Widow 101

My husband died two years ago today, as I write. That sad ending was a new beginning, although I certainly did not think of it that way at the time.
It’s a sunny day today, as it was two years ago, and as it has not been here lately. It’s been raining heavily or it’s been cloudy the last weeks.

How do you learn to live without someone? Same way you get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice. The habits and familiar old shoe feelings you had are gone and you have to form new habits, break in the new life. There are pains in the process.

It took a long time to really “get” that he was dead. Not simply gone, but dead and gone. I don’t know why it takes so long to wrap your head around the fact of someone’s death, but it does. Perhaps because it is an absence so total, so unthinkable, that the mind refuses to accept it. I think I understand now, in the deepest part of my heart. No more lame jokes about, “he never calls, he never writes.” No. He doesn’t, and he won’t, and I get that now.

Well, I think I get it. You never know what illusions, delusions, or vain hopes your clever busy brain will devise. The brain can be a trickster.

I have pondered whether it’s harder to lose someone to death or to a divorce or other break up. I don’t have an answer. Loss is loss. All I can say for sure is that it changes your life no matter how it happens, whether it feels like a tragedy or a great escape when it happens. Suddenly everything is different, everything you knew, all the rules you lived by, are tossed in the air, and it takes a while for everything to land and settle into a new order.

There were times when going on without him seemed too hard and I understood why he had expressed a wish that we could go out together. I’ve known other couples who have said the same – they can’t imagine life without each other, and they don’t want to leave their partner to mourn, or be the one left to mourn. Boy, I really get that now. Mourning sucks. Sorry about that language, but there it is. Life is hard any way you live it, and learning to live it without your partner and friend who was always there for you, with whom you laughed at everything, is almost beyond bearing.

It is beyond bearing for some people, and I don’t blame them. For the rest of us, however, we accept it, and we go on living.

You learn how to go on, if not for yourself, then for other people who would mourn your going. There are people who need you to go on being you, so you pull up your socks and keep going. Eventually you have to do it for yourself, but until you get down to that bedrock, you can come up with plenty of reasons to go on living, especially if you believe that you are here to serve some higher good than your own happiness.

You think about your children, who mourn their loss of a parent. It’s pretty tough for them, too. You might feel alone, and you might be alone a lot of the time, but you’re not the only one going through grief. Both of my parents are gone, and I know that’s a huge event and process, getting used to them being gone. It changes you.

I have been asked by people who have lost their partners more recently than I, “Does it ever get better?”

The answer is: I don’t know for anyone else, but in my experience, yes, in time you’ll be able to go outside, go to the store, function in the world without being numb or breaking down in tears, and without being furious at the hand you’ve been dealt or with the person who has died. All those extremes of unbridled emotion do settle down.

No, you will not ever lose the deep and abiding sadness of their being gone.
Two years out I still find myself trying to bargain my way out of this. I try to think of something I might have done that would have kept him here longer. I fantasize sometimes about his being here now, being his whole, funny, sardonic self.

Wouldn’t that be nice? Then I acknowledge I couldn’t save his life then, and I can’t save it retroactively, but that’s the kind of thing you think about sometimes. You have lots of time to think when you’re alone, and your brain is so clever.

Two years, and counting, and the new life goes on.