Feeling Small

When you have a long-term relationship with someone, you are involved with something that is both you and bigger-than-you. By definition, love and a deep connection to another makes you bigger than you are, expanding your self beyond the barrier of your skin. After he dies, your grief is so enormous that it, too, expands beyond your self, filling some of the empty space he left behind.

And then one day, your grief shrinks into the confines of your body, and all you are left with is you and the unfilled empty space around you, and you begin to feel very small. Doing something to fill in that empty space doesn’t really help because you can’t replace something you were, such as being part of a couple or feeling grief, with something you do, such as volunteer work.

That’s where I am right now — feeling small — as if I am wearing clothes way too big for me. I miss being part of something that expands beyond my self, miss feeling as if I am part of something important.

I still have importance, of course. I am important in my 95-year-old father’s life — he needs someone to stay with him so he can continue to maintain his independence. I am important in my siblings’ lives since my being here with my father gives them peace of mind. I’m important to those who find comfort in my words. I am important to those I do volunteer work for. And yet . . . and yet . . .

My whole life has been a search for meaning, and somehow the importance of the quest is eluding me. I hope life has meaning — I’d hate for my mate’s death to be the end of what he was — but I no longer have any great desire to find out what that meaning is. If there is meaning, it’s there whether I search for it or not.

I sound as if I’m feeling sorry for myself, don’t I? But I’m not, or at least, not very. One day, this shrunken me will feel normal, and I might even forget that once I was more than I am. But until then . . . I’m just me, and right now that doesn’t feel like it’s enough.

Is Irritation & Frustration a New Stage of Grief?

I’ve been blogging about my grief for almost two years, and I’ve run out of things to say. Right now I have no great insights to share, no deep emotions to purge, no angst to get out of my system. I’m just going through the motions of having a life, hoping that someday something will spark a new enthusiasm, and there’s not much to say about that. It’s just a matter of waiting to see what happens.

A couple of days ago someone told me that pain at the death of my life mate/soul mate still showed through my writing, but the truth is, I’m going through a hiatus. I’m not feeling much of anything except irritation and frustration. Do these signify a new stage of grief? Perhaps I’m nearing the end of this time of great emotions and have descended into the pit of trivial feelings. But this irritation and frustration don’t seem trivial. They loom large, coloring everything I do.

I’m irritated at having to deal with the all the foolishness of life — the eating, sleeping, grooming. I’m irritated that after all these months of grieving, I’ve gained no great insights, no great growth. I’m irritated that despite all the changes in my circumstances, life seems so much the same as usual, just infinitely sadder and lonelier. I’m irritated that he’s still dead. I mean, come on — a joke is a joke. It’s past time for him to stop playing dead so we can get on with our lives. I’m frustrated that so much seems beyond my reach — understanding, enthusiasm, wonder. And I’m frustrated at all that is within my reach — loneliness, aloneness, pointlessness. I’m both irritated and frustrated that the world still feels alien with him dead. I’m both irritated and frustrated that he hasn’t bothered to call to let me know how he’s doing. I’m frustrated that I still want to talk with him and irritated that I can’t. I’m frustrated that I’m alone and irritated that I have no one to share my life. I’m frustrated that I don’t seem to be able to get a grip on my life, and I’m irritated with my lack of motivation to even try.

I still think there could come a time when everything works out for me. (My dead life mate/soul mate was a bit of a seer, and during his last days, he told me everything would come together for me, though foolishly I never asked him what he meant.) And I’m irritated and frustrated that it hasn’t yet happened.

I keep telling myself that I’m not yet where I need to be for everything to work out, and maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t keep me from being irritated and frustrated.

Grief: Overflowing Into the Empty Places

During all these months of posting blogs about my grief journey, I never understood their emotional impact on others. To me, writing the posts was all about finding words to explain how I felt so that perhaps those who had never experienced the loss of a soul mate could understand a little of what their bereft friends and family are feeling. But even more than that, it was about finding a measure of peace.

