Writing While Grieving 3: Tomorrow Is a Long Time

When I’m in My Home, I Need the Strength to Be Alone

[Previously]

After finding out how long my wife and I had been together, a young woman in the neighborhood asked, “Don’t you two run out of things to talk about?” Her question made us laugh.

Most mornings of my adult life began with coffee and conversations with my wife. If the rest of the day wanted to create highlights to compete with those conversations, it needed to work hard at it. Anyone will tell you, she was a delight to talk to. She was quick to laugh, and it was fun getting her going. As a bonus, though she had a sunny outlook, she laughed freely at my dark humor. And she was insightful as heck, pointing out connections and references related to whatever we were talking about. She was a librarian, after all, and she had vast amounts of information about books cataloged in her mind.

So no, we never ran out of things to talk about; in fact, there’s so much more I want to ask her. Talking with her was my favorite thing in the whole world. Now, my mornings are silent. I’ve never lived alone before. I don’t know how this works. Even if I did, I would still hate it. I’ve never been lonely, either. Now that I am, all I can say is holy shit. This is fucking serious. Loneliness is so dangerous. I had no idea. I need to be careful.

Oh, and sleep? What’s that? I always thought it was involuntary, like breathing. Now I realize it’s a skill, and I’ve lost the instruction manual. The Dylan line “I’ve been up all night, leaning on the window sill” is how it goes most of the time. After much study, I’ve concluded that 3 a.m. is the definition of loneliness, and it’s the most dangerous hour.

That’s why I’m writing again, because of this sense of danger I feel all around me. I’ve lost the one who protected me and made me feel at ease enough to be able to exist in this world and to sleep. I tell my students to write about whatever is driving them crazy, so I’m following my own advice. Writing has saved me before. I’m counting on it to save me again. So I write whether I feel like it or not because, for a long, long time, I haven’t felt like doing anything. I can’t afford to wait until I feel like doing things anymore.

Don’t worry. In a different sense, I’m not lonely. Luckily, I’m rich in friends. But friends can’t help me with the kind of bone-deep loneliness I’m talking about. They help me in other important ways, though. Being with people is good medicine right now.

What can I do about these quiet mornings, though? I could turn on NPR, but who wants to hear news these days? I could put on music, but that has its dangers. Most songs are about falling in love or breaking up. More about breaking up, it seems. The sentiments in the breakup songs sound a lot like grieving to me. That’s how I hear them now, anyway. I suppose breakups are mourned in similar ways as deaths. I wouldn’t know. I never broke up with anyone, and no one ever broke up with me. I’m a unicorn, I guess. Unicorns, I never realized, must be lonely. Since there’s no one to talk to in the morning, I read to take my mind off that awful silence. It’s an imperfect solution.

When it comes to bereavement, I’m a run-of-the-mill case. Whew! I was worried. The things that alarmed me about my reaction, like the intensity of my anger, are typical, it turns out. Even some other scary things, one of which I’ll mention, are ho-hum, apparently––though this one sure doesn’t feel that way.

As I mentioned, it’s quiet here. Too quiet. Since there’s no one to talk to, I talk to myself.

This freaks me the hell out. I never talked to myself before, beyond swearing if I jammed my finger while fixing something. I was afraid I might be moments away from walking down the street shouting at lampposts or striking up conversations with strangers’ dogs. What the hell is wrong with me? It turns out, nothing. It’s a thing, this talking to yourself while grieving. And this thing, it’s nothing. So I’m as boring as ever. The lampposts are safe.

There are ways I’m not typical. I don’t look for signs from the other side that my wife might be leaving for me to notice. I’ve heard a surprising number of stories like this. Many of them involve birds, for some reason. I like birds. I know this kind of thing is helpful to a lot of people, so I won’t belittle it, but I’m such a skeptic in general that even the placebo effect refuses to be seen in the same room with me.

At my wife’s celebration of life, the wind blew her portrait over when I stood at the podium to speak. People said it was a sign that she was there with me. Wait, so my wife controls the wind now? Cool. This death thing sounds kinda fun.

I’m pretty sure my wife would have laughed at that last part, by the way, or at least smiled and rolled her eyes. I have a photo of her reacting like that to something I said. I know that look well. I wish I could remember what I said to cause that expression on her beautiful face so I could say it again the next time I talk to myself.

