Category Archives: grieving

grieving

Widowed for almost 2 ½ Years: What Feels Possible

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It’s just a month shy of 2 ½ years since my husband died. Every time I think of how long it’s been, I’ve been shocked both at how long it’s been and how short it’s been. I can’t believe I’ve survived nearly 2 ½ years without him, a task that felt impossible in the first days and weeks. I am also surprised at how much has happened since he died—I’m coming up on my third Thanksgiving and holiday season without him. I’m gone three Halloweens without him. At the same time, he still feels so close to me and the loss still feels so fresh. How can it have been 2 ½ years already? And how can it have been only 2 ½ years?

I see myself moving forward as a person who is not married to Tom DeBlaker. I am a person who is not married. I identify as widowed rather than single or even unmarried, but I know that’s a distinction many don’t recognize. I’m not making any claims about whether being widowed is harder or easier than divorced or single, but I am saying that I very much identify as widowed. The death of my husband is always with me, always occupying a slice of my heart and brain, and the feeling of loss is like a bruise that hurts when pressed.

But I am moving forward. This is the first semester since spring 2020 that I’ve felt excited about going back to work. I had the first-day-of-school excitement I used to feel reliably but haven’t since his stroke. When I had that excitement in January 2020, I went home and told my husband about it. When I had that excitement in August 2023, I noted it but kept it to myself.

The excitement felt good but was also a reminder of how much has changed since the last time I felt it. At the beginning of spring 2020, I had a couple of research trips scheduled and a keynote speech at a conference. My husband was planning to work for 6-12 more months and then retire. We were saving money to buy some property in Colorado that we would spend weekends camping on. The pandemic hit in March, then my husband had a stroke in June. A year later, he was dead.

I am used to him being dead now. I still love him—I will never be done loving him. But I am used to him being a man in photos, a pile of ashes I dole out to bodies of water and spots that meant something to him when he was alive, and a voice in messages reminding me to check that the garage door is closed or warning me about bad weather heading my way when we were apart. He is no longer someone who hugs me at the end of the day or holds my hand.

Some things that now feel possible:

  • He watched Yellowstone after his stroke and although I’ve been wanting to watch it for a year or so, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Last night, I watched the first episode of the series. I was able to immediately recognize which characters he would love or what funny comments he would make about the plot. I thought about him not being able to see the left side of the scenes (the stroke wiped out his ability to process anything happening to the left of midline) and noticed where he might have missed important action or context because of that. But overall, I enjoyed the show and will watch more.
  • I do not live in fear of something going wrong with the house. My husband handled every aspect of house maintenance and I lived in blissful ignorance. After he had his stroke, he could still talk me through the few little jobs that came up, but after he died, I realized I didn’t even know how to turn on the furnace. I was terrified of water leaks, anything breaking, and unidentifiable sounds. I’ve learned how to turn on the furnace and clean the dishwasher filter. I now have my favorite plumber. I read How Your House Works by Charlie Wing.
  • My capacity to be with other people is getting better. For a long time after my husband died, I could hardly stand to be with other people beyond my closest family and friends. Being with other people for more than a couple hours exhausted me. Even when I was with people I loved and enjoyed time with, I couldn’t wait to get home and crawl into bed and cry. That has faded and can now spend a whole day with others.

I think I might even feel ready to camp and raft next summer. Maybe not, but now I feel open to it rather than panicking at the thought.

grieving

Missing Shared Silence

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I grew up before Susan Cain’s book Quiet helped spur a re-evaluation of introversion. I was an introverted quiet kid when being quiet was seen as a character flaw. I remember my teachers saying on my report cards things like, “She’s very quiet but . . . “ and then there would be the good stuff—I was smart or I was kind, as if one wouldn’t expect to find strengths in a quiet person.

Most of my life, I’ve gravitated toward quiet people and quiet in general. It’s hard to find quiet outside of my house or nature. Restaurants and coffee shops are loud. Classrooms are loud. Concerts, dance classes, and conferences are loud. I love all these places, but I often crave silence after being in one.

When I’m alone, I usually savor the silence. Although I love music, I seldom have music on when I’m home alone. I never leave a TV on for background noise. If the TV is on, it’s because I’m watching it.

It’s only recently that I’ve realized how much I miss the shared silence of my relationship with my late husband.