Grief is a difficult journey, and it’s made even more difficult when you lose a life mate/soul mate because the one person you need to turn to for support is the one who is gone. It’s also why, for some people, grief grows during the second and perhaps even the third year — the further you get away from your mate and your shared life, the more you need to talk to him about your bewilderment at his being so very gone from your life. You want to talk with him about the changes you’ve made in your life, to discuss ways of continuing to live without him, to share bits of your journey and show your growth. But he is not here to respond, and never will be again.

I’ve used this blog as a way of crying out to cyberspace, flinging my words to the electronic winds, sharing all those thoughts I can no longer share with him. And oddly (to me, anyway since it was never my intention) my grief somehow ends up overflowing into the empty spaces between the words, just as my sadness overflows into the empty spaces of my life. This emotional overflow is even odder when you consider that often when I write the posts, I am not feeling particularly bereft.

Yesterday I noticed that one of my grief blogs was getting an upsurge of views, and out of curiosity, I scanned the article to see what had caught people’s attention. Unexpectedly, the emotion of my words slipped through my usual editorial block and slammed into me. I started weeping. I don’t know how all that emotion ended up in a few hundred squiggles on a webpage (because, after all, letters are simply squiggles with no intrinsic meaning except that which we give them), but the sorrow is undeniable.

I’ve never been able to read my grief book all the way through. I had to edit in bits and pieces, and to depend on others to copyedit the book for me. All that angst just waiting between the covers of a book! I don’t quite know what to make of it. I don’t know why it was so important to me to show people that grieving is okay and even necessary, don’t know how so much of myself ended up in the book, don’t know where I got the courage to be publicly vulnerable. And yet, there it is, or rather, it there it will be in a couple of weeks when the book is finally released.

Grief: Being Ripped in Two

One of the truly bizarre aspects of having lost a life mate/soul mate is that his death rips you in two. It’s as if the person you were with him still exists, always bereft, always lost and lonely and amputated from him. At the same time, a new person comes to life: the person you are to become without him.

In the beginning, the person-becoming is so new you’re barely aware of her birth. You’re only aware of being the person-bereft, someone so awash in grief she sees no reason to live. Gradually, the person-becoming gains strength as you learn to live without your mate. You do new things, eat new foods, have new experiences. And all of these take you further away from the person you once were.

For a while — perhaps for several years after the first horrors of new grief have passed — you toggle between the person-bereft and the person-becoming. Eventually, you remain mostly the person-becoming, though the person-bereft is always there, shadowing you. Certain events, such as anniversaries, or new milestones, such as the birth of a grandchild, catapult you right back into person-bereft, and your loss feels fresh and raw and real.

If you’ve lost your mate, you know exactly what I’m talking about. If you haven’t lost such a significant person, this splitting apart sounds bizarre, and it is. How can you be two people, both a person who looks forward to continued life and a person who wants only to be with their mate?

I had a terrible realization while walking in the desert the other day: he died so I can live. Perhaps his death wasn’t as purposeful as that sounds, but our shared life had become a hell. As the cancer spread, the metastases in his brain grew larger and the drugs dosages became stronger. He kept getting weaker and more disoriented, and he turned into a stranger. There were moments that last year when I feared he would last for a very long time, slowly draining my life away. (Not an admirable admission, perhaps, but an understandable one considering the circumstances.)

Twenty-two months and two days ago, he died. And now I have the gift of life. His death gave me that. As much as the person-bereft wishes the whole thing were over with, the person-becoming sees glimmers of . . . not hope exactly, but possibility. I don’t know what I will do with this gift, but someday, somehow, I need to find a way to live so that I don’t waste his death.

Grief: Feeling The Absence

I must be getting a grip on my grief despite the recurring upsurges of sadness because more and more I’m seeing the bizarreness of the process rather than simply experiencing it. On Friday, it will be twenty-two months since my life mate/soul mate died and though I’ve never felt his presence the way some people sense a connection with their dead mates, sometimes I feel his absence as if it’s a living entity.

