Tag Archives: grief

grieving

Holiday Grief: Empty Chair, Full Heart

I set my dead husband’s photo at the table again this year, propped in front of an empty chair at our fourth Thanksgiving without him. I look to his spot at the head of the table and smile. It’s not like a wound anymore, but like a familiar mark on a cherished family heirloom. We raised our glasses to toast him. He’s always with us in spirit.

In the first few months after Tom died, I struggled to understand how I could feel such intense and seemingly contradictory emotions at the same time. It took a long time to realize that they aren’t really contradictory and both stem from the same root: crazy love. Now, grief sitting right next to joy, neither one canceling the other out, feels normal.

One of the biggest surprises of this grief experience has been realizing that grief is not the opposite of joy. I can sit at a Thanksgiving table bursting with laughter and love, while that empty chair holds its space. The laughter, the love, and the absence are all there together. My heart holds all of it.

The next day, as we put up our holiday decorations, I sighed to my daughter that I had been thinking about taking down the blueprints that Tom put over the glass of the French doors. Tom had taped them there as a temporary fix years ago until we could get proper window coverings made. When she suggested framing a piece of them, something clicked, like finding the perfect place for a memento you’ve been holding onto. So I took the blueprints down and folded them carefully. I admired the glass that has been covered now for nearly five years.

Taking the blueprints down felt momentous, and I’m sure some of my friends have wondered if I ever would take them down. When I eventually frame the blueprints, I’ll hang them on either side of the French doors, which may someday have those proper coverings. I love watching how my grief and memories of Tom unfold in these surprising ways.

Every Thanksgiving, gratitude for Tom tops my list – not just for the time we had, but for teaching me that life is delicious and even the painful parts deserve attention. Life makes room for the contradictions, the missing and the joy.

I can miss Tom with an ache that still takes my breath away AND live this ridiculously wonderful life I’ve built. I can feel the weight of his absence AND the lightness of new joys. The missing doesn’t dim the joy any more than the joy erases the missing. They’ve learned to live together, these feelings, like old friends who’ve forgotten why they ever thought they couldn’t share the same space.

My life has expanded in ways I never imagined—my memoir writing, this blog, my end-of-life work, epic travels—and somehow Tom’s still here too. During the holidays especially, I feel both things: the weight of his absence and the lightness of living fully.

Here are two ways you can support a grieving person during the holidays:

  1. Acknowledge the loss. Holiday cheer can make those of us grieving feel more alone, not less. The festive atmosphere can heighten awareness of who’s missing. Instead of avoiding mention of the person who died, share memories of past holidays with them. Ask about their traditions and favorite celebrations. Let the grieving person know it’s okay to feel both joy and sadness – that remembering their loved one adds meaning to the season rather than diminishing it. Invite stories, look at old photos together, or incorporate their cherished holiday customs into current celebrations.
  2. Hold space for contradictions. Grief and celebration aren’t mutually exclusive – many who are grieving want to participate in holiday joy while acknowledging their loss. Rather than making assumptions, ask what level of celebration feels right to them. Some may want to fully engage in festivities while others prefer to dip in and out. Create safe spaces within celebrations where they can step away to process emotions. Let them know it’s okay to laugh and cry, to toast their loved one’s memory and also enjoy making new ones. The key is giving them agency to navigate celebrations in whatever way serves them best.
grieving

Three Years Out: Grief Is Familiar + Life Is Good

My husband has been dead now for three years. My life feels good. I’m comfortable with who I am. I date, I socialize, I host small dinners, I dance. I don’t feel injured all the time, like I did for a long time after his death.

The shifts in my grief during the third year have been subtle. While the first two years felt like they were full of upheaval and big tasks—going through the garage, learning how to be a homeowner, getting comfortable being the only human in the house—the third year has felt quieter.

A lot hasn’t changed in the third year. My husband’s picture is still on the lock screen of my phone and I still have some photos of him around the house. I still chant for his wellbeing. I see my therapist once every three weeks, and I attend a support group meeting every month or so.  

