HALLOWEEN. IF YOU’VE LOST SOMEONE TO SUICIDE OR VIOLENCE, THIS TIME OF YEAR YOU CAN EXPECT TRIGGERS EVERYWHERE.
WIDOWHOOD IS NOT STATIC. IT KEEPS CHANGING, AND IT KEEPS CHANGING US.
LIKE THE LEAVES IN FALL (A TIME WHEN GRIEF, ITSELF ZOMBIE-LIKE, RE-EMERGES FOR MANY), WIDOWHOOD HAS AN INFINITE NUMBER OF COLORS.
HERE ARE FIFTY OF THEM.
1. I take a lot of deep breaths this time of year.
2. It’s fall, the season inherently bittersweet and elegiac. All that plush color and harvest, all that stunning beauty, some years almost ostentatiously spectacular.
All that run-up to the long winter, white, brown, and gray, the small seeming death of each year.
Seeming. Not actual.
3. “The fact of mortality makes loss certain,” writes Adam Gopnik. “For all the ways science and medicine have reduced the suffering that a human life entails, the vector of sadness remains in place. The larger problem we face is not (physical) suffering but sadness. And sadness is caused by the fact of loss.”
4. Fall is also “the season”, my personal one (live long enough, and you, too, may have one) — an annual period of a close-together cortege of losses and associations. David’s birthday, Ned’s and my anniversary, my mother’s death date, my father’s birthday, my birthday, Thanksgiving. Ned’s death date. All between the end of September and the beginning of December.
(“And what are you thankful for?” people commonly ask at Thanksgiving. A good question, appropriate to the holiday. And yes, I always am honestly grateful for much. Yet, the query does comes in the middle of all this. )
I have recited this loss-list before here; forgive the repetition.
5. I remind myself that Halloween iconography, especially the hanging effigies, is not intended to trigger. Not intentionally cruel. I remind myself that I cannot and should not expect the world to be sensitive to people who loved someone who hung him or herself.
That would be like asking that the world be carpeted, so I could walk barefoot.
6. Even the word “trigger” is probably a trigger for those who lost someone they loved to a bullet, whether self- or other-inflicted.
7. I remind myself that other Halloween-related holidays, like Mexico’s Dia de los Muertes, have an entirely different meaning. They are about getting cozy with 
death as part of life. About the border between the two worlds, that of the living and the dead, thinning, so spirits can pass over and through to say hello to those still quick.
A sugar skull or bone-shaped cookie, a retablo inhabited by skeletons at work or play, feasting or marrying, the decoration of graves, cemeteries made partylike with family and friends visiting, playing music, eating; the food left on an altars besides pictures of deceased loved ones — these celebrations are not macabre, but integrative.
8. A few months after David’s death, I hand-washed a camisole, put it on a hanger, placed the hanger in a sunny bedroom window, forgot it was there. Started violently when I walked in and saw it, stirred by the breeze, hanging there.
9. In reference to the day someone leaves this world: There’s a Sanskrit word I much prefer to “death date.” It’s “maha-samadhi,” loosely meaning great, or final, liberation.
Though I’m not sure I believe that death is a great liberation, or at least, that that is true of all deaths, still, I like the idea and find a modicum of comfort.
It is at least possible that David, in taking that action, was liberated from a psychic pain so unbearable that in fact he choice not to bear it any more.
10. Unthinkably, in condolence notes and emails and conversations after David’s death, several people said or wrote this to me: “Hang in there.” “Hang tough.”
11. There are often days, weeks, months when grief vanishes. Not the loss, but the grief, the uncontrollable fits and tsunamis. (I am almost nineteen years into my first widowhood, almost six into my second).
This is the true hope — that daily grief does end — which I can legitimately extend to those of you younger in widowhood than I am.
In these phases, I am un-grief-y, easy in my life. In these phases, it seems incomprehensible that I will be again visited by grief. The particularly brilliant blue of fall skies no longer mocks. The trees — not just red but fuchsia and magenta, not just golden but ochre, orange, yellow — do not seem like sleight of hand, a trick for forgetting that winter is coming. Instead, both are mere neutral beauty, and taking them in often fills me with wonder.
What I mean to say is, I am often happy now. And when I am not, it is mostly ordinary unhappiness, not grief.
But — and this is the sad truth as I have experienced it, and which I must tell you if the other is to have legitimacy — the uncontrollable fits and tsunamis do still come from time to time. And as far as I can tell always will, though the intervals between grow longer and longer.
This is why we get through grief, but not over it. Why we get better, and life gets easier, but we do not “heal.”
12. Three Octobers ago, I was driving my boyfriend of recent years, the gentleman I sometimes refer to as my Alpha Dude, to the train station in Vermont, where I then lived. Suddenly he said, leaning out the window to scold a maple of particularly spectacular scarlet, “Oh, come on now, that’s just showing off.”