I was sitting in the dentist chair yesterday, waiting alone for the verdict on my gum infection, when all of a sudden I started crying. We’d always gone together to the dentist, doctors, optometrists, etc, and yesterday, sitting alone, I could feel that he wasn’t waiting for me. I could actually sense that he wasn’t in the reception area, could feel the substance of his absence like a white hole (as opposed to a black hole). Just one more bizarre aspect of grief.

Oddly, I didn’t realize what a comfort his presence was at such times until it was gone. I took his presence for granted (not him — I never took him for granted), but it was as if his presence were part of the very air I breathed, and now that he has disappeared from my life, I’m stuck breathing the standard nitrogen/oxygen mix. And it’s not enough.

I don’t mind that I don’t feel his presence. If he still exists somewhere, I hope he has something more thrilling to do than watch over me, and I certainly hope he has something more thrilling to do than wait at the dentist’s office for me. But . . . I truly don’t understand how he can be dead. Don’t understand where he has gone. Don’t understand what death is. Don’t understand what life is, either, to be honest.

All I know is that he is gone from my life, and never again will I feel the comfort of his presence.

But it makes me wonder: did he feel the comfort of my presence? I was there at the end of his life. I was there when he took his last breaths. I hope he felt my presence the way I used to feel his. I hope it gave him comfort. Hope it still does.

There is Something Totally Bizarre About Grief

Sometimes grief strikes me as being totally bizarre. For example, the eighteen-month mark is particularly difficult, sometimes even more so than the one-year anniversary. I do not know why, I just know that it is because so many of us bereft experience the same thing. In my case, for a couple weeks around the eighteen-month mark, I felt as I had during the first months after my life mate/soul mate died. Somehow, someway, it seemed as if he just died. And maybe in a way, he had. Grief is a journey of starts and stops, retracing steps, standing still to catch your breath, and then being pushed into the future again. Each step forward in grief’s journey is a step further away from our loved one, a step further away from the last time we talked, or hugged, or smiled at each other. Now, all we have left of them are our memories, and as each memory fades, a bit more of our loved ones die.

But such incremental deaths do not explain the upsurge of grief at eighteen months. (Here’s an ironic twist — I googled “Why is there an upsurge of grief at eighteen months? And the top three links that came up were links to this blog.) Oddly this upsurge is not a conscious one. I knew the date, of course, but I had no expectation of feeling any different at eighteen months than I had at seventeen months, so once again, grief took me by surprise. But the upsurge happens even if you lose track of time.

I received this email from a bereft friend today: I woke up crying at 6 this morning and didn’t stop until after noon. This reminds me of those months right after he died. I haven’t had such severe morning cries for a long time. I guess I might be heading into that upsurge a little earlier than expected.

I emailed her back, saying she was right on time since this was her eighteenth month.

Her response: Good grief. Time is losing meaning for me. I’ve been thinking my 18th month starts in February. I guess I’ve been subconsciously trying to avoid it.

See? Even when you get the date wrong, your body knows. There really is something totally bizarre about grief.

Grief: Yearning for a World that Makes Sense

In a week, it will be twenty-two months since my life mate/soul mate died. Sometimes it seems like he slipped out of my life just yesterday; sometimes it seems as if he’s been dead forever. And I still cannot fathom his goneness. It makes no sense that he is no longer here on this earth.

The worst trauma I am facing now is his continued absence. I don’t have the totally mind-numbing pain that I did in the beginning, nor do I head to another room in search of him a dozen times a day. I do, however, still desperately yearn to talk to him, and the longer I go without talking to him, the more the yearning builds up with no way to relieve it. (Yearning sounds so mild for the longing that claws at me, but it’s still the best word to describe what I feel.)

My own experiences and the experiences of my fellow bereft have shown that it is not anger or any of the other Kübler-Ross stages that fuels our grief, but yearning to see our mates once more, to have one more conversation, one more word, one more smile. I do talk to him, especially when I’m walking in the desert. (Though why there I don’t know. He didn’t like the desert, didn’t like the heat.) But he never answers back. One-sided conversations do little to satisfy the yearning, though sometimes they bring a bit of comfort.

