Tag Archives: widow

grieving

Moving Forward: Adjusting to New Rhythms

I think a lot about the distinction between moving on and moving forward after someone dies. Moving on means putting the loss behind you and going back to living life the way you did before the loss occurred. Moving forward is quite different; it is integrating the loss into your life so that grief isn’t necessarily something you stop experiencing but you learn how to carry it with you into your future. Moving forward acknowledges that the loss experience will change how you live your life.

Being widowed has changed me. In October I wrote about trying to come to terms with the fact that I will never again be who I was when I was with my husband.  I talked then about how I still wanted to be the person I was before my late husband died but that I was trying to focus on who I am becoming as a result of the loss. I noticed then that I was more open and vulnerable and more comfortable taking about death.

Lately, I am struck by how different the rhythm of my days is now. Widowed people often find that the loss of their loved one impacts their lives in this way.

For my entire relationship with my husband pre-stroke, I went to bed around 9 pm and woke up at 5 in the morning because he was an early riser and liked to chat in the morning. I learned that serious discussions with him went better in the morning than if I waited until after work. Now that I don’t have to get up so early, I find myself sleeping until 6 and going to bed around 10 pm, but every night when I go to bed, I second-guess my alarm setting. Waking up at 5 for so long made that feel normal and setting my alarm for 6 feels off.

Other habits are changing to accommodate how my life is now. Tom enjoyed watching movies and TV, but I prefer to read, so most nights and weekends I read. What I eat has changed significantly. Tom was a meat and potatoes guy—except for when he was eating nachos or Mexican food, which he adored. Now I eat almost no meat. I haven’t eaten nachos in nearly two years. (The thought of nachos makes me smile, though—one time when I got back from being out of town for a few days and noticed that all the meals I had left for him were uneaten but the cheddar cheese and chips were gone; he admitted to having eaten nachos every night for the five days I was gone).

The shape of my days is different. After his stroke, my day was scheduled around taking care of him. In the morning, I would wake him up, help him sit up and bring him his coffee and his morning medications. We would chat about the day and then I would walk the dogs and work out while he drank his coffee. After that, I would get him dressed and help him get into his wheelchair. He would watch TV, read, or sharpen knives (for real, that was his main hobby after his stroke) while I worked in my office for a couple of hours. I would take a break at some point to help him stretch his arms.

At midday, I gave him his midday medications and made him lunch. He usually had speech, occupational, or physical therapy in the afternoon, so I would help him go to the bathroom before that. If he had speech therapy, I worked in my office, but I usually participated a bit, even if just to cheer, in his occupational and physical therapy sessions.

In the evening, I made dinner and we ate together. Then I got him ready for bed and brought him his evening medications. After he was in bed, I would massage his legs and feet.

My entire day was structured around providing care to him. It was hard work but work I loved. The intimacy of caring for someone at that level is beyond words. When my daughter was born and depended on me for everything, I remember feeling similarly and I assumed part of the connection was that she had been part of my body for nine months. But the connection I felt to my husband while taking care of him was the same—finding every sight, smell, and sound utterly delightful, feeling absolute peace and completion when he was comfortable and happy.

As I continue moving forward, I notice intensely contradictory feelings. On the one hand, I am very happy, feeling loved by and connected to so many people and living a life that is full of joy and peace. On the other hand, I am achingly aware that as I move forward each day, I also move farther away from the beautiful life I had with my husband. I miss having those moments of care punctuating my days.

I recently remodeled my bathroom and had a tile installed that is inspired by the Japanese art of kintsugi, in which broken pottery is repaired with gold, leaving the restored piece with deep gold veins that call attention to themselves. Every time I step into that bathroom and see the tile, I am reminded that I am turning the pieces of my life into something new and beautiful. Those pieces were shaped by the love I had with my husband and they still exist, but they are held together now with something new that I am creating.

grieving

Stop telling people facing loss that they are strong

Grieving people are frequently complimented for being strong. I have been told some variation of “you are strong” hundreds of times since my husband’s stroke. I know people mean it as a compliment or an assurance that I have what it takes to make it through the grief I am experiencing. 

But it gets old. Folks who are grieving get really tired of being strong. A fellow griever recently said to me, “I don’t want to be strong anymore. I want to be weak.” But when I asked what “weak” would look like, my friend said, “I don’t know.” This post on What’s Your Grief captures some of the other problems with telling someone grieving that they are strong, most significantly making them feel like they haven’t really been seen. 

