Tag Archives: moving forward

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.

grieving

Widowed for almost 2 ½ Years: What Feels Possible

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.