I’ve said many times here that I’ve gone to my late husband’s bench and talked to him. That’s true to some extent, but what it usually looks like is me getting there, saying hello and I love you, and then being quiet for the rest of my visit. That’s partly because I do enjoy and appreciate silence, but it’s also because our relationship was a very quiet one. We didn’t actually talk that much.

I don’t mean that we didn’t talk. We did. We shared our thoughts, funny stories from the day, and such. We asked each other’s opinions of things—well, I asked for his opinion on things. He was not a man who often wanted the opinions of others. We gently teased each other throughout the day and laughed together at silly things that happened—one of the dogs falling off the couch, or the time we were standing naked in the hallway when my daughter unexpectedly opened her bedroom door, causing us to each dive and roll in a different direction . . . and then fall apart in laughter.

But we spent a lot of our time together in silence—peaceful, generous, delicious silence. Enjoying each other’s company in silence. So many of our raft trips were just us on the raft, smiling, listening to the water lapping at the raft and the shore, the oars dipping in and out of the water. Much of our camping trips was us sitting outside together, holding hands, listening to the leaves rustle, the birds chirp, the wings of dragonflies fliting by.

Just a few months into our relationship, we had a dinner together where conversation didn’t really happen. I panicked. I thought, “Oh, shit, we’ve run out of things to talk about.” But I was wrong. He just wasn’t in the mood to talk. He was in the mood to be with me, to enjoy a meal together, to rub his leg against mine under the table. Just not to talk. And once I relaxed into that, I loved it.

I’d never had a significant relationship that was so quiet.  Many times when I heard the truism about a good relationship being one in which you always have a ton to talk about, I wondered if I was kidding myself that Tom and I had a great relationship. But then I would spend time with him in silence and notice the peaceful, blissful quality of our togetherness and know that I wasn’t kidding myself.

Tom taught me to enjoy silent company. I deeply miss sitting in silence with him, holding hands but not talking. There’s a special, still calm I got from being with him in silence.

That is something I am realizing I want more of. I get plenty of silence by myself, but not much shared silence.

Many people want someone they can talk to. I want that, too, but I also want someone I can not talk to—someone who is comfortable with silence and doesn’t rush to fill it. I was lucky to have that with my husband and I sure do miss it.

grieving

Asking for Help, Part 2: Figuring Out What to Ask For

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I talked a couple weeks ago about how asking for help is brave. I have found that one of the barriers I face to asking for help is that I often don’t know what “help” would look like. Sometimes, brave or not, I’m too confused to ask for help.

I am often slow to realize what I need, recognizing most clearly what I need when I realize I am not getting it. That makes for awkward timing. I’ll be angry that no one called me on an anniversary related to my husband, and that will trigger me to realize I wanted someone to call me on the anniversary. I didn’t know I wanted that until I didn’t get it. By that time it would be counter-productive to text someone in my angry state and say, “Hey, call me! This is an important day to me!”

Ideally, I would have realized a day or so before the anniversary that I would want a call and then I could have texted a friend to ask for a call on that day. I’m certain that any friend I would ask that of would happily deliver. The problem isn’t with the friends who didn’t call but with me not realizing in a timely fashion that I would want a call.

And on a related note, I usually hate getting phone calls and most of my friends know that. One of the ways they show their love for me is by not calling!

So the trick to effectively asking for help is to identify the need before I have the need or at least before anger or overwhelm set in.

Simply asking myself what I need or want is often not at all helpful. For example, often when I’m feeling intense grief, when I ask myself what I want or need, I answer with the self-evident, “I need my husband back!” In that scenario, it’s just not helpful in any way to ask that question. It just makes me angry on top of feeling grief.

I also find myself getting tangled up in semantics. Parsing out needs from wants and the possible from the impossible isn’t helpful and actually just makes things worse. Most of the time if I ask myself what I want or need, the answer is I want or need my husband back, and the impossibility of that just hurts, all the way into my gut.

I’ve been experimenting with some different questions to ask that feel a little more helpful:

  1. What would make this situation easier?
  2. What would make this situation less stressful or upsetting?
  3. What do I want more of or less of in this moment?