In addition to it getting old and causing the problems What’s Your Grief describes, it’s also just not an accurate assessment of what healthy grieving requires of us. 

It may be true that grieving calls upon us to be strong, but I think we conflate “strength” with other qualities that grievers rely upon, such as the ability to prioritize, flexibility, courage, self-compassion, and mindfulness. I wonder if people recognize these and other qualities in folks who are grieving, but lack the emotional intelligence or emotional vocabulary to articulate them and default to complimenting strength. 

But focusing the compliments on strength implies that strength is the most important quality one needs during a trying time. To be strong is to be firm, immovable, stoic, unbending, powerful. 

When my mother died 41 years ago, I put my head down and barreled through it, an approach that seems to exemplify pure strength. But because that approach led to me having issues with death, mothers, holidays, and more, I very deliberately took a different approach when my husband died.

Since my husband’s death, “strength” is not a character trait I’ve focused on. The compliments I get on my strength don’t feel accurate. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you may recall that I’ve talked about my ability to set boundaries, my patience with myself, and my willingness to feel sadness. These qualities have helped me much more than strength has. 

As I reflect back on the conversation with my friend who wanted to be “weak,” I realize that because our minds automatically go to “weak” as the only alternative to “strong,” those very qualities that I just listed as having been crucial to my ability to navigate grief might be seen as “weakness.” 

I was recently reminded of what happens when you focus on strength to the exclusion of other things. After my unexpected brain surgery in the fall, I wasn’t able to do ab work in my workouts for a few months. I was so excited to get back to ab work this winter that I overdid it. I got a massage last week and when I told my massage therapist I was having some lower back pain and general lower body stiffness, she immediately pinpointed my tight psoas muscles as the culprit—a result of my keen focus on my abs. 

The remedy? Backing off of strength training and focusing on flexibility. 

Oh, the irony! That’s exactly what I’ve done emotionally! Now I need to treat my body the way I’ve treated my heart. 

The next time someone suffers a loss and you want to wish them strength, stop. Consider what might be a real struggle for them and offer them that thing. Are they often hard on themselves? Wish them self-compassion. Do they like everything done just so? Wish them flexibility. Are they highly independent? Wish them the freedom to depend on others. 

Our focus on strength as a positive trait minimizes the value of other traits. This quote from the Buddha captures the fallacy: “In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins—not through strength but through persistence.” 

grieving

19 Months Out: Emptying the Last Bag from His Last Hospital Visit

For 19 months, I was unable to use one of my reusable shopping bags. The gray polka-dotted bag was tucked away in the back of a closet, full of the items I had put in it when I packed things to go with my husband to the hospital for the surgery he would never wake up from. Almost everything he needed fit into one suitcase, but there were a few odds and ends that I tossed into the bag: salt and pepper (he was oddly enamored of the food at the hospital his surgery was at, but felt it lacked seasoning), a CBD patch (the medical staff frowned upon the use of CBD products because of the lack of long term testing, but knowing I had one packed made my husband feel more confident about being able to cope with the post-surgical pain), and six of his favorite condom catheters (he liked the ones I bought better than the ones available at the hospital).

When I came home from the hospital a widow, I put the suitcase in the area of our living room that we had used as a bedroom after his stroke, our basement bedroom rendered inaccessible. For a month, the gray polka-dotted bag sat on top of the suitcase. At some point, I emptied the suitcase, but when I picked up the gray polka-dotted bag and saw the things inside—all items intended to make my husband more comfortable—I quickly closed it and pushed it out of the way. While everything in the suitcase was typical stuff one might take to the hospital, the items in the bag were specific to my husband. In fact, he had specifically requested each item.

Over time, as I collected his belongings, giving some away to friends and family and donating others to charities, I began putting items I either wanted to keep or just couldn’t deal with yet in a plastic bin. The gray polka-dotted bag ended up in the plastic bin. For months, the plastic bin was in the dining room, a reminder to me that it and its contents existed. It made sense to have it easily accessible because I was still finding things to add to it, but over time, its contents stabilized, and I found that I was no longer adding anything to it. I moved it to the closet in my home office.

Whenever I bought groceries, I noticed that the gray polka-dotted bag wasn’t with the others and I went through a process of wondering where it was, recalling that it was in the plastic bin, remembering what was in the bag, and making the decision to leave the bag in the bin, untouched. This went on for a year and a half.