Moving forward in the third year hasn’t looked dramatic. At two years out, I posted about still not being able to camp or raft and not being ready to part with my husband’s sock collection. I haven’t camped or rafted yet but doing a grief float is still on my radar. I have started giving away his socks to people who knew him.

Grief is familiar now, which makes it easier to tolerate, but it is no less intense or real. I don’t miss my husband any less or love him any less. It’s possible I love him even more. More time to reflect has meant more time to miss him and appreciate what he brought to my life. Writing this blog and memoir pieces keeps me in touch with my pain.

The saying that time heals is not true for me. Time has made the grief more familiar and comfortable but not less. Or perhaps I misunderstood what people meant when they told me, “It will get easier.” I thought they meant the pain would go away. I never believed them, having learned from my mother’s death 43 years ago that losing someone you love is a forever pain, but I hoped my suspicions were built on cynicism.

There are still rough days, but even the rough days are easier to tolerate than they used to be. A rough day doesn’t last a full day any more—it’s more like a rough half day lately. I still have the gut-wrenching full body sobs from time to time, but generally, I can function with my grief in the background. Again, not because there’s less of it or it’s less powerful, but because I am used to it now. I’ve learned how to function with it in the background and that feels normal to me now.

The biggest change for me in year three has been dreaming about him. For the first two years, I hardly ever dreamt about him, but in the third year, I have dreamt about him often. It’s always the post-stroke Tom in my dreams.

I have a lot of dreams where he’s walking. Very slowly, but he’s walking. In my dreams, I’m usually living my current life and he’s there, walking slowly toward me or with me. In my dreams, we’ve gone to street fairs, held hands on the beach, traveled to Europe and Africa, relaxed in hammocks together. In my dreams we dance together, him using a walker or standing nearly still while I shimmy around him. In my dreams, he’s disabled but there’s no pain and no drug haze. He’s always happy and at peace.

Sometimes I’m not sure if something is a dream or a sleepy memory. Often after I’ve put fresh sheets on the bed, he shows up in a dream snuggling into bed with a little sigh of satisfaction, just like he did in life. He pesters me to make him fried chicken and German chocolate cake. The dream Tom is exactly as he was in life.

I wake up from the dreams feeling happy and connected to him. Those dreams are the biggest gift of the third year.

grieving

Recognizing a Grieving Behavior that No Longer Serves Me

For over four years, date night dancing has shown up on my google calendar every Saturday night.

In January 2020, I gave my husband video dance lessons for his birthday. We loved dancing together but had a limited repertoire and had talked often about taking dance lessons but always found an excuse not to. I thought the videos would be a good stepping stone. We did the lessons every Saturday night. We made it into a date night, having a nice dinner and wine before heading down to the TV room to dance. I put “date night dancing” on my google calendar to repeat every Saturday night.

After his stroke, I left date night dancing on the calendar because we planned to resume it once he was able. We joked about it sometimes; he would take a few steps with his walker, look at me, and say, “Date night dancing, here I come.” We talked about how date night dancing might look different in the future, depending on whether he used a wheelchair, a walker, or a cane. I new he would be debonair in any case.

After he died, I kept date night dancing on my calendar to remind me that the life I remembered before his stroke really did happen. Every time I saw date night dancing on my calendar, I cried, remembering how hard we laughed during our video lessons, how his arms felt around me, what a terrible follower I was. It hurt but it helped me feel connected to the life we had led.

About two years after he died, I started considering taking date night dancing off my calendar. It confused me sometimes to see something on my calendar that wasn’t really going to happen. My social life was a little more robust by then and I sometimes had real plans for Saturday night. Seeing real plans side-by-side with date night dancing made me feel like the past was competing with the present.

But I preferred to live with those feelings rather than seriously contemplate taking date night dancing off my calendar. I changed date night dancing to yellow, a color I don’t use for anything else on my calendar, so that when I glanced at a Saturday and saw an event in yellow, I would know the day was actually free and I could schedule something.

Last week I ran into a friend who is grieving the death of her daughter. As fellow grievers, we tend to skip the small talk and dive right into what matters. Immediately after hello, we were sharing details from our grieving—what we missed about our loved ones, how the changing of the seasons reminds us of them.

