I noticed last week that the corners of my mouth were cracked, the result of the dry cold winters bring to Denver. This has happened to me every winter since I moved here nearly 30 years ago. But this is the first time I’ve noticed it since my husband died, meaning I didn’t notice it for two years. I’m sure it’s happened for the past two years; I just didn’t notice it.
I wouldn’t have given this much thought except that it hurts enough that it causes me to put ointment on the corners of my mouth multiple times throughout the day—and I realized that for the first two years after my husband died, I was in such a fog I didn’t notice things that caused me physical pain. I didn’t notice the corners of my mouth cracking—but I’m sure they did.
I think I was too consumed by emotional pain for physical pain to even register with me. Not too long after my husband died, I had two major surgeries: a hysterectomy a few months after he died and brain surgery a little over a year after he died. I bounced back from both quickly enough to surprise my doctors and hardly touched the pain medication offered after both. I hope I would have done that regardless, but now I wonder if general grief and numbness to my own condition contributed, making me unaware of physical pain.
I’m not saying grieving improves your pain tolerance but rather that grieving can impact your pain tolerance. I suspect some grieving people would have the opposite happen—less tolerance for physical pain.
For me, this new awareness of my own physical pain corresponds to a generally heightened awareness of my own needs. I’m not just trying to get through the days as much. I’m noticing myself being hungry and thirsty in ways I haven’t for a long time. I’ve been hungry and thirsty since my husband died, but the hunger and thirst felt somewhere in the distance, not quite in my body. The sensations were reminders of something I had to deal with, but I felt detached from it. That detachment is fading.
So much of the first two years after my husband died is hazy in my memory but lately I’ve noticed my memory for things happening seems sharper. I’m better able to remember what I did last week or a few months ago. I don’t feel disoriented all the time anymore. The fog of grief that was a layer between me and everything else is fading. The grief is still there but it every experience I have isn’t filtered through it anymore.
As I make plans for the future, my first thought is no longer automatically about my husband being dead. I can now plan a trip and think about what I want to do without that thought being closely followed by, “He would love that” or “he would hate that” or “I wish he could have gotten to do that.”
What would have been his 64th birthday passed last week. Fits of weeping took hold of me several times, but unlike previous birthdays, I was able to focus on other things for a good part of the day.
Before my husband died, I started working on a memoir of being my husband’s caregiver. We were actually working on it together, with me reading him what I’d written and then him talking through his thoughts, which I added to the draft. We envisioned a co-authored memoir.
After he died, I kept working on the memoir, but obviously it was no longer co-authored. One challenge on this project has been seeing myself as the protagonist. Nearly everything I wrote before he died positioned him as the protagonist and me as his trusty sidekick. After he died, it was hard for me to shift that focus and at some point I realized I was writing a memoir of my husband rather than a memoir of being his caregiver. I was writing from the perspective of his caregiver, but it wasn’t about my experience, it was about his through my eyes.
I’ve continued to struggle with positioning myself as the star of the story, but this new experience of being aware of my own physical pain seems like a positive development. I wonder if I’m entering a new phase of grief, one where grief is still with me but it isn’t the membrane through which all experience is filtered.