Sometimes the answers to these questions are surprising. Here are some answers I’ve come up with lately:

  1. What would make this situation easier? A nap, giving myself permission to not think about it for a while, giving myself permission to think about it without apologizing, going to Tom’s bench to talk to him about it
  2. What would make this situation less stressful or upsetting? Taking a deep breath, journaling about it, calling a friend to vent, going for a walk or working out, holding somebody’s hand, chanting or meditating, listening to a meditation, sitting outside and listening to the leaves rustle in the breeze
  3. What do I want more of or less of in this moment? A glass of water, more time with the dogs, more laughter with someone who loved Tom, less feeling pressure to have the answer

A couple interesting things I notice about these answers are that they are much more varied and thought-provoking than “I want my husband back” and that most of them don’t involve asking for help at all—they are things I can easily do for myself. I’m an introvert, so it makes sense that some of the forms of help I would most want do not involve social interaction with others.

Which brings me to my final and perhaps most profound observation about the subject of asking for help: sometimes it’s ourselves we need to ask for help from.

grieving

A Weekend to Sink into Grief

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Halloween hits me harder than the other fall/winter holidays. It was my late husband’s favorite holiday and his fervor for celebrating it was contagious. He’d start gearing up for it by July, thinking about costumes and often doing research or ordering specialty components for whatever he had dreamed up.

We normally celebrated by rafting and camping for two days over the pre-Halloween weekend with fellow Halloween fanatics.  

This year marks my third Halloween without him. I noted last year that the second Halloween hit me harder than the first. This year, the entire month of October felt like a slow build up to the final weekend, with my chest getting tighter and tighter as the month progressed.  

I noticed myself feeling more and more on edge as the final weekend loomed. That Friday got off to a rough start as someone I had hired to do some winterizing at my house didn’t show up. I went to work for a few hours but couldn’t stop thinking about how my husband would have done the winterizing himself. It made me miss him intensely and I felt sobs building up inside of me. I wondered how I would make it through the session I had scheduled for the afternoon with my trainer and then evening plans with a friend.

And then I had an epiphany: I didn’t have to make it through a session with my trainer and evening plans with a friend. I could cancel. My trainer and friend were both quite gracious and encouraged me to grieve in whatever way I needed. Emboldened, I decided to clear my weekend and set some intentions.

In the early days of my grief, I often spent an entire weekend sinking into my grief, but for the last year at least, while I’ve felt a lot of grief, it’s mostly been a layer on top of whatever I’m doing. I have given myself a few hours here and there to settle into it and be sad, but it’s been quite a while since I gave myself an entire day to be sad, so a whole weekend to nurse my grief felt luxurious.

I went through photos and videos of our life together, listened to voice messages he left me, and wandered around the garage, touching his workbench and the tools I’ve kept. I still don’t know the names of most of them, but that doesn’t matter.

Luckily, he had a well-documented life. I have photos and videos of him doing so many of the things he loved to do—riding motorcycles, rafting, playing with dogs, remodeling, playing cards and dominoes with his brother and sister-in-law, road tripping, camping, gardening.

He had a knack for turning everything into a competition, and I have the video proof of that. I am not competitive, so he got used to competing with himself. I had forgotten about when we were in the airport in Frankfurt, Germany and he invented a contest with himself, trying to get his wheelie suitcase to do more and more elaborate maneuvers. I watched the videos over and over again, savoring his voice, his hands on the suitcase handle, his cocky explanations about the twists and spins.

I went to the bench commemorated to him on Sunday morning. It was covered in snow and the plaque with his name on it shined. I sat and cried for as long as I could stand the cold.

I wore his fisherman hat and flannel shirt. I put my wedding band on, relishing how beautiful it looked on my hand and how right the weight of it felt on my finger.

A couple friends texted me, offering to distract me and make me laugh. I explained that I didn’t want distraction. I was laughing plenty. Crying, too, but there is often quite a lot to laugh about when I’m grieving. I still don’t know if I lost my breath while watching the suitcase spinning videos from laughter or crying.

I closed out the weekend by attending the one event I had not canceled: a family dinner with his mom and son, my daughter, and a cousin. We reminisced about some of his antics and his terrifying driving.

It was a good weekend, and while I was sad on Monday, my breathing felt much less tight. Tomorrow is November 1, and I look forward to drawing in a deep breath without effort.

grieving

Be Brave Enough to Ask for Help

I’m getting better at asking for what I need, but my default setting for many years was to refuse help. I spent many decades perfecting the art of rejecting help.

For example, there’s the infamous time I refused to let my sister-in-law open a door for me. I haven’t just been bad at accepting help, I’ve been downright obnoxious about it. I told myself I was being independent and strong, but now I think that was bullshit. I thought that asking for help—or even receiving help I hadn’t asked for—was a sign of weakness, but now I realize that what I was doing when I refused help was hiding my vulnerability.