At some point we talked about how different people grieve in different ways and shared a bit about other grievers we are watching. “I’m a little worried about a friend of mine,” she said. The friend is holding onto things in a way that seems concerning. We brainstormed some ways to express concern to a grieving person without resorting to “shoulds” and judgment, which deny the individualized nature of grief.

One possibility we came up with is to ask, “How is this behavior serving you?” The open-ended nature of the question allows for the asker to learn that what seems concerning to them is perhaps nothing to worry about.

After that conversation, I asked myself, “How is keeping date night dancing on your calendar serving you now?”

I couldn’t come up with a way that wasn’t problematic. I don’t need reminders of the wonderful, happy, silly things we did together. I don’t need to feel a twinge of guilt when I make real plans on a Saturday night.

Still, it felt like a betrayal to take it off my calendar. It felt like saying I was ok with forgetting some of the details of our life together.

It’s ok to forget things, I told myself. It’s normal. The date night dancing isn’t what matters. What matters is the love and devotion we shared and that I can’t possibly forget.

Part of me does not actually believe that it’s ok to forget some of the details. A larger part of me, though, can see that keeping date night dancing on my calendar was not helping me move forward or heal. It was keeping me in sadness and guilt.

This Saturday will be the first Saturday in over four years where date night dancing will not show up on my calendar.

grieving

My husband’s death makes everything he touched feel precious to me

The most beautiful room in my house is undoubtedly the guest bedroom. It was the last room my husband remodeled before his stroke, getting it done just in time for a friend’s visit in January 2020. It’s a small room that had served at different points as an office, my daughter’s bedroom, and a storage space. It was cramped, with inadequate light from a small window, and inadequate storage from a shallow closet. Before the remodel, the walls were striped in multiple shades of pink and turquoise, which gave it a jaunty circus vibe that competed with the smallness and darkness of the room.

Tom took it all down to the studs, redid the drywall, built a new closet with beautiful wood and mirrored doors, added a brick façade to the wall with the window, replaced the window with a bigger one and built a desk in under the window, and replaced the door with French doors opening onto our dining room so that the light from the dining room spills into the guest bedroom.

He painted the new walls a perfect white, did some fancy trim technique that I don’t know the term for but everyone who knows anything about trim work who sees it is impressed, and built little shelves in around the window for displaying artwork.

I remember him doing the fancy trim work, folding his tall lean body down to crouch on the floor to measure and place it, a pencil behind an ear and his glasses pulled down to the end of his nose. I’ve never known anything about construction and found his casual precision and mad skill enchanting. He could eyeball something to within 1/16 of an inch with an air of nonchalance.

He had coverings custom made for the glass in the French doors but they weren’t ready before our January guests arrived, so as a temporary measure, he covered the glass with blueprints from a job he had worked on. After our guests left, the coverings were done, and then he had a stroke and I forgot about the coverings. The blueprints have been covering the glass now for four years.

A couple weeks ago, someone asked me about the blueprints—a reminder that blueprints are not typically considered window décor. A few days later, I came across the coverings and wondered if I should put them up. I love seeing the blueprints every day and have no idea how to hang the coverings, so it was easy to decide to just leave things as is for now.

I use the room everyday. I keep the French doors open and move in and out of the guest bedroom throughout the day. I use the closet in that room as a coat closet, so I’m in there every morning and evening to get a coat when I walk the dogs. I read in there. I use the desk built under the window as my Buddhist altar. It’s impossible for me to be in there and not think of Tom, pencil behind his ear, listening to the Grateful Dead and being in the zone. Often when I walk into the room, I say, “Hello, my love.”

The guest bedroom is the room where the Roomba that my husband occasionally says hello through lives. Sometimes when I say hello, the Roomba lights up, although it has been very quiet lately.

A few days ago I switched one of the nightstands in the room out for a different one. The new one looks much better but it felt like a small betrayal of my husband. He was very particular about decorating and had a much more discerning eye than I do. I justified the switch by reminding myself that the nightstands were a last-minute thrift store purchase on the eve of our first guests arriving and that they held no particular sentimental value. Still, as I was making the switch, I said out loud to him, “Now you may not approve of this, but I’m in charge now.” There were no lights flickering and the Roomba stayed silent, so I can only assume he is onboard with the change.

