The Second Year

There used to be a custom in British and American culture of literally wearing your grief. For a woman who had lost a spouse the rule was to wear full mourning, i.e., all black, perhaps including a black veil, for at least one year. In the second stage, half-mourning, you were allowed to move on to lavender and gray.

This custom was pretty much gone by the mid-20th century, except for the convention of wearing black at a funeral. The old color codes don’t have the meaning they once had. In a way I think that’s too bad. It was a way of letting people know that you were grieving, and they should respect that. Nowadays if you wear all black you might be taken for a Goth. Or a priest.

At the end of my first year of grief, I had a moment of bright clarity in which I thought the color code was a good idea. I briefly wished I’d worn black all year, and could now transition to the slightly less mournful purples and grays as a visible sign that things were literally lightening up. Too late to do that, but then the color code implies that there is a steady and predictable progression of grief. After fifteen months, I know that is not so.

Grief is disorderly, if not drunk. You experience all the stages of grief, but you never know what stage you’ll be experiencing on any given day, or if you’ll be experiencing a stage that didn’t make the list.

Grief in the second year becomes not less subtle but a little less persistent. You get to have moments of actual happiness, and dare I say it, lightheartedness. I do, anyway. And then you step on a grief-mine, put your foot right in that load of hurt you’re still carrying, and bam, the tears rise and if you’re in public people are either lovingly sympathetic or go stick their heads into the frozen vegetable section and pretend they didn’t see you do that embarrassing thing - that is, have a deep feeling.

The emotion feels unexpected because you were going along minding your own business, feeling pretty good about not being a full time basket case anymore. Even though grieving is a normal, common state of abnormal, who wants to feel like a full time basket case? It feels good not to be sad all the time, and in the second year you may not feel sad all the time. You cannot mistake this change for a cure, though.

I’m talking to myself here. I’ve always had a tendency to think that whatever my emotional state is, it’s permanent. I know better, but as I once heard someone say, that few inches between head and heart is the longest journey in the world.

Driving home the other day I realized I was feeling sad. I thought, well, of course I’m sad. My husband died. I am feeling what anyone would feel in the circumstance, and there is nothing wrong with me for feeling it.

Then I thought, what if every time I felt sadness over the years, I’d realized that being sad made perfect sense and there was nothing wrong with me? Childhood was hard, and lonely. Early adulthood was  also hard, and lonely. Growing older has not been a picnic. Like most of us, I have taken some hard knocks. Of course I am sad and angry at some of the cards I’ve been dealt in life. Who wouldn’t be?

Isn’t that nice and neat? I laugh. Life is not nice and neat. Anything but. Like a wagon with a couple of crooked wheels on a potholed track, we straggle along, and occasionally we have a necessary and appropriate break down.
We get up and keep going, though, because we still have things to do and people to love, and people who love us.
If I could convince you reading this of one thing, it is that you matter profoundly. It’s not because you are a hero, although you probably are in some ways, and it’s not because you’re good all the time, because nobody is good all the time. You are important because you are the one and only, unique, irreplaceable you. When you lose someone dear to you, you understand to a degree that you never did before how much that person mattered and how connected they were to everyone who knew them as well as the world of people who did not know them.

It’s my second year and I’m beginning gradually to move into the world again. I’m sticking around to see what happens next, to sing a few songs and write a few essays, and, of course, keep the squirrels off the bird feeder. It’s good when life has purpose and meaning.