Two weeks ago, I went to gather up my grocery bags to go shopping and realized that my daughter had borrowed one and I didn’t have enough on hand. I considered getting the gray polka-dotted bag from the plastic bin, started walking toward my office, and stopped. I wasn’t ready. I went to the store but got only some of the items on my list, careful to limit myself to what would fit in the bags I had. Perhaps my daughter would return the bag she had borrowed before I needed groceries again, I thought.

Last week, the borrowed bag still with my daughter, I took a deep breath and got the gray polka-dotted bag out of the plastic bin. I brought it to the dining room table and spilled its contents out. The salt and pepper shakers, CBD patch, and condom catheters represent an anticipated outcome to his surgery that didn’t come to pass. I was expecting him to joke about enjoying the food so much he wanted to GrubHub it when he came home. I was anticipating panicky phone calls from him at 3 in the morning, asking me to talk him through the pain. I was looking forward to him showing off to the nursing staff that he had brought his own condom catheters.

That is not how things went. He never woke up from surgery. I am grateful that he did not experience the nearly unbearable pain.

I sobbed for some time over the bag and its contents—and I laugh-cried over it, thinking of the “I dare you” look he would have given anyone who threatened to take his CBD patch and the gleeful way he would have told staff he brought his own condom catheters. And then I put the salt and pepper shakers in a kitchen cabinet, the CBD patch with the painkillers, and the condom catheters in a box I’ll eventually take to a medical supply donation center, and I took the gray polka-dotted bag to the grocery store.

anxiety, grieving

Scattering Ashes, Forgetting He’s Dead, and Intense Anxiety at 18 Months Out

I have been traveling for the past month. One stop in my travels was to Ushuaia, Argentina, where I scattered some of my late husband’s ashes. Ushuaia is the southern-most point of the Pan-American Highway. My husband loved riding motorcycles and read a lot of online forum postings by people who had ridden the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Ushuaia. He wanted to do the ride when he retired. He didn’t get to retire or do the ride, so for me, scattering some of his ashes in Ushuaia was a way to symbolically honor those wishes of his.

The night before scattering his ashes, my anxiety kicked in hard. I’ve been able to manage it pretty well for several months, but I wondered if it would show up on my trip. The first part of the trip went smoothly, but as the ash-scattering day got closer and closer, I could feel the restlessness building up inside me, especially at night when I went to bed. I started dreaming about my husband being unhappy with where I scattered the ashes or not being able to find a suitable spot.

I wasn’t too worried about the anxiety because I have a good list on my phone of strategies to use to help me when it gets bad. I figured if it got very intense, I would just methodically work my way through the list until I found a strategy that helped.

The night it really hit me, my first go-to strategy, walking or working out, wasn’t available to me because of where I was in my travels, so I moved on to my second strategy: tapping. Tapping uses the same principles as acupuncture to channel energy to the body’s meridian points. I think it also helps by bringing my awareness out of my mind and into my body. Unfortunately, that night, tapping didn’t seem to have any effect. No problem, I thought, I’ll listen to some meditations on Insight Timer.

That night I was in a remote part of the world and didn’t have internet access. I had planned ahead for that possibility by downloading several of my favorite Insight Timer meditations within the app, but when I tried to find them, they weren’t there. That’s when my anxiety really started to escalate. My hands were shaking as I tried to navigate my phone. I checked and rechecked the app. I closed the app and re-opened it. I turned my phone off and back on. None of it helped. The downloads weren’t there. I could only listen to meditations if I had an internet connection and that wasn’t possible. My mind went blank and I could no longer even find my list of strategies.

I finally took a Lorazepam, which is kind of my last resort option. It felt like admitting defeat, which made my anxiety even more intense. By then, my hands were shaking so much that I spilled the pills all over my bed, leading to the kind of low-contrast situation in which I’m pretty much functionally blind: white pills on white sheets. I had to use my shaky hands to find all the little pills strewn about in the sheets. Even after I swallowed a pill, there was no relief. By that time, I had gotten too worked up for it to have a noticeable effect.

At that point, I went to a strategy I’m surprised I remembered without my list: reminding myself that everything is temporary. That the anxiety will eventually pass. That I will eventually fall asleep. That the world will carry on. And I did eventually fall asleep for a couple of hours.

