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.
feeling isolated after the death of a spouse
The worst day of the week is Sunday. It’s for family and friends. Something that you are in short supply of after you lose your spouse. I don’t know how it is for people who lose their loved ones suddenly. I would imagine that the shock compells family and friends to hang around for a while but perhaps not. I know plenty of widows and widowers who lost their spouses tragically who can attest to the fact that very quickly the phone stops ringing, cards stop arriving, and people they thought they could count on disappear back into a life they are no longer a part of. It’s like losing your membership in a club. One day you are one of them and the next you are one of “them”. Sundays are the longest day of the week. Not that the rest of the weekend doesn’t carry its own special tortures but generally, you can shrug off Friday night without too much effort. You’re tired and by the time you’ve gotten children home and fed and maybe hit the gym for a workout, it’s easy to kick back and call it an early night. Saturday is for errands and housework and yardwork and kid’s birthday parties and playdates that can easily keep a person running into the early evening. But, Sunday is a blackhole that waits for you all week long and swallows you. A wormhole to hell. If you go to church, you are assailed by families, whole and happy. If you avoid it, as I do, you are left with that many more hours of the day to fill. Say what you like about mass, but it is a guaranteed time sucker. When I was a child, I never knew a priest who couldn’t conduct a service in less than 35 minutes. My father’s uncle, Father John, was the master of eclesiatical efficiency. Twenty minutes and this included the homily. My cousins and I used to time him. We never caught him going long. When my aunt’s husband died, I remember my father telling one of his brothers, who was worried we wouldn’t make it across town to the cemetary before the noon traffic began, that he shouldn’t worry because Father John never ran long. The marriage ceremony he performed for my parents was probably the longest mass he ever gave. It lasted about a half hour, but he was drunk. Today, if it weren’t for the consecration, you couldn’t tell a Catholic Mass from a Protestant service. Quanity over quality. Sunday is a day when you cannot call up friends and finagle an invite or a playdate. It is a day when you will run into couples and families wherever you go. It is a day when you remember most keenly that you are not like them anymore.
In the beginning, people call and ask you out to lunch or over for dinner. They offer to help out and babysit for your child. They treat you like you are made of something very fragile that would break with a cross word or a misinterpreted action. And they are constantly bucking you up not because they believe that your sadness is unhealthy for you but because they are so acutely uncomfortable with what has happened. They have been awakened to the possibility that there but for the grace of God they may go to, and they don’t like it. They don’t like that you are not strong, that you need so much time, that you are frozen in a moment that you relive endlessly, and that you are quite probably infecting them with whatever bad karma has brought death to your door. The further out from the early days you travel the less they are there for you. Impatience replaces kindness and understanding. Why aren’t you taking steps to rebuild your life? Why aren’t you returning to the accepted standards of self-reliance? Why are you still sad? And lost? And needy? And taking up my time? Time that is better spent on things that aren’t tainted with grief and death. Past six months they think they are being kind when they offer you advice on what you can do for yourself as opposed to offering assistance with what you need done. They think that you would get over your loved one’s death faster if you would join a club or go to a singles’ function. They equate the lose of the person who loved you more unconditionally than your own parents ever have with breaking up with a lover or getting a divorce. You should be cried out by now. You should not be bothering me with this anymore. But, they don’t say that because they know that they are wrong to think and feel the way they do, and that you are in the right to mourn. They stuff that down deep; they way they wish you would stuff your grief. And eventually, you stop asking them for things because it is just easier. How are you? Fine. I’m okay. Even though I am not okay. The numb disinterest in everything is gone now and replaced by a raw, scraped feeling that makes you a lightening rod for every heightened emotion that filters past daily. In the beginning you turn inward and sought the cocooned safety that the emotional distancing of grief provides in much the same way burn victims are shielded from the agony of their smoldering flesh by a shutdown of the pain receptors. But the receptors switch back on in time to witness the desertion of family and friends who withstood the waves of heat rising off your blistering soul while you were oblivious to it. Because of this, you can’t easily label them traitors and cast them aside. They were there at one point. It was, unfortunately, a point at which you weren’t paying any attention at all. And now you really need the shoulders, the help reconnecting with society at large, and they are tired and ready for you to be normal again. And the ironic thing is that they know as well as you do that you will never be that kind of normal again. And the more ironic thing is that I am not sure I want to be.
anniegirl1138 