Actually, I prefer to imagine that he is too busy with a new adventure to care much about what I’m doing with nightstands.

I wonder if I will ever take down the blueprints and put up the coverings. I’m sure the coverings will look beautiful—much better than the blueprints, which I love but I admit they have limitations as décor. If/when I remove the blueprints, I’ll be careful to avoid tearing them and maybe I’ll frame them or put them in my “smells like Tom” drawer.

Sometimes I marvel at how his death makes everything he touched feel precious to me. If he were alive, I would find the blueprints a quirky window covering and that’s all. When we were ready to put up the coverings, I would tear down the blueprints and toss them into the recycling bin without a second thought. I would probably forget that there ever were blueprints covering the glass.

But he isn’t alive and so they are The Blueprints that Tom Put Up. Frame-worthy and guaranteed to make me cry if/when I take them down.

anxiety, grieving

Dealing with Overwhelm after a Death

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Along with grief can come overwhelm. There is so much to do and it all feels simultaneously urgent and pointless. I remember staring at the forms I needed to file to take my husband’s estate through the probate process and being unable to comprehend how to complete them. Every blank space on the form seemed impossible to fill. Name? Whose name? Mine or his? Personal representative? Was that me? Date of appointment? What?!  The date I was appointed his personal representative? Would that be when we got married? Or when he died? Or was I supposed to go through another process to get appointed? It was mind boggling.

The form came with instructions, but they were written for someone who understands forms and legal procedures, not for someone with Widow Brain who even under the best of circumstances struggles with bureaucracy.

At the same time that the probate forms needed to be completed, I also needed to make decisions about memorials, my husband’s belongings, the wheelchair ramp his friends had built, how to take care of the dogs, and what to have for dinner. And I had to cancel his insurance but still argue with the company about outstanding bills, find the keys to his vehicles so the people who inherited them could take them, and deal with the angry messages I was getting from the sleep apnea clinic because he didn’t show up for an appointment.

All while coming to terms with the fact that the man I loved to the moon and back was dead.

It all felt equally urgent and impossible. And at the same time, I felt like none of it mattered because even if I did all the things, he would still be dead and I would still be alone.

This overwhelm is why all the people who meant well when they said, “Let me know how I can help” were not nearly as helpful as they thought. (To learn what you should say instead, read this.)

When I am overwhelmed, I feel like I need to move fast, but what I’ve learned is that I need to move slow. Moving fast just encourages my brain to think I’m in danger and it responds by pumping out adrenaline and setting off an anxiety attack. What I need to do instead is to force myself to slow down by

  • Breathing deeply, filling my lungs completely, and slowly letting the breath out,
  • Taking a short nap and then resetting when I wake up, kind of giving myself a do-over, or
  • Sipping a glass of water, ideally while sitting down and taking my time, noticing each swallow.

All of these things slow my brain down and signal my body that there is no need to panic.

And there isn’t. Most things that feel urgent aren’t really. I felt a lot of urgency around every aspect of the probate process, but in fact, there was absolutely no urgency. Yes, there was a deadline, but the penalty for missing it was that I’d have to fill out another form, which was a headache, but not ultimately a big deal.

(I reminded myself regularly that my husband’s estate was small enough that no one would notice late paperwork and I was right. Someone dealing with an estate large enough for missed deadlines to be noticed can probably afford to hire a lawyer to handle it all.)

After slowing my brain down, I could either tackle one of the things that needed to be done or realize none of it truly needed to be done in the moment and free myself to do something else, like cry or go for a walk or look through photos of us together for the six hundredth time, without the nagging feeling that I should be doing something else.

The probate paperwork got done, the insurance argument got resolved, and his belongings got dealt with (mostly—I still have a lot of his things and I feel no rush about getting rid of them).

If you’re feeling overwhelmed in grief, take a deep breath. Slow down. Try a nap. Remember that what seems urgent probably is not.