I ended up finding an excellent place to scatter the ashes: at the base of a gorgeous and regal tree in the forest off the Pan-American Highway. The tree had lichens on it that only grow in places where the air is exceptionally pure.

My anxiety continued through my husband’s birthday, a few days later. but after a few days I at least had Internet access again and re-downloaded my meditations. Until then, I took a Lorazepam each night when I went to bed (it seems to work best when I take it before my anxiety kicks in, which becomes a mind-bending prediction game in itself). Once I was able to listen to my meditations again, the anxiety became much easier to deal with, although it still lingered for a few more nights.

My lack of sleep probably contributed to a mind blip while in Chile. I saw a sculptural door made out of old metal farm implements and said to my friend, “I need to take a picture of that for Tom.” It’s the first time in a year that I forgot he was dead. Somehow, for a moment my brain thought he wasn’t with me in Chile because he was back home, waiting for me. For that moment, I wasn’t a widow. For that moment, I was excited to share stories and pictures from my epic trip with him. I could see the look of wonder and appreciation he would have on his face, feel his hand on the small of my back, hear him saying, “That’s amazing, Babe.”

As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I had the crushing memory that he was dead. It felt like all the heartbreak I’ve experienced since he died was compressed into a single massive wave that flattened me. Luckily, I was with a dear friend who knew to immediately pull me into a hug and didn’t mind that I got snot all over her shoulder.

It was a tough time, and it was temporary.

grieving

The Mysteries of Cremains

Before my husband died, I knew what cremation was and that when my husband and I died, we wanted to be cremated, but that was about as far as my thinking on the topic went. After he died and was cremated, I learned a lot more about the ashes that remain after cremation.

The first thing I learned is that the cremated remains of a person are officially called cremains. It’s a weird, goofy word, and if you don’t like it, it’s perfectly acceptable to call the cremains “ashes.” I use both terms.

One of the biggest surprises for me was that cremains are really heavy. I was shocked when I received the box of my husband’s cremains—I needed both hands to carry it. The ridiculous scene in the Sex and the City spinoff, And Just Like That, in which Carrie Bradshaw puts her late husband’s cremains in a little beaded Eiffel Tower-shaped purse is ludicrous. The cremains of a 200 pound person will weigh about 7 pounds and that little purse would have been overflowing, plus the strap would have been digging unfashionably into Carrie’s shoulder.

In terms of volume, a website I’ve mentioned before, Cake, uses this helpful comparison to describe how to understand the amount of ashes you’ll have: “The typical volume of cremation ashes is 200 cubic inches. If you’re wondering what that volume of ashes looks like, picture a common grocery store bag of sugar.”

What to do with the cremains is another question. I learned that many people have strong opinions on what the proper thing to do with cremains is when people started saying things to me like, “You don’t have the cremains on your bedside table, do you?” and “Don’t be one of those morbid people who puts the ashes on the mantle.” In my opinion, if you are bereaved, you can put the cremains wherever you damn well please.

I did, in fact, keep the box of ashes the funeral home gave me on my bedside table for a while, and how I have some of the cremains on my mantle. When I first brought that heavy box home, I put it on the bedside table in part because I wasn’t quite sure what to do with it. Every night for months, I put my hand on the box and said good night to my husband. I knew I would eventually do something else with the cremains, but I didn’t know what, and it was comforting to have the bedtime ritual of saying good night to him.

I knew I wanted to scatter some of the ashes in a few places with meaning to my husband, and once I understood the sheer volume of cremains, I realized I had enough to share. I gave some to my late husband’s rafting buddies to scatter on the river. That seemed important because Tom loved rafting and some of his happiest days were spent floating down a river after having tackled a fearsome rapid. I also gave good quantities to his brother, his mother, his son, and my daughter. I kept a large amount for myself to scatter in a few strategic spots, and I put some in a beautiful urn specifically made for cremains that I found on Etsy, and which is now on my living room mantle.

Additionally, I had a teaspoon of the cremains incorporated into a memorial ring that I wear. Soon after my husband died, another widow told me about memorial jewelry, and I loved the idea of having part of my husband with me always. A quick search on Etsy helped me find hundreds of artists who create jewelry and other keepsakes using small amounts of cremains.

I have so far scattered some of the remaining ashes in the Pacific Ocean off the Oregon coast, one of his favorite places, and some in the forest outside Ushuaia, Argentina, a place he never got to go to but very much wanted to.