I know, I know––I should go to therapy, I guess, but that sounds like work. I don’t have the energy for that. I’m not the therapy type. (If you know me, you know.) My daughter calls me stubborn. Maybe, but I know myself. If I’m going to do something like that, I need to do it on my schedule. I attended group therapy sessions related to a medical condition once. I completed it, but it was mostly uncomfortable, plus a woman who knew full well that I was married propositioned me. I recommended she continue with her therapy.

By the way, I was the most married man you’ve ever met. That doesn’t mean things were always perfect. We spent a few years being unhappy with each other for reasons that we both found bewildering. We chalked it up to marrying young and just rode it out until things got better. I’m glad we did, but man would I like to have those years back. I want a do-over. So yeah, grief will dig up more regrets than you’ll know what to do with.

While searching for help with all these bereavement-related feelings, fortunately, I found a researcher who is even more of a skeptic than I am, and so far, her article has been the one that has helped me the most. It’s called “There Are No Five Stages of Grief.” It’s by Hilda Bastian who lost her adult son, which of course left her reeling. She assesses the strength of scientific information for a living. Upon reading that, I was all ears. She says the five stages thing is not based on evidence. “I’ve never felt as hopeless as when I lost my son,” she says. “I didn’t need a vague theory. Facing grief that felt unbearable, I needed to know: When might the worst be over?”

I need to know this, too. Oh my God.

She says, like herself, 10 percent of people have severe grief for six months or longer (check). Those at risk for a year or longer include those who lose their spouse (check) or a child. She writes that when her son died, “I needed hope that a vibrant life was within my reach.” She found it was, according to research. “So I tried to look forward,” Bastian says. She concludes that her son had loved her “his whole life.” She adds, “That love is precious and it’s for keeps. I will not waste it.”

That gives me something to aspire to as I enter the treacherous holiday season and as the countless horrible anniversaries of this past year’s trauma approach. Like today, for instance—the day last year when our world began to fall apart, an anniversary that kept me up all night and led me to write this so I don’t lose my fucking mind.

A quote that best describes my current state comes from Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy where the narrator says:

[Grief] was a physical sensation, an imprint of the past that had been left in his body, and he had no control over it. These moments came less often now, and, for the most part, it seemed as though things had begun to change for him. He no longer wished to be dead. At the same time, it cannot be said that he was glad to be alive. But at least he did not resent it. He was alive, and the stubbornness of this fact had little by little begun to fascinate him––as if he had managed to outlive himself, as if he were somehow living a posthumous life.

A posthumous life. That makes a weird kind of sense to me. I don’t know how to live a life like that, but I suppose I’ll learn. I spent most of my life hoping to make my wife proud of me. Any time I did, of course, I wanted to turn right around and do it again. Without that inspiration, I’m lost.

In the last weeks of her illness, my wife was confused. The cancer in her bones had caused the calcium levels in her blood to rise, inducing fogginess and occasional paranoia. I worried that in that state, she wouldn’t know what was happening, that the things I needed to do as her caregiver (things that the nurses held several mini-classes to teach me), things that were rough going for both of us, would make her scared or angry, and that she would think I was harming her. We argued because she was trying to do things that were putting her in danger of further injury. I felt she resented me, and this was so hard to face. I never knew how much worse a nightmare could get. I didn’t want things to end that way, but it looked like that was how things would end, with her being unhappy with me.

Luckily, there were some brief moments of clarity. In one, she said to me, “We won’t be together anymore, but I love you.” In another, a nurse asked how long we had been married. When I told her “In a couple of weeks, it will be forty-six years,” the nurse asked us what was our secret that kept us together for so long. My wife then spoke up and listed several reasons. I’d never heard her talk to someone about me before. You see—and I’m not being modest here, I’m just describing how I felt—I never understood her devotion to me. Deep down, I always felt she could have done better. It’s a version of imposter syndrome, I guess, which infuses every aspect of my life, including writing. I won’t repeat what she said to the nurse because if I did I might never stop crying. Let me just say that after she spoke, I knew I’d made her proud.

I’m going to hold on to the idea that my wife’s love for me shouldn’t be wasted. It won’t be. I will never stop trying to make her proud.