I don’t think I had survivor’s guilt after the death of my life mate/soul mate, but I do feel bad that I’m leaving him behind. I get a second chance at life, new friends, new vistas, new experiences, but he has been denied that. And in fact, he was denied all those things long before his death since his protracted dying kept him from doing much except struggling to get through one more pain-filled day.
He often told me that when he got incapacitated, I had to put him in a home and walk away. Just forget him. I know he’d want me to do the same thing now that he is dead, but I didn’t walk away when I had to put him in the hospice care center, and I can’t walk away now, and for certain I can’t just forget him.
But perhaps I am looking at the situation backward. His being dead is still the thing that drives my sadness — sadness not just for me but for him. And yet . . . what if it is he who left me behind? Perhaps he has gone on to a wondrous new life, in which case my sadness on his behalf is misplaced. And maybe none of this has anything to do with me. Maybe it’s not up to me to worry if he was cheated or not, or even to wonder if he’s in a better place. Despite our deep connection, he was still his own person. Maybe I’m poking into something that is his alone.
Just as I have to accept that my life is mine alone now.
About a year before he died, I hugged him and accidentally touched his left ear. I know now cancer had metastasized all the way up his left side and into his brain, but at the time, all I knew was that he pushed me away, wincing in agony. Something shut off right then, and a voice deep inside me said, “He might dying but I have to live.” For all that year, we went our separate ways, he to dying, me to living. Then, six weeks before he died, he made the connection with me again. He needed to talk about what was happening to him so he could gather courage to face what was coming, and during that daylong conversation, I remembered why I fell in love with him all those years ago.
Because of that disconnected year, a year where I felt dissociated from him and our life, I didn’t expect to grieve, but here I am, two years and seven weeks later, still struggling to deal with the wreckage of our shared life, still sad, still wondering about life and death and the meaning of it all. When life makes sense, death doesn’t. When death makes sense, life doesn’t. It would be nice to talk to him and compare notes about what we’re both doing, but so far he’s remaining silent.
One thing has changed recently. In between the moments of angst and wanting it all to be over with, in between the pinchings of grief and not caring what happens to me, that determination of several years ago is making itself felt.
He might be dead, but I have to live.
I just wish I knew how.
Bertram's Blog 
May 15, 2012 at 4:58 am
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May 15, 2012 at 6:24 am
I don’t know how. That’s my problem too. And it’s complicated by the fact that I do not want to. I do not want to face life without John. I miss him every day, every hour, every second. We didn’t have the dying process like you did, Pat. I just turned a page and he wasn’t on it. And the page won’t turn back. I am almost to my two year mark and I feel like I am going to fall apart into a million pieces.
May 15, 2012 at 10:51 am
That has to have been such a terrible shock. I don’t know who has it worse, people who have to deal with the death of a loved one in an instant, or those who have to watch them die bit by bit over many years. Both are painful, because in the end they are the same — we are left alone.
I don’t know where that small sprout of determination is coming from. For many years I thought I’d die when he did, but obviously that was a silly romantic notion because I am still here. So now I have to figure out how to live. Just live, I guess. Breathe the air, walk on the ground, follow my thoughts where they take me.