Dividing up the cremains means coming up with containers for the stuff. The funeral home would have happily sold me very expensive cardboard containers, but I chose disposable food containers that I got at Target. Mason jars would work, and I only decided against them because I knew I’d be traveling with some of the cremains and thought the glass was too fragile. Ziplock bags seemed like a poor choice because squeezing the air out of them would cause some of the cremains to poof out into the room and that seemed problematic.

Before I ever dealt with cremains, I might have felt strange about putting human remains into Tupperware, but after receiving the ashes from the funeral home in a heavy-duty plastic bag inside a heavy-duty cardboard box, Tupperware seemed just fine.

It took me a while to figure out how to open the fancy cardboard box, but luckily there are quite a few videos on YouTube made by others who had similar struggles and detailed their tips.

One last word to the wise: If you divide up the ashes and stash them somewhere “safe,” make a note of that safe place. I learned the hard way that it’s very awkward to explain to others that you misplaced the Tupperware full of cremains.  

grieving

Anticipatory Grief: Grief for Someone Who Isn’t Dead Yet

I mentioned Kirsten Johnson last week, in my post about Anderson Cooper’s podcast. Johnson is a guest on episode 5, which focuses on anticipatory grief—grief for someone who hasn’t yet died. Johnson’s description of anticipatory grief in the podcast is perfect: “It’s this crazy feeling of imagining the person dead while they’re in front of you and then all the feelings that that brings. There’s a lot of guilt in it. There’s a lot of just confusion in it because it’s almost sort of unbearable. The fact that they’re not quite themselves already and then the fact that it’s going to get worse, it’s like you’re on quicksand or something.”

I did not know that I was experiencing anticipatory grief between the time that my husband had his stroke and died. I knew that every moment was precious, and I constantly felt like I needed to be present, memorizing every detail with him because I didn’t know how long I would have with him. I began journaling during this time as a way to keep track of the details I knew I’d want to remember. Every moment felt precarious. He had profound sleep apnea brough on by the stroke, so we never knew if he would make it through the night. He was always at risk of falling. He was at risk for another stroke. I felt awful, thinking all the time that I needed to remember this moment in case he dies tonight.

The year was maddening because he was startlingly present in a way he hadn’t been before the stroke. I was, too. We were more tuned into each other’s emotional states, checking in regularly with each other about fears and worries. Because of my caregiving role, he had no privacy from me, and we chose to laugh about that—and he sang about it. The injuries caused by the stroke seemed to make it easier for him to be vulnerable with me. He began a tradition of ending each day by telling me what he was most grateful for about me. At the same time that we were experiencing this incredible closeness and intimacy, he was wasting away in front of me. He lost a tremendous amount of weight, he slept all the time, his memory was no longer dependable. There were times I felt like I could see him fading away and I mourned the loss of him even though he was still with me. That is anticipatory grief.

Johnson made a documentary called Dick Johnson is Dead, which is available on Netflix, that captures anticipatory grief with startling clarity. The Dick Johnson of the film’s title  is Kirsten Johnson’s father, and he’s not dead yet but he is in his 80s and had dementia. The film stages Dick Johnson’s death several times, using comic relief to help Kirsten come to terms with his eventual death.

I watched the film last weekend and laugh-cried all the way through it. It’s an incredible film, portraying the deep love Kirsten Johnson has for her father, and showing his aging and dementia without veering into pity. There is no sense that we should feel sorry for Dick Johnson. He is enjoying life to the fullest, getting lots of quality time with his daughter and grandkids. The film manages to show the joy Dick Johnson finds in his life, the joy Kirsten Johnson finds in Dick Johnson being alive, and the pangs of loss Kirsten finds in Dick’s fading away in front of her.  

One scene in the film is of a staged funeral for Dick Johnson, in which he stands behind church doors, listening to the glowing eulogies people deliver in his honor. Even though they know he is still alive, they get choked up expressing what Dick Johnson has meant to them. Dick Johnson himself gleefully listens to the eulogies and then enters the church to applause. While it’s an amazing and affirming experience for everyone, the image of Dick’s best friend sobbing after delivering his eulogy is hard to shake. That’s anticipatory grief: the person is still here, but you’re already trying to figure out how you’ll carry on without them.

In the podcast, Kirsten Johnson says how much it means to her that because of the film, people feel like they know her father. I have the same experience—I love when people tell me that through my blogging or through the obituary, they feel like they know my husband a little bit. That’s one of the ways I keep him alive.