The idea that asking for help is a weakness is actually backwards. Not asking for help, for me, is the weaker option: it allows me to keep my vulnerability hidden. Once I made that mind trick visible to myself, it became easier to ask for help. Now I can challenge myself to be brave enough to ask for help.

I’ve recently had a few friends beautifully demonstrate how to ask for help. One friend is receiving chemo treatments for cancer and losing her hair. She posted her Amazon wish list of wigs to Facebook, making it incredibly easy for anyone who wanted to help to order her exactly the wigs she wanted. Another friend had a significant birthday coming up and wanted to get lots of old-fashioned birthday cards, so she posted messages to a few different online groups she’s part of, making her wish for birthday cards explicit.

Guess what? The one friend got exactly the wigs she hoped for and the other got a mother lode of birthday cards. And those of us who sent wigs and cards got to feel like we were awesome friends who knew just exactly what to send. As I’ve said before, letting others help is actually giving them something.

Asking for what you want or need is tricky—that’s why it takes courage. You might ask for help and be told no. I still vividly remember a time in the past when I asked a loved one to help me with something and they told me they were offended that I would ask. Although I now think that they were the one who was out of line—they could have simply said, “I’m sorry I can’t help” instead of shaming me—I do still hear a voice in my head sometimes when I ask for help, saying, “Oh, you’re doing it again, Elizabeth—this could go badly.”

But if I were to tally up the times my requests for help were greeted happily against the times they weren’t, I know which team would win: Team Ask-for-Help by a landslide.

I see a lot of anger among grieving people that others don’t know what they need—there is anger because people invite them out too often or not enough, call too often or not enough, talk about their dead loved one too much or not enough. The common refrain is, “They should know that I want [more/fewer] [invitations/calls/stories].”  The idea that good friends should just know what we need when we are grieving is seductive and fed by the serendipity of someone every once in a while getting it just right.

For example, a few days ago a friend messaged me and another friend to share Halloween memories of my husband. Halloween was his favorite holiday and they had both spent many Halloweens with him. We had fun reminding each other of some of his more outrageous costumes (like a four-foot extension he made for himself that made it look like he was ten feet tall and had four arms, two of which clenched beers in their hands). I didn’t even realize until we started messaging the stories to each other how badly I wanted to share those stories.

But the fact that someone can occasionally know what I need doesn’t mean that everyone should know what I need on a regular basis. As I’ve said before, much of the time, I don’t even know what I need. So it’s important for me to remember that nobody is a mind reader.

It’s absolutely lovely when someone guesses correctly, but that’s all they’re doing: guessing. Every grieving person is a little different, so what one grieving person wants may be quite different from what another wants. I often hear about things that other widows found comforting when their partner died and I think, “I am so glad nobody did that when Tom died!”

Accepting that no one is a mind reader has been helpful for me way beyond getting support in my grieving. My relationships with colleagues, friends, and family members have improved as I’ve stopped assuming that what I want is evident and that if I’m not getting it it’s because they’ve made a decision not to give me what I want.

But it takes a little courage to realize I didn’t make my needs known rather than everyone around me is a jerk.

grieving

Grief Shows Up Unexpectedly on a Trip

Grief never stops surprising me. I’m over two years out from my husband’s death, and grief still finds ways to make me feel like I’m in uncharted territory.

I know that traveling can be a trigger for my grief.  I’m used to feeling sad when I go to a new place I never went to with him—thinking how sad it is that he never got to visit the place. That’s how I felt when I took my trip to Iceland, Spain, and Portugal last summer. Several times a day, I found myself thinking wistfully about how he would appreciate the view of the Tagus River from the hotel roof in Lisbon, or how he would have enjoyed the noise and bustle of the pedestrian street in Madrid. I take photos for him, even though I know he’ll never see them. The muscle memory just seems to take over and before I realize what I’m doing, I’ve taken the photo and my mind has started conjuring the narrative I imagine I’ll share with him about the picture.

I also know that going to a place we went to together stirs up memories for me. I find myself in Portland, Oregon, reminiscing about the time we accidentally bought too many train tickets and Tom gave our extra to a stranger. In Seattle, I cried over memories of returning to the hotel after being at a conference all day and finding Tom sporting a new scarf and coat, saying the city made him realize he had to upgrade his style. In Vancouver, I was overcome by simultaneous laughter and tears, recalling Tom’s mock outrage when I ate a pastry from one bakery while standing outside another bakery, looking longingly at the pastries in the window.