I am lucky in that we had a chance to say everything we needed to say before he died, so there are no lingering issues or questions I have to discuss with him but, for me, need is not the issue. I want to talk to him. He had a great grasp on the intricacies of life and on modern history, he had a well-researched historical perspective on current events, and he loved books and movies. We could talk about anything and everything, and not once in our thirty-four shared years did he filter my words through his prejudices or beliefs. That is such a rare quality in a world where it’s so easy to bang one’s verbal shins on the rocks in other people’s heads.

We all have rocks in our heads — the rocks being our opinions, prejudices, beliefs, stubbornly held viewpoints, preconceived notions, assumptions, attitudes, falsehoods we hold to be true. Sometimes the rocks are soft and fall apart under the touch of reason. Other times the rocks are boulders that take up all available space, leaving no room for a new idea. If my mate had any rocks, they were more like a few shifting grains of sand that could take into account anyone’s truths, and that made him easy to talk to.

I should be glad I had him for all those years since so few people find someone they can truly talk to, someone who will listen, and I am glad. But . . . how can the earth survive without him? After he died, the planet felt tilted, and I had a hard time keeping my balance, but now I’m growing used to living on the slant. But I still yearn for a world that makes sense the way it used to, and I still yearn to talk to him.

My Grief Book is One Step Closer to Publication

Grief: The Great Yearning is one step closer to publication. Today I received what might be the final copyedits. One of my fellow bereft volunteered to proof the book for me (actually, a mutual friend volunteered him, and he was kind enough to go along with the suggestion), and he turned out to be a phenomenal copyeditor. Found mistakes that all the rest of us missed. We don’t even have the excuse that we couldn’t see the words for the tears, since he had the same problem.

Very few people have managed to get through the book dry-eyed. Even though each person’s grief is different, there are enough similarities that this book speaks to everyone. It’s been called powerful, profound, exquisite, wrenching, raw, real. One woman wrote me, “I really like your book. When my husband died I devoured books about loss of spouse…maybe 30-40. The ones that were most helpful were similar to yours in that they recounted the journey. NONE were as complete as yours and that is what I wanted.”

Some people think the book will be best as a companion to those who are grieving. Some people think it will be best as a book to give their friends and relatives to help their loved ones understand what the bereft is going through. Some people think it should be required reading in classes for would-be therapists. Some people think it should be handed out to everyone whose spouse signs up with hospice so they are not shocked and bewildered when grief hits.

I never set out to write a book about grief. I merely cried out to an unfeeling void, looking for whatever comfort I could, trying to understand what had happened to him and me and our shared life. Apparently all that chaotic feeling ended up on paper, and now those emotions are tidily packed away into a book. Well, packed away until someone opens the book; then emotion explodes out of the binding.

Writing fiction comes hard to me. I have to drag every word out of my depths, but the words in this book came gushing forth. Of course, I was writing for me, not for others, and I didn’t have to create emotion out of nothing. I had emotion to spare.

Perhaps the time is right for this book. Perhaps it won’t mosey along like my novels, but will burn up the atmosphere when it takes off. Perhaps I really did write an important book. What a strange thought.

Appalling Remarks People Say to Those Who Are Grieving

People make appalling comments to us bereft. At a time when we can barely manage to drag ourselves through our days, we have to find the energy and graciousness to make allowances for people’s tactlessness, ignorance, and downright meanness. Most people are unaware of what it feels like to lose a significant part of their life, such as a spouse or a child, and they seem to be terrified of even thinking about that unthinkable happenstance, so they distance themselves from our pain with unfeeling words. They want to believe that the universe makes sense; that God is in his heaven and all is right with the world (except for that one little slip when he let your loved one die); that everything happens for the best. It is almost impossible for people to comprehend that bad things happen for no reason at all, so of course, the deceased had to have done something to cause his or her death.

Although people were generally kind to me after the death of my 63-year-old life mate/soul mate, I still got my share of inexcusable remarks such as:

Blank stare, then, “My second cousin’s great aunt just died.” (How does that in any way relate to my having lost the man with whom I shared the past thirty-three years of my life?)

“I didn’t know he smoked.” (He didn’t. And what does smoking have to do with kidney cancer?)