At the end of the film, Kirsten Johnson says, “Dick Johnson is dead. Long live Dick Johnson.” It’s a reminder that a person dies, but their memory lives on. Tom DeBlaker is dead. Long live Tom DeBlaker.

grieving

Grieving or Not, You Should Listen to Anderson Cooper’s Podcast on Grief

I binge listened to 5 of the 7 episodes of Anderson Cooper’s podcast on grief, All There Is. Cooper’s openness in talking about his own losses—in these episodes, those include his mother, his father, his brother, and his nanny—captivated me. He shares intimate details of his relationships with those people, gets choked up or cries in every episode, and really dives into the messiness and ambiguity of grief.

It seems to me that a podcast like this from someone with a following and a platform is important because it normalizes loss and grief. In fact, Cooper talks about how although loss and grief are universal experiences, they make us feel alone and not talking about them makes it even worse. As I am learning, everyone is grieving. My grief experience actually connects me to others.

In addition to the message that grief is normal, a theme threaded throughout the episodes is the idea that grief is not bad. In several episodes, Cooper talks to someone who has found a way to turn their grief into something lovely. In episode 5, for example, filmmaker Kirsten Johnson talks about how even after a person dies, we can still have a relationship with them and even change our relationship with them.

Johnson says, “it’s never too late to get to know someone differently and even more deeply. We let the idea of death trap us, but we don’t have to.” She and Cooper talk for a bit about that concept of “letting death trap us,” that we think because a person is dead, the relationship is what it was when they died. But Johnson disagrees. She says that as we change, “we have new capacity to know someone,” which gives us an amazing opportunity to reframe our relationship with the person who died.

I am seeing that happen with my mom, who died when I was 12. For a long, long, long time, I had a 12-year old’s relationship with her, remembering her as she was when I last saw her. She was an alcoholic, which gave me lots of reason for anger and resentment toward her. When I turned 47, officially outliving her, my relationship with her shifted dramatically. I started understanding everything I was experiencing as something she would never experience and feeling both grateful for my experiences and sad for her not being able to have them herself. I softened toward her, feeling less anger and resentment and more compassion. My memories of her are different now because they aren’t framed with anger and resentment.

Episode 3 speaks more directly to the theme of grief not being necessarily bad. In this episode, Dr. BJ Miller says “sorrow isn’t an enemy.” He goes on to say, “[Sorrow and sadness] don’t poach my joy or my happiness in this life. In fact, as foils, they kind of set each other up. You don’t get life without death. These things must go together. They’re not at odds.” He and Cooper talk about how they are the people they are in part because of the losses they’ve experienced, crediting grief with helping them cultivate character traits they are proud of.

I can recognize my own sense of deep connection to others because of shared grief as a development in myself since my husband died that I like. I wrote last month about how hard it was for me to accept that I’ll never again be the person I was before he died. I can identify other positive changes in myself brought on by my grief experience: I am certainly more patient, more accepting and less judgmental of others and myself, and even more apt than I was before to find joy in nearly everything.

The podcast title, All There Is, echoes Oliver Burkemann’s 4000 Weeks, which my friends and family are probably tired of me weaving into every conversation. Burkemann’s title references the length of the average human lifespan: 4000 weeks. He argues that coming to terms with “life’s finitude,” as he calls it, is the key to really enjoying the time we have. That seems to be where Cooper is going with his podcast.

Even if you’re not grieving right now, you have before and you will again. Cooper’s podcast can help you feel less alone when that next time comes.

grieving

My Second Halloween as a Widow: Sharing Visible Grief  

I told a fellow widow recently that I was surprised that the build-up to Halloween was hitting me harder this year than last year. Last year was my first Halloween without my husband. Halloween was his favorite holiday. He started planning it much more in advance than any other holiday.

My widowed friend replied that the first year after her husband’s death she was too numb to really process all the “firsts” and that for many of those special dates, the second year hit her harder than the first. I think that’s what I’m experiencing. Last year, Halloween was on a weekend, so it was easy to just hole up at home and cry. This year, with it being on a Monday, I had to go to work.

I thought about not going. I had traveled to a conference the week before and just returned home Sunday night. Between the travel and Halloween, I felt physically and emotionally exhausted, and I suspect that my students and colleagues would have been understanding had I decided to take the day off. But I had already missed three weeks of the semester because of my brain surgery and felt self-conscious about canceling another class. I am also trying not to shy away from things I want to do because of grief, and I wanted to teach my classes.