This week’s surprise was that going to a city I’ve been to before but never with him can be a trigger. I had a conference in Atlanta, which I went to three times while Tom and I were together, but never with him. After I checked into my hotel and had a few quiet minutes to myself, I was surprised to feel the familiar pressure of grief in my chest. I was mystified, and then my brain said, “The last time you were here, Tom was alive.”

I couldn’t tell you what year it was, what conference I went to, what hotel I stayed at, what restaurants I ate at—but I know for sure that Tom was alive, that I spoke to him on the phone every night, that he made me feel his presence from 1400 miles away simply through the power of his voice and our connection. I know that I missed him the whole time I was gone, not in a way that made it hard for me to be away but in a way that made it easy for me to go home, and that when I got home, I felt that soul-deep exhalation that comes from being held by the person who makes you feel the safest you’ve ever felt in your life.

Then I went to a restaurant I had never been to that seemed oddly familiar, and I remembered: the last time I was in Atlanta, I walked past the restaurant and thought it looked interesting but didn’t go in. When I got home, I told Tom that I hadn’t eaten in the most interesting restaurant I saw on my trip. Of course, he teased me. I hadn’t thought of that conversation once while I was planning my trip. It wasn’t until I was inside the restaurant I had never been to that I recovered the memory.

It makes sense that grief would show up in Atlanta. Now when I travel, there’s no one to call with an evening check in. Nobody greets me when I get home. Nobody misses my cooking while I’m gone. Remembering that he wasn’t with me the last time I came to Atlanta is just another way to miss him, to miss missing someone and to miss being missed.

The truth is, I could call my daughter or sister or a good friend for an evening check in, and my dogs will greet me with much gusto when I get home. It’s not really about whether I have someone to do an evening check in call with or someone to be glad I’m home—it’s about not having Tom.

It’s always about not having Tom. I know I may again have a partner who I talk to every night when I’m away and who greets me with a great hug upon my return, who makes me feels safe and loved. I hope I do. I know I will probably love that person like crazy. And Tom will still be gone and that will still hurt.

Accessibility + Dis/ability, anxiety, grieving, mental illness

How to Be Gentle with Yourself

Twice in the last week I’ve told someone I hope they can be gentle* with themselves. They are both dealing with tough situations beyond their control—one’s mother is slowly dying and they are experiencing the heartbreak of anticipatory grief; the other has significant health challenges and just had a second bout with COVID.

It’s easy for me to identify situations where others should be gentle with themselves. It’s a bit more challenging to figure out when I need to be gentle with myself, but it’s something I’ve been working on and getting better at.

I’ve been struggling with a round of depression and anxiety for about a month now, sleeping much more than usual, feeling constantly fatigued and drained. There are days where I get nothing done beyond walking and feeding the dogs and myself and working out (I learned long ago that working out is a basic daily need for me and I almost never skip it, although I do sometimes allow myself to work out for just a few minutes—see #1 below).

For the first week that I felt crappy, I told myself I was wasting my life. I told myself I couldn’t have dessert or a glass of wine with dinner unless I accomplished certain items on my to do list. I told a friend I was being a loser. I asked myself repeatedly, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I rolled my eyes at myself in the mirror with the derisive, dismissive, contemptuous air of a teenager.

None of this made my depression and anxiety easier to cope with. It did not motivate me to stop sleeping so much or to fly into action, completing tasks on my to do list. It just made a difficult situation worse.

I wish I could tell you that when I stopped being mean to myself, my depression and anxiety magically disappeared. Alas, that is not the case. But when I stopped being mean to myself, I was dealing only with depression and anxiety rather than depression and anxiety and the cruel torment of a bully. Taking away the bullying made the depression and anxiety relatively easier to bare.

Want to be gentler to yourself? Here’s what I do:

  1. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of good. Working out for 5 minutes is better than not working out at all. I’ve been chipping away at writing projects in 15-minute increments, and while I’d like to be putting in more time, I’m not able to right now.

2. When I catch myself saying something to myself that I would never say to another person, like, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” I take a step back and apologize. I remind myself that I am a kind person and that I am kind to everyone. Even myself.

