I Am a Six-Month Grief Survivor

Six months ago my life mate — my soul mate — died of kidney cancer, and my life changed forever. I survived the first excruciating weeks, and now I am learning to live with his absence and finding ways of going on by myself, but it’s lonely. So few people know how to act around the bereft, and they end up offering us maxims that bring no comfort because the adages are simply not true.

People tell us that time heals. Time does not heal. We heal. Grief helps us heal. Time does nothing. Time doesn’t even pass — we pass through time like persons passing through an endless desert.

People tell us that we’ll get over our loss, but when you have suffered a soul-quaking loss, you never totally get over it. Nor do you want to. Getting over it seems like a betrayal, a negation of the life you shared. The best you can do is eventually accept the person’s absence as a part of your life.

People tell us to on with life. They don’t understand that this is our life. Grief is how we get on with it.

Grief is not the problem. The problem is that our loved one died. Grief is the way we deal with that loss, the way we process it, the way we heal the wound of amputation. By experiencing the pain, by allowing ourselves to feel the loss, we honor our loved one and our relationship, and gradually we move through the pain to . . . to what? I’m not sure what lies on the other side of grief. I’ve passed the worst of the pain but not yet arrived at a new way of living.

During these past six months, I’ve been inundated with information about how to deal with grief. I purposely refrained from reading the material, which is strange for me — I’ve always been one who researches everything — but I didn’t want to know the accepted way to grieve. I wanted to experience my own grief without the current fad getting in the way. It used to be that grief was a regimented experience — one wore black and mourned for a year. More recently, the “stages of grief’ became the accepted way of grieving, though now there are various new ways of thinking about grief. The truth is, grief is personal, and except for the extremes of not allowing oneself to feel anything and trying to find ways of dying so you can join your loved one, however you grieve, that is the right way to grieve.

Grief makes even friends and family uncomfortable, so eventually the bereft learn to hide what they feel. They stop talking about their loved one, but they never forget.

I will never forget.

He will always live in my memory.

Is Twenty-Five Weeks a Long Time or a Little Time?

Is twenty-five weeks a long time or a little time? I haven’t a clue. All I know is that twenty-five weeks ago my life mate — my soul mate — died of inoperable kidney cancer, and I am still learning to deal with his absence. Sometimes it seems as if he’s been gone forever, and other times it feels as if he just left, as if I should be able to reach out, hold him in my arms, and keep him safe. Strange, that — I couldn’t stop his dying when he was living it. I certainly can’t stop it now that he is gone.

When I was a child, twenty-five weeks seemed a lifetime, especially if I was counting down to Christmas or summer vacation. When the weight of age began settling on my shoulders, twenty-five weeks went by in a flash. Or at least they used to. Now weeks stop and go, dam and flow, and I no longer have a concept of time, perhaps because the passing weeks are not relative to anything but his death and my loss.

Even the future seems long and short by turns. I think of growing old by myself, of learning to live with the limitations aging will bring, and ultimately of dying alone, and the coming years seem long. Yet those same years will still be full of life, maybe even happiness, which will make them feel short.

I do know that twenty-five weeks is a long time when it comes to feeling lost, alone, and confused by this major change — both his and mine. (I am very confused by his death. I worry about him still, feel sad for what he is missing, glad he is beyond pain.) At the same time, twenty-five weeks is way too short to even begin to process all that this experience means and will mean.

So, is twenty-five weeks a long time or a little time? I haven’t a clue.

Recording Your Character’s Voice by Aaron Paul Lazar

Please welcome my guest, Aaron Paul Lazar, author of the LeGarde mysteries and  Healey’s Cave, the first book in the Moore paranormal mysteries. Lazar says:

I’m wondering if every author needs to take voice-over training. Especially if they want to record their works in audio formats. 

Readers like hearing the author read. Right? They know that only the author really understands the nuances of each sentence, the way it was supposed to be said aloud. I do believe this, and wish I could download books read by Dean Koontz himself, or that John D. MacDonald could come down from Heaven for a while to record his Travis MacGee series for us. Wouldn’t that be cool? 

When you’re reading from your own character’s point of view, you really have to get inside his head. You have to feel his pain, suffer his humiliations, and share in his joy. 

Could you do that? If so, it’s a good sign that you really know your characters.

And what do you do if your character is of the opposite sex? I guess unless you’re a woman with a very deep voice, or a man who does a reasonable falsetto, you’ve got to find someone who fits that mold, a friend who can sound like your character and really get inside his or her brain. 

Would you like to get to know a character, even before you read his book?

Well, I never took acting lessons, but I sat in the back of the auditorium while my daughter performed in fifteen musicals and plays. Maybe a little of the training rubbed off on me. I don’t know. 