I second-guessed my decision all the way to campus. Every time I saw a person in costume on the street, I thought of how gleeful my husband looks in every Halloween photo, how animated he got brainstorming costume ideas, how much sheer joy he conveyed to every trick-or-treater he interacted with. I thought of the annual raft-in Halloween party we went to every year, which was a highlight of the year for us, much bigger than Thanksgiving, Hannukah, or Christmas. It involved a few nights of camping, a live band, and a pig roast. Tom and I would dance together under the stars and every year, he would declare, “This is the best band we’ve had yet!”

By the time I walked across campus toward the building where I teach my morning class, I could feel tears sliding down my cheeks and my lip trembling. I knew I would have to acknowledge my visible grief to my students.

I begin each class by saying, “I want to invite you to be completely present for the next 75 minutes.” I then usually say something related to living with anxiety (most of my students seem to) and then the whole class takes three deep breaths together. On Monday, I told the class how special Halloween was to my husband, how fragile I was feeling, and that I was going to do my best to be present for the next 75 minutes but that I just wasn’t my best self at the moment. I heard my voice shaking and felt my lip trembling. I then asked a student to lead the breaths while I sat down to collect myself.

And class was ok. It wasn’t my best class but it certainly wasn’t my worst. A couple students stayed after to offer hugs and sympathy.

Back in my office, I closed my door and did some timed grieving.

For my second class, I repeated the confession of fragility and had the same experience of acceptance and sympathy my first class had offered.

Between classes, a colleague in costume came by my office, wanting to show off their costume. I was polite but said, “I’m sorry, I’m pretty wobbly today,” and they cut the visit short.

At home, neighbors invited me to join them on their porch for drinks and candy dispensing, but I declined, explaining the significance of the day. They understood.

This is the second Halloween I’ve lived through without my husband. It hurts to think of it in those terms—something to live through, something he isn’t living through. I woke up this morning very sad but full of determination to live life fully for those who can’t. The Muriel Rukeyser line “Today for the sake of all the dead      Burst into flower” is never far from my mind.

grieving

Loss-events are not disruptions of life–they are life

People use the term “get back to normal” all the time in relation to loss-events.* When my husband had his stroke, when he died, when the world went into lockdown because of the pandemic, when I had my recent brain surgery, people—myself included—said things like, “things will get back to normal” or “are things back to normal yet?”  This kind of thinking frames the loss-event as a disruption of whatever constitutes “normal” and makes the return to a pre-loss-event state the measure of success.

But I look around me and see that nearly everyone is dealing with loss of some sort, and I have to wonder, if so many people have experienced loss, isn’t loss normal? In other words, loss-events aren’t disruptions of life. They are life. These events may be disruptions of routines, of ways of thinking, of our understandings of how life is going to unfold, but they are not disruptions of life, unless we define life as only the predictable pleasant things that happen, which is a very narrow slice of what most of us experience.

In addition to recognizing loss-events as the real meat of life, I am pondering an idea from Michele Neff Hernandez’s book, Different after You: Rediscovering Yourself and Healing after Grief and Trauma: the distinction between the good that may come out of a loss-event and the loss-event being seen as good. This is something I have struggled with, going all the way back to my own stroke in 1997. Without exception, I have seen the changes in myself since my stroke as positive: I am kinder, feel more connected to others, and feel more inner peace. I have heard myself tell the story of my stroke and use the words “it was a good thing” or something similar, but I never quite felt like that was what I meant. Hernandez helped me understand that it wasn’t what I meant—that the positive changes in me that came about after the stroke were because I allowed the stroke to change me, not because the stroke was good.

I have similarly struggled with my husband’s stroke. After his stroke, he was so much more open toward me and we were able to be honest with each other about some things that we had held back before. That doesn’t make the stroke “a good thing” or any less traumatic or any less of a loss-event. We both lost plenty with his stroke, including independence, privacy, and identity. I have had a hard time talking about the ways our relationship improved without feeling like I’m saying I’m glad he had the stroke. There is nothing in me that is glad my husband had a stroke.