3. Refrain from bad-mouthing myself to others. My form of self-deprecating humor can get a little out of hand sometimes and I’m trying to reign it in. When I am about to tell a friend I’m a lazy ass, I remind myself I am depressed.

4. Continue allowing myself dessert, wine, and other treats rather than making them contingent of achievements. Everyone deserves pleasure in their life.

5. Remind myself that depression and anxiety are illnesses, and just as I would cut myself slack about sleeping a lot if I had the flu, allow myself to act like a sick person.

6. Accept what is possible under the current conditions. Although I’ve gotten by with 7.5-8 hours of sleep a night for many years, lately I seem to want more like 10 hours of sleep. It’s very inconvenient. I can’t possibly get done what I normally get done with two hours a day less to do things. This is where guideline #1 really comes in handy. And it turns out that a lot of things I normally do in a day don’t need to happen or don’t need to happen every day. What does need to happen every day is me taking care of myself.

7. Hold space for myself to be depressed or anxious. That means no fixing.

Being depressed and anxious still sucks, but at least now I know I have my own back. I don’t look in the mirror with self-loathing—instead, I look with compassion, as I would for anyone else on the planet.

*I no longer tell people to be strong. I think being gentle is both more difficult and more effective.

grieving

Grieving Milestones + Timelines

Grief experts and folks in the widowed community say over and over again that there is no timeline and that each person’s grief experience is different. That was proven to be very true to me in the past couple of weeks, as I interacted with several widowed people and found that each of us is hitting milestones at vastly different times. Even what each of us considers to be a milestone differs widely.

One person has been widowed for nearly a decade but was able to readily find photos on their phone to show me of their late partner. We talked at length about our marriages and the lives we shared with our deceased partners. This person spoke about their late partner in the present tense, as I do. I suspect people who met me after Tom died wonder who “Tom” is and whether he’s alive or dead, given that I talk about him all the time, sometimes in past tense and sometimes in present tense. To me, he is past but also still present.

I am over two years out and I’m still holding on to many of my late husband’s clothing items, but another widowed person who is less than a year out had a donation opportunity come up and donated all of their person’s clothing. Another widowed friend is nearly a decade out and just now going through their partner’s stuff. Did one of us do it wrong? No.

One widowed person I know hosted a social gathering less than a month after their person died. I used to love hosting parties and dinners, but I’ve only hosted one event since Tom died. It went well, and yet, I can’t quite bring myself to host another one. Maybe I am not a person who hosts events anymore . . . but maybe I am. For me, it’s too soon to tell.

Another interesting difference is about dating. I know more than one widowed person who remarried within a year or two of their partner’s death. Others aren’t able to consider dating for several years, and of course, some never do date. I am dating, but my husband is a tough act to follow, as a couple of people I’ve gone out with have observed.

In my pre-widow days, I thought one or two years was about how long it should take to “move on,” but when I ask myself now what did I mean back then when I thought of “moving on,” I am stymied. I didn’t know what widowed people experienced, so how could I possibly know how long it might take? I knew that historically, widows wore black for one year, so I imagine that’s where the one year marker came from.

The pre-widow me would be astonished that I am still crying myself to sleep some nights (not as many now as a year ago), that I still say good night every night to my dead husband, and that I still take a vial of Tom with me whenever I travel somewhere new to leave some of him there. My pre-widowed self thought all that happened in a flurry of activity soon after the death. My widowed self wasn’t capable of any flurries of activity for many months.

Every widowed person has their own timeline. Every widow I’ve described here is “normal” in their trajectory.

I’m 27 months out, and I’ve accomplished some important-for-me milestones since my husband died:

  • I’ve traveled alone (about 9 months after he died)
  • I’ve enjoyed traveling without him, sort of, in that I’ve been able to take pleasure in being where I am without thinking constantly about how much Tom would enjoy it (two years after he died)
  • I’ve made new friends since he died, people who never knew me when I was “Tom’s wife” (about a year after he died)

And yet, I still feel like grief is very active for me. For example, a few days ago, completely unbidden, a wave of grief hit me while I was walking one of the dogs. By the time I got home, I was bawling and breathless. It was a rare-for-me wave of angry grief. I wanted to argue with Tom, point out to him the dysfunctions in our relationship, the things he was wrong about, but with him not around to give my wrath a target, it turned inward and I was left just breathless and sad.

