzing me about where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do with my life. Partly because he is a problem-solver. Me, man. See problem, solve problem. And I love that about men in general, and him in particular, because I problem solve the way I shop for clothes. I browse through all the stores noting styles and colors. A few days later I go back and try things on, and maybe I will buy something but likely not, and after a few days more, I decide and purchase. Impulse shopping lands me with clothes I will never wear, and solving a problem without due thought and sorting is much the same scenario.

I am not sure when Rob went from a man I wanted to find someone just like to a man I was falling in love with, but he changed the staging of my daydreams about the future. And it wasn’t scary. It was, at first, that stomach dropping feeling you get when you go over the top on the Ferris Wheel or look down into the crevices from atop the rocks. Breathtaking. But, as we grew closer, talked more and spent time together; he became the future to me. The place where I knew I should be. The one I was meant for.

People who have never seen us together don’t get “us”. Certainly the way we met invites even the most casual skeptic to voice an opinion, usually negative. There is a song by Brandi Carlile called The Story that almost conveys how I feel:

All of these lines across my face

Tell you the story of who I am

So many stories of where I’ve been

And how I got to where I am

But these stories don’t mean anything

When you’ve got no one to tell them to

It’s true…I was made for you

I climbed across the mountain tops

Swam all across the ocean blue

I crossed all the lines and I broke all the rules

But baby I broke them all for you

Because even when I was flat broke

You made me feel like a million bucks

Yeah you do and I was made for you

You see the smile that’s on my mouth

Is hiding the words that don’t come out

And all of my friends who think that I’m blessed

They don’t know my head is a mess

No, they don’t know who I really am

And they don’t know what I’ve been through but you do

And I was made for you…

Someone on the board wrote about feeling cheated of her time with her husband. How could he have been put in her life only to be taken away so soon? And then someone pointed out something to her she hadn’t thought of before, perhaps she had been put in his life. An interesting twist. We think of our spouses as forever because we have such a limited grasp of the concept. Our forever is really here and now. The time we are allowed with our spouses is probably even more finite because if I am here moving forward with Rob then what is Will doing? For some reason the image of him sitting on a cloud and plucking a harp waiting for me just doesn’t seem plausible. A Creator who could envision a sunset, much less create one daily, does not live in a cotton candy Christian heaven.

It is amazing where or to whom the imagination can lead you when it is free from fear and open to the possibilities. Eternity is bounded by the limits of what we can imagine. As John Lennon once said, “Imagine there is no heaven.”