Hernandez says that when we notice positive impacts that have come out of our loss-events, we may conflate the event with the positive impacts, which I’ve certainly see myself do. She is clear: “Tragic events remain tragic no matter what good arises afterward.” My husband’s stroke at 60, which left him paralyzed, unable to work and engage in most of the activities that had brought him peace and joy, was tragic. Facing that tragedy allowed us to grow deeper in love and to know each other (and ourselves) better. Recognizing the difference between the event and the impacts of facing the event helps me reconcile that something good came out of something so painful and difficult.

After his stroke, my husband and I had incredible joy and happiness. We loved each other more deeply, more authentically, after his stroke than ever before. When I held him as he took his last breath, that was me living life as fully as possible, completely leaning into the pain and joy. I’ve thought many times that the most loving thing I ever did in my entire life was let my husband go. That is not a disruption of life. That is life. Life is all about letting things, people, dreams go.

That may sound dark. Someone who read my writing recently told me that it was too depressing, that nobody wants to think about death. While I understand this point of view, I also think of Oliver Burkemann’s point in 4000 Weeks that all the energy we put into avoiding thoughts about our own inevitable death could be put into actually doing the things we want to accomplish in our lives. Acknowledging that I have a finite amount of time (and no one knows exactly how finite—my husband did not imagine having only a little over 3000 weeks) helps me fight the urge to put off what’s important to me until my life is simpler or less busy.

*I am experimenting with this term to capture the death of a loved one but also other events that could result in traumatic loss—losing a job, a catastrophic health event, a bitter divorce, etc.

grieving

A Grief Spike at 16 Months

I have been told so many times since my husband died that my grief will fade with time. That may be true in terms of the general trajectory of my experience, but here I am, 16 months out from his death, and I have been just flattened by some of the hardest waves of grief I’ve had.

Sunday night, all day Monday, all day today. Halloween, which was my husband’s favorite holiday, is coming and last year it triggered some pretty tough grief, so I figured that could happen again this year. Expecting it doesn’t seem to mitigate it, though.

Grief makes my head hurt, my eyes dry, my belly feel unsettled, and my chest sore. I had to go to work on Monday and barely held it together. When I got home, I immediately fell apart, sobbing all evening. Tuesday I was able to work from home and experimented with what I’m calling “timed grieving”: I set a timer for a certain amount of time, usually 15 minutes, and give myself that time to sink into the grief, sobbing, howling, screaming, moaning. Sometimes I empty myself of the grief and drift into sleep until the alarm goes off.

The dogs have learned how timed grieving works and come running when they see me moving toward the couch. They rest their heads heavily on my legs or my chest, just as they did for my husband when he was in pain after his stroke.

I’m back into that early feeling of disbelief that he’s gone. One day he was here, he was my husband, and the next day he was gone and I was a widow. It’s still unfathomable to me sometimes. I had a dream that his stroke wore off and he was his old self. Sometimes those dreams bring me joy, giving me an avenue into beautiful happy memories of the past. The last few days, though, they hurt, even though the pain is mixed with gratitude that I got to be with him in that last year and the amazing 11 years that came before it.

Before my husband died, we spoke every single day. My favorite part of every workday was being reunited with him when we both finished work. We had a lovely tradition of dropping everything when the last one got home to greet each other with a hug. In warm weather, we would then sit on the front porch with drinks; in cold weather, we snuggled on the couch with drinks. We’d spend a few minutes catching up with each other before I started making dinner.

When we weren’t together, we spoke on the phone in the evening. It was usually a very brief call—often just a couple minutes, focused on “I love you” and “I miss you.” Occasionally, when he was rafting or camping without me and didn’t have cell service, we’d go a few days without talking. It was hard. I would eagerly anticipate hearing his voice again

After his stroke, we were together 24/7. His quiet presence filled the house with love. Just knowing he was in the house, whether he was dozing in the bed I had moved into the living room for accessibility, sitting at the front window with his binoculars, watching neighbors and squirrels, sharpening knives (the hobby he picked up after his stroke), or watching videos on his phone, made me feel warm and loved. Sometimes he got studious and wheeled up to the dining room table where his books on Buddhism were piled. I loved hearing him moving around the house from my office, the sound of the wheelchair wheels making their rubbery squeak against the wood floors.

I’ve now gone 488 days without him. 488 days of no moving Buddhist books out of the way to clear space on the table for our dinner, no rubbery squeak of wheelchair wheels against wood, no “I love you.” Buddhism reminds me that everything is temporary, including this wave of grief. It will subside and dreams of my husband will again feel like a delicious gift.