I remember being that angry after my mom died when I was 12—almost 13, and as many people told me at the time, old enough that I needed to take care of my younger sister and my father. Well, I was completely unequipped to take care of myself, let alone another child and an adult, so I floundered horribly. I remember vacillating between pride in how well I was “taking care of them” (to his credit, my father never suggested I put less onion in the tuna sandwiches I sent for his lunches, although I am scandalized now to think perhaps he didn’t date for a long time because of them) and blind fury that my mother had left us to fend for ourselves.

That anger festered for decades. The anger I feel now comes in a wave, white hot and astonishing, but now I can name it and once I do, it immediately softens. “Hello, Anger, I see you,” I say. “I know you. It’s ok. I know you’re helplessness in disguise. You’re vulnerability, you’re fear. It’s ok. You’re welcome here.” And then my anger stretches out like a dog, yawning and almost smiling, shakes itself vigorously, and I pet its soft lamby ears. We are friends now.

The grief is active, but I’m not afraid of it anymore. That’s another big milestone.

grieving, life skills, normalizing what should be normal

How + Why to Hold Space

The loved one I mentioned last week who was dying passed away and their memorial celebration was over the weekend. It was gut wrenching to see another person go through the experience of being widowed. The death was expected but as I’ve said before, that doesn’t make it any easier for those left behind. My loved one’s widow had the same shocked, glazed look I probably had after my husband died.

Experiencing the death of another loved one and witnessing his wife become a widow has brought on fresh waves of grief for my husband. At the memorial event, for example, I felt like I knew exactly what my husband would do and say—I could nearly hear him and see him. I swear I felt his arm around me and his voice in my ear. Sometimes I miss my husband so much I think I can’t stand it. I think I will just explode or dissolve right there.

I’m still having mood swings, feeling exhausted, and being on the verge of tears around the clock. Some nights I feel like I slept hard but I’m exhausted all day. Other nights I feel like I didn’t sleep at all.

I know all this will pass and that it is normal.

At the memorial event, I talked to other grievers and learned about how they had shown up for my loved one while he was dying or how they had supported his wife. One person sent a photo every morning of a beautiful nature scene or awe-inspiring animal from their morning walk. Another made arrangements to show up after my loved one had died with groceries to make a fresh cooked meal for his widow and sit in quiet company.

Someone at the gathering who knew I’d been widowed fairly recently asked very directly, “Is being here hard for you?” I so appreciated the elephant in the room being addressed explicitly. It was hard for me and I was relieved to have someone acknowledge that and invite me to talk about it. I didn’t want to talk about it, but I was grateful for the invitation.

I have seen so many people hold space for me, my loved one, his widow, and others experiencing grief in the last two weeks.

If you’re not familiar with the term “holding space,” it may sound like psycho-babble, but it simply means listening and offering support without judgment, without trying to fix the problem or situation. I don’t think it’s something that necessarily comes naturally or easily to a lot of us. I know I often find myself trying to fix things, so when someone says they are tired, my automatic response is to start trying to identify what is keeping them from sleeping better. That is not holding space.

Holding space in the example of someone who says they are very tired might be expressing sympathy by saying something like, “I’m sorry to hear you aren’t feeling rested,” and then perhaps remaining quiet for a beat or two to allow them to say more about how they feel or what they need.

Remaining quiet for a beat or two is something I’m working on building into my conversational skills. I grew up on the East coast where conversation tends to be fast paced and people often speak over each other. Overlapping voices, regular backchannel affirmations (like “mmm” and “uh huh”), and spirited interjections are all hallmarks of East coasters’ conversations, and when there’s a pause, everyone gets uncomfortable and rushes to fill the silence. I’ve had to work hard to become comfortable with silence and learn other conversational strategies.

A beat for me translates to a complete breath—breath in, breath out—at a normal pace. After someone speaks, I take a complete breath before speaking myself. If I’m holding space, often the person I’m holding space for speaks again while I’m taking my breath. If they don’t, I usually follow up with a neutral response to what they said—something like, “That sounds like a lot” or “I’m sorry to hear that.” Any response that sounds like it ends with an exclamation point is not neutral. “Oh my god!” or anything like it is not holding space.

Then I might ask a question about how they feel or what they need. “What would you like from me?” is a question I like to ask. Sometimes people don’t know what they want, so I might make some suggestions. “I can sit here with you quietly, if you’d like” or “I’m happy to listen if you want to talk” are two suggestions I make often.

