Writing While Grieving 6: My World Is Empty Without You

This Turmoil of Missing and Sad Memories of Happiness

[Previously]

I’ve been missing from here for a bit. The reminders of this time last year are hard to handle. It was when what little hope that remained went missing.

The Barnes passage about missing and happiness brings to mind what Saint Augustine said about remembering happiness:

For even when I am unhappy I can remember times when I was cheerful, and when I am cheerful, I can remember past unhappiness. I can recall past fears and yet not feel afraid, and when I remember that I once wanted something, I can do so without wishing to have it now. Sometimes memory induces the opposite feeling, for I can be glad to remember sorrow that is over and done with and sorry to remember happiness that has come to an end.

I’m not there yet with the “glad to remember a sorrow that is over and done with” part. I can be having an okay day, then, oof, sorrow ambushes me, striking me down with its how-can-you-be-gone blunt impact. I’m left to unhappily remember a happiness that has come to an end and a sorrow that is only beginning.

The memories flooding in now are about confusion, fear, losing touch, the gruesome, gritty details of caregiving, a pending month-long hospitalization, a brief, harrowing 10 days at home again, an ambulance idling at our front door, more hospital time, another ambulance, admittance to hospice on Mother’s Day, for God’s sake, her losing the ability to talk, filling in the details of her death certificate as she lay beside me, still breathing, and 10 days holding vigil while I watched her starve to death and waited to get going on a lifetime of missing her.

If I want to block all that out with a happy memory, I’ll need to roll that film back quite a ways. What am I hoping to find? What happens when I get there? What do I hold onto?

There’s no happiness there, only the sad memory of happiness. Missing lurks at the edges of everything. It takes over and colors the world in sepia tones.

Singer Nick Cave said this about grieving:

Grief is the terrible reminder of the depths of our love and, like love, grief is non-negotiable. There is a vastness to grief that overwhelms our minuscule selves. We are tiny, trembling clusters of atoms subsumed within grief’s awesome presence. It occupies the core of our being and extends through our fingers to the limits of the universe. Within that whirling gyre all manner of madnesses exist; ghosts and spirits and dream visitations, and everything else that we, in our anguish, will into existence.

I read the first line in the above passage at my wife’s celebration of life. The terrible reminder. The depths of our love. Non-negotiable. At the time, that’s where I was at. I’m permanently there, in fact, but now, because of the reminders of last spring, the “whirling gyre” part and its “all manner of madnesses” have joined the fray.

In a few weeks there will be a ceremony at the library children’s room where my wife worked for over 3 decades. The room will bear her name. An endowment fund for children’s programming bears her name already. There will be sad memories of happiness, of the happiness she brought to that room. Joy is the better word for what she created there. Pure joy.

A few days after that will be the one-year anniversary of her death. I’m reminded once again that I’m never going to be all right and that somehow, I need to find a way to be all right with that.

Be all right with that? This turmoil of missing will never allow it.

I miss her, the life we had together, what it was in her that made me more myself, her companionship, the love we had for each other, the happiness we shared—all of that and more I am missing.

“Happiness, I’ve been looking for you lately,” the song says a little too cheerily.

“My world is empty without you,” another song says, bleakly.

Happiness?—forget about it. It’s something shared or it’s nothing at all. This contraption will never get off the ground.

I already knew some things about missing. I remember missing her during our first two winters when we were apart. We wrote letters every day where we spoke of missing and of together again.

After we married, whenever we were apart, even if it was only for a night or two, I couldn’t sleep. In our phone calls and texts we said, “I miss you.”

What I am missing most is this: A new morning, two cups of coffee, her hand casually draped over my shoulder, and her sweet voice.