Regardless, I figured it was a good idea to help create a little buzz for my debut book in my new green marble series by writing a letter from Sam Moore to his future readers. Would you like to hear it? See what you think and please let me know, below. 

Sam Moore’s most intimate and tortured thoughts are in this video. It’s not really a normal video, but the only way to get audio on YouTube or other sites is to put a jpeg image behind it and save it as a movie file. ;o) Took me all day to figure that out – shows you how bright I am. And I didn’t want to make it into a book trailer, for Heaven’s sake. I already have one of those!

Sam Moore is a retired country doctor in the new paranormal mystery series, Moore Mysteries. The first book just came out via Twilight Times Books, and you can read the first few chapters here: Healey’s Cave .

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Aaron Paul Lazar writes to soothe his soul. The author of LeGarde Mysteries and Moore Mysteries enjoys the Genesee Valley countryside in upstate New York, where his characters embrace life, play with their dogs and grandkids, grow sumptuous gardens, and chase bad guys. Visit his websites at www.legardemysteries.com and www.mooremysteries.com and watch for his upcoming release, FIRESONG, coming Winter, 2010.

 

The Healing Power of Stories

I attend a bereavement group every week, which surprises me, considering that I’ve always been a do-it-yourself sort. I only started going to the meetings because I wanted to know how to survive the terrible agony of grief I experienced after the loss of my mate. I didn’t learn how — it’s something no one can teach another — but I learned that one could survive those first unbelievably painful weeks when I met people who had survived them. I keep going to the group because of those same people. We have something in common, a shared understanding, a survivor’s respect. And now, after five months, I am one of those who, just by being there, show the newly shell-shocked bereaved that one can learn to live with the devastation of a major loss.

Each meeting begins with a lesson, and today’s lesson was about the importance of stories and how they help us heal. The people who attended the meeting today all happened to be women who had lost their mates after decades of being together, and the counselor asked each of us to tell the story not of our mates’ deaths, but of how we met. We all knew the end of each of our love stories — over the months we have told the story of our grief many times. But this is the first time we talked about the beginning of our love stories, and in those stories we found hope, comfort, smiles, a reconnection to our past.

According to the handout we were given, the benefits of telling stories are:

• Searching for wholeness among our fractured parts
• Coming to know who we are in new and unexpected ways
• We can explore our past and come to a more profound understanding of our future direction
• We can seek forgiveness and be humbled by our own mortality
• We can discover the route to healing lies not only in the physical realm, but also in the emotional and spiritual realms.

An unexpected result of today’s lesson was a new understanding of the importance of writing. For me, anyway.

These past months, I’ve spent a lot of time reading. I have always tried to lose myself — and find myself — in fictional worlds during periods of trauma, but this time it’s not working the way I hoped. I’m not finding healing in current books. The authors seem to be going for the shock effect of not-so-good versus unbelievably-outrageous-evil, for story people who have identifiable characteristics but no character, for fast-paced stories with little substance or truth. How does one find wholeness in such stories? How do we come to know each other or come to a more profound understanding of our future in trite mysteries and unrealistic thrillers?

Perhaps it’s not important. Maybe entertainment is all that counts when it comes to fiction, but I want something more. And I especially want something more when it comes to my own writing. I don’t know where grief is taking me – it is changing me in ways I cannot yet fathom – but I hope I will end up writing stories of truth, of understanding, of healing. I hope I will make people smile. I hope my words will matter.

Snake in the Grass

I bet you thought the title was a reference to a metaphor, didn’t you? Well  . . .

I encountered my first Mojave green rattler while I was out walking in the desert today. I didn’t even notice it — I was walking down the middle of a sandy path, minding my own business, when a hiss and a rattle startled me.  I looked around and there was this beauty lying in the grass beneath a creosote bush. I moved ten feet away, then stopped and took a couple of photos. Apparently it didn’t like having its picture taken, because as I was aiming for the third, it raised it’s head and rattled at me again. I took the hint and left. Every time I think about this encounter, I smile. I don’t know why it makes me feel good, perhaps because I finally encountered the real desert. I also got to find out what I always suspected: I am not afraid of snakes, just healthily wary. 

The Mojave green rattlesnake will not attack, but if disturbed or cornered, they will defend themselves. Apparently, bites occur if people accidentally step on a snake or purposely harass it, so if people are careful, they can keep from being bit. Generally, if bit, a person has time to walk out of the desert, since the effects don’t always take place immediately, and only 5% of the bites are fatal.  Supposedly, the only cure for the bite is antivenin at a cost of $18,000 per treatment. Now that’s scary! (But it can’t be right, can it? Seems excessive.)