Questions that begin with “have you tried . . .” are geared toward fixing and are not holding space. No matter how pure your intentions are, fixing is just not holding space. Fixing is fixing. Fixing is fine but it ain’t holding space!

Holding space is essentially about slowing down an interaction. Instead of rapid-fire questions and answers, think of a leisurely unfolding. It acknowledges the pain or confusion or other difficult emotions a person is feeling without minimizing them or rushing to get rid of them (which is what fixing does). And it normalizes those difficult emotions.

The tricky part is that the situations in which we need to hold space are the same ones that feel stressful to us. When we feel stressed out, are brains can go into fight or flight mode, which often produces a feeling of urgency in us. Urgency equates to speed in our lizard brains and we may want to speed up these conversations.

That’s why I make myself take a breath. It helps me slow down the interaction and a deep breath also signals to my brain that I’m safe and it can relax.  

caregiving, grieving

How to Be with a Dying Person

Because we don’t tend to talk about death and dying in our culture, most people are afraid to be with a dying person, unsure of what to do or what to talk about.

I was with my husband when he died. During the two days between him not waking up after surgery and discontinuing life support, I was with him for 12 hours a day. COVID restrictions at the time limited guests to two at a time and no one was allowed to spend the night. Sitting with a dying person for 12 hours may sound grueling, but I found that I became so absorbed in the present that the time flowed.

More recently, a loved one made the decision to begin receiving hospice care, which means they are no longer receiving medical intervention for infections and conditions and only taking medicine for pain. Typically when a person begins receiving hospice care, it means they are ready to die, but it may take months or longer for that to happen. In the case of my loved one, they are progressing quickly toward death.

I have spent the last few evenings with my loved one and their partner.

My thoughts on how to be with a dying person are shaped by these two experiences and also my own near-death experience after I had a stroke in 1997.

Here’s my advice:

If they are able to talk, they may be hard to understand. Be patient. There is no urgency. Give them time to stumble over their words. Follow their lead about what to talk about. They may want to talk about dying or the weather or their mother or something else. Whatever they want to talk about is ok. You don’t have to try to steer them toward or away from certain topics.

If they are responsive but not able to talk, you can hold their hand. You can talk to them about memories, you can read to them, or you can be quiet. Sometimes sitting in silence with someone is more comforting and profound than filling the space with words.

It’s ok to bring a book or play a game on your phone. You might scroll through pictures on your phone and show them to your loved one, if their eyes are open, or describe the photos to them if their eyes are closed. When my husband was dying, I chanted his favorite Buddhist chant.

If they are not responsive, talk to them. The point isn’t to wake them up but to help them understand what is happening around them. I don’t know what a person who is dying and appears to be sleeping understands, but I choose to believe that they can hear us talking and feel us holding their hand or touching them gently.

When I enter the room of a dying person, I announce my arrival to the person and give a description of what I’m doing. I might say, “Hi, Loved One. It’s Liz. I’m here to say hello and tell you I love you. I’m going to sit down on your right and hold your hand.” I also announce when I’m leaving.

When I visited my loved one today, I noticed several vases of beautiful flowers in the room that others had brought. I described them in detail to my loved one so they could picture them if they wanted to. I told my loved one how good it was to see them looking peaceful.

When I was in a drug-induced coma after my stroke, I did hear people’s voices. I don’t know if I captured everything that was said around me, but I was certainly aware of who was in the room with me and the broad strokes of the conversation.

It’s ok to cry. It’s ok to not cry.

You don’t need to entertain them, but it’s ok to laugh. Death may feel like serious business, but I think my husband enjoyed hearing his loved ones laughing around him as he died.

If the person is at home, it can be nice to bring some food for their family, if they live with others. At my loved one’s home, people have brought cheese and crackers, brownies, fruit, salad, and other easy-to-eat food, along with many bottles of wine.

Take care of yourself: take breaks, stay hydrated. I have had to set alarms to remind myself to go for a walk, have a drink, and eat a snack every few hours.  

It can be exhausting emotionally, which may leave you feeling tired, irritable, or disoriented. You may feel calm when with the person and then weepy and anxious later. Or vice versa. I find that I feel completely calm and open while with a dying person and then I’m very anxious and sad after. The anxious sadness can last for days.

It can help to remind yourself that being with a dying person is an honor that not many people get to experience.