grief

Unavoidable


So I dipped a toe into the topic of the avoidable, but didn’t delve into the flip-side, did I?

The young woman isn’t identified in the photo credits. Perhaps the photographer, Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images didn’t ask. It would take a ballsy person to stroll up to such a scene and play 20 questions though I imagine he’d have gotten chapter verse and the annotated notes if he had.The grave belongs to U.S. Marine Corps Lance Corporal Noah Pier. He was killed February 12, 2010 in Marja, Afghanistan and is resting at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia, which is just outside the capital.

I’ve been there. It’s beautiful, belies its purpose and history. Arlington was the plantation home of Robert E. Lee’s wife. They abandoned it when he turned down Lincoln’s offer to head the Union Army, resigned his commission and went to serve the Confederacy. The mansion was built by George Washington’s grandson and the father of Lee’s wife, Anna.

The house was commandeered and used as a garrison and it was Union General Mieg’s idea to start burying dead soldiers there, partly as a rebuke to Lee. Mieg’s own son was among the first war dead interred there.

I wonder. Did he sleep on the left side of their bed? Is this the first restful nap she’s had in months? Were they married? Engaged?

Not that any of that matters but I bet she’d have told Chip if he asked.

I found the picture in my blog reader and then just after I found a post about John Cazale, the actor. You’d know him if you saw him. He only made five movies before he died of bone cancer in 1978, but all five were nominated for best picture at the Academy Awards, and he is cited by folks like Pacino, De Niro and Streep as being one of their great influences.

But that’s not why I found him interesting or mention him now.

Meryl Streep and John Cazale were engaged to be married when he died. She nursed him throughout his illness. She even took a minor part in The Deer Hunter, just to be with him and take care of him as he went about making his last movie.

She was with him when he died.

And then six months later, she was married.

Some people would find that shocking. Judge her even.

Yet, she’s been married for 31 years and has four children and by all accounts is very content, happy even.

She helped put together a documentary about Cazale and agreed to be interviewed. She is puffy-eyed and tearful at turns on the screen as she talks about him.

And yet …

I wonder about Noah Pier and this girl. On this most recent Memorial Day she is napping on his still fairly fresh grave, but where will she be mid-summer? Or fall? Or next year?

Losing people we love isn’t anymore avoidable than someday being “lost” ourselves. But it isn’t the end … of anything really.

A Bit Down


“You look down,” Rob remarked after dinner last evening. “Anything wrong?”

I didn’t really want to go into it, but it’s no use trying to pretend with my husband. He reads me too well.

“I was just thinking about Wally’s son,” I said. “His visitation is tonight and funeral tomorrow.”

“Wally was Will’s best friend,” Rob reminded me, “not yours.”

“I know. It wasn’t my responsibility to keep him in touch or to make sure that he saw Dee,” I said. “But it’s not like I didn’t know Spence. We saw those kids quite a bit in the early years of our marriage. I knew that little boy.”

And he’s dead now – which went without saying.

Still, it doesn’t change the fact that his death represents more severing with the past for me and it’s on that level that I am most affected. Cold? Maybe. And maybe not. I am sorry for Wally and Cherish’s loss in that empathetic way of parents. Losing a child is a horror that being widowed can’t even compete with, but I haven’t see Wally in over 4 years and the last time I saw Cherish, just before Christmas of 2006, I was handed a load of crap about Wally needing space still.

Okay, maybe not a full load of crap. As I mentioned, Wally did eventually reach out a year later. It’s not my fault he couldn’t deal with the fact that I had naturally gone on with my life. People from back in the days of Will expected me to sit and wait for them to catch up emotionally not remembering that I dealt daily and they dealt when they couldn’t avoid it. Definitely on different timelines.

And Spence’s death comes pretty close on the heels of the beginning of year 5.

Yes, I do keep track of the number of years my first husband has been dead. Sort of.

About a week before the anniversary in late January, Rob asked how I was doing with the date looming.

“It’s still a bit off,” I said, “but I’m okay. It’s not until the 26th.”

“23rd,” he corrected me.

“Oh yeah, the 23rd. I always forget.”

And I do. Always forget the exact day. With Will having been not really figuring in the day-to-day of my life for so long, his death was almost anticlimactic. I’d been on my own for over two years. In a lot of significant ways, I am really gearing up for my 7th anniversary though widow purists would not agree.

I think the events of this week have brought up, yet again, my sore points. Will’s friends. Their abandonment of him. The way they have rewritten history to avoid acknowledging the extent his illness mentally maimed him so they feel better about what they did, didn’t and continue to do. And the way that I am still maligned in their circles as though I could have done anything differently or better that would have changed outcomes.

I do so hate being spun around. I am not Lot’s Wife, after all, I don’t miss anything back there enough to turn around on my own.

Oh well.

The One Where I Kept My Mouth Shut


Dee attended a pool party Saturday. It was the birthday celebration of two little school friends who she has known since kindergarten. They are twins. I have gotten to know their mother a bit over time and when she let me know last week that she was going to be flying to Ontario on an early flight the next day because her father is in the last stage of cancer, I naturally volunteered to help out in any way she needed. I’ve been there. I know. I offered. It’s simple because there isn’t much to think about really.

While the kids were swimming under the supervision of the twin’s dad, two lifeguards and a couple of other parents who wanted to help out as well, I sliced hotdog buns. At some point, things were set up enough to allow the conversation to flow past panicked preparation to topics of the day. Twins’ Mom related her frazzled shopping adventures of the previous couple of days and remarked that at one point she became irrationally angry with a cashier who was more interested in socializing with her customers than checking them out. She realized that it was just the stressful nature of getting ready for her daughters’ party while planning to leave to be with her parents and siblings that was making her react as she did but knowing isn’t always enough to quell feelings in the moment. She apparently mentioned it to her primary care provider not long after it happened because she went on to say,

“I was told that I reacted that way because I had started the grieving process and that if it got worse, I should come back in.”

There are so many layers of myth in that one statement that I almost couldn’t wrap my own thoughts up quickly enough to silence myself. Two years ago, okay maybe even last year, if someone had said that, I would have been all over it. Instead I just smiled and said,

“You’re normal.”

Because that is one of my stock answers where upheaval, tragedy, adversity and death are concerned.

The others?

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s going to be okay.”

Not verbatim, of course. I flush them out with descriptors and if I am feeling particularly reckless and under the influence of empathy, I might share a personal story with as little advice or judgement as possible.

Why?

Because I know now that all people want is to be heard. Even when they ask for advice specifically, they are not looking for anything more than someone to hear, echo and tell them that they are normal and all will eventually work out. And you know what? For most people, everything will be okay – albeit different. Very few of us lack the resiliency to right ourselves after life capsizes our boats or destiny re-charts our direction without regard to our wants.

I know it’s hard to believe. Society these days is such a nanny, telling us that there is a therapy, self-help group or pill for everything. Some of us forget, in the face of unrelenting peer pressure, that human beings are designed to overcome emotional bumps, bruises and breaks because if we hadn’t been Darwinian law would have taken care of us long, long ago.

We are victims of our ability to be introspective and logically analytic, I guess. If we’d remained merely animals, we wouldn’t be able to second guess ourselves and we’d take crisis as it came and for what it was, reminding ourselves that we were hardly unique and that life goes on even if it sucks sometimes. We are nothing special after all, that bad times should pass over our house for those more deserving.

So, I am sorry you’re normal, but in spite of that, everything is going to be okay. Really.