“How did allow himself to get so sick?” (He took excellent care of himself, better than anyone else I ever met.)

“I know how you feel. My cat just died.” (There simply is no response to this.)

“You’ll find someone else.” (What kind of comfort is that supposed to be, especially a few days after the death of the one man who ever truly loved me and had time for me?)

“It’s God’s will.” (You don’t want to know what I think of a God who allows a good man to suffer for years and then die a horrible death just to satisfy His whims.)

“God never gives you more than you can handle.” (Wanna bet?)

“Everything happens for the best.” (Who’s best?)

As grief continues, even those who started out kind become impatient. They say things such as:

“You have to get on with your life.” (This is my life).

“He wouldn’t want you to grieve.” (Well, then, he shouldn’t have died!)

“Get over it.” (I’ll get over it when he gets over being dead.)

But the worst thing anyone ever said was:

“God will never take something away from you without replacing it with something better.” It’s bad enough to say (as so many people did) “God never closes a door without opening a window.” At least this door/window analogy acknowledges that the replacement might not be as good as what was lost. But for someone to say that He will replace what was taken with something better is totally reprehensible. How could He possible replace my life mate/soul mate/business partner/best friend/comforter/supporter/companion with anyone or anything that would be better than what I had? If you lose a job, perhaps (in a good market) you can find a better one. If you lose your wedding ring, perhaps you can buy a better one. But a person? How can one unique individual be replaced with another?

Besides, I know for a fact that the aphorism is wrong. It’s been twenty-one months since my mate was taken from me, and though many things, both good and bad, have happened to me in these months, nothing comes even close to being as good as what I once had.

Click here if you want to know: What to Say to Someone Who is Grieving

The Conundrum of Grief

Tolstoy wrote, “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.” This is especially true of those of us who have lost our soul mates. What we once were (or thought we were) has died along with our loved ones. Now we’re wandering the desert of aloneness and wondering why we are still here. Since we don’t know, life seems impossible.

Recently, there was a news article about an elderly couple who died within hours of each other. This is the sort of romantic story that we all believe in — that when one of a pair of soul mates dies, the other will die also. Unfortunately, that does not happen very often, which is why it is noteworthy when it occurs. Life is at once very fragile and very tenacious. Having watched my life mate/soul mate’s struggles, I know how difficult it is to die. People can suffer for years, fading slowly and painfully, hoping for death to release them from their agony, but still endure.

New grief feels as if it will kill you, but it seldom does. Such grief is so very strong that it takes your very breath away. It makes you feel as if you are having a heart attack and some sort of terrible gastrointestinal disease at the same time. It can cause Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, make wounds difficult to heal, retard recovery from illness. The death rate for those whose life mate’s died increases by 25% for all causes of death — disease, accident, trauma. Despite this, almost all of us, to our shock, find that we have survived the trauma of such a heinous loss.

Here is the conundrum of grief: if they got the better end of the deal, if they truly are in a better place, then why are we still here? And if life is worth living, how can we not care that it is being denied our loved ones?

I always thought I’d die when he did, and I wonder if that’s where some of my deep sorrow comes from — an unconscious feeling of not having loved enough, been connected enough to die at the same time as he did. But the truth is, I wanted to live, though I don’t know why.

About a year before he died, I hugged him and somehow so aggravated his pain that he pushed me away. A voice deep inside me, beneath conscious thought, proclaimed, “He might be dying, but I have to live.” I have no idea what that voice was. I’d only heard it once before, and that was when I met him. Thirty-six years ago, I walked into a health food store to buy whole-wheat pastry flour, and after talking to the owner for two minutes, that voice wailed, “But I don’t even like men with blond hair and brown eyes.” It wasn’t love at first sight, our meeting, more of a primal recognition. And that same part of me recognized that our shared life was over. After that day, our lives started to diverge — he to death, me to continued life.

I don’t know why I was so determined to live then, and don’t know why, almost twenty-two months after his death, I am still determined to live. Curiosity, perhaps. Curiosity to see what I can make of my life alone, to see what I am, to see who I become. Curiosity to see how I will make life seem possible once more.