This still makes me laugh.
13. The geese, the effing geese, honking as they head south.
14. David had just gotten hearing aids, which he called ‘listeners’. We were outside in the garden, this would have been 2009-ish, his depression — the one he alluded to, saying he was “in recovery from” when we first met, had not yet returned. He was newly in love with the world, which had renewed its invitation to him once before I met him, when he got on medication that worked, and was now doing so again, with his listeners, through sound. Crickets amazed him. The frogs, croaking in the pond in spring.
He startled the first time he heard the geese, flying noisily overhead.
“What’s that?” he asked me. Amazed, looking around for the source of the sound.
“Geese,” I said, pointing upward. He followed my finger, and gazed up at them.
Then, with a shrug, David said, “Honk if you love Vermont.”
15. This also still makes me laugh. Then, usually, it makes me cry, or feel that prickling, tightening in my throat.
16. Every time.
17. And there are a lot of geese flying south this time of year.
18. Before his depression returned, he was a funny guy, was David. Affectionate in his way, and devoted. As I was to him. He was well-known as a documentary filmmaker, but that was far from his only gift.
And that kitty pumpkin David carved one year, the last year before depression finally and permanently took him down, that pumpkin kitty which we set on the porch of my mother’s house, and which was the talk of Elm Place? That pumpkin was a work of art.
19. Both of them — my mother, Charlotte, and David, my partner of ten years — were alive then. Neither of them are now. Both of them leaving life in her house, the house in which I grew up.
20. Charlotte in her own bed, left as easily as a leaf falling from a tree. She was 98, one of the last leaves still clinging stubbornly to the sturdy oak of her generation, a brown leaf still affixed, right through the winter. Then, one day, she let go.
21. Three months later, David left life there too. Hung himself in her basement.
22. After I found his body there, I never spent another night in that house.
23. Who was it who said to me recently, “I’m still pissed at him for doing it there” ?
I said, “But he knew that house was going to be sold. Better there than the house in Vermont, where he knew I’d be living.”
Whoever it was — and why I can’t I remember? — said, “Yes, but he knew you would be the one to find him, didn’t he?”
I no longer live in the house in Vermont, either. Where I did live with David. Where I cleaned out his office and found a collection of suicide letters he had written in 2011, though he did not actually take his life until 2014.
All that pain, borne for so long.
24. Every death leaves the survivors with unanswered, and unanswerable, questions.
But a death like Charlotte’s (natural, at 98), leaves so many fewer questions than David’s (suicide, at 74), or Ned’s (bicycle accident, at 44).
25. Ferncliff, the crematorium near my mother’s house.
There, on November 25, 2013 (my 61st birthday) I escorted her box, which was made of cardboard, and set on a wheeled table, through the open, hinged door, into the built-in concrete oven. My hand was the last to touch that box, and by extension, her body in it.
And then, a kind Latinx man who worked for Ferncliff, a quiet man of gentle mien, gestured towards a switch, like a large light-switch, to the right of door. (When I had escorted Ned similarly, back in Arkansas thirteen years earlier, there was no such switch).
I understood I was to flip the switch. I understood that this would initiate the flames.
I touched the switch, depressing it.
Three months later, walking David’s box at Ferncliff towards the oven. Thinking, “David! Did you know I was going to be doing this for you when we were here for Charlotte?”
The kind Latinx man had retired by then. I missed his calm presence. How compassionate he was, without saying a word.
26. After Ned’s death, Charlotte said this to me, and I still think of it often, eighteen years later:
“Because you and Ned loved each other so much, a part of you died when he died. But because you and Ned loved each other so much, a part of Ned is alive as long as you are.”
27. I used to hold the belief “Everything happens for a reason.” What a comforting belief I found it! For years! It was just like being rocked in a cradle. If it happened, it had a reason. And if it had a reason, this belief meant I needed to A) live with it, accept it, approve it even if I couldn’t understand it, and B) figure out that reason, so I could learn what “plan” or “lesson” the Divine had custom-crafted especially for me.
I apologize to any of you who still hold this belief, and enjoy that untroubled, or less-troubled, contentment I once enjoyed, too. And I respect why you too would want to hold it. I know what I’m about to say seems harsh.
But I promised, on these pages, as much honesty as I have about widowhood and how it affects a person. And losing this belief was an enormous part of widowhood for me. This secondary loss was difficult, even excruciating, and it was fundamental. It shifted my foundations, as it has for a number of other widows I have walked with.
Now “everything happens for a reason” looks to me like infant theology. It is not tenable for eyes-open adults.
In fact, it now seems to me almost obscene in its unintentional cruelty and narcissistic human arrogance.
28. Because things happen, period. Whether or not they do so for a “reason” (reason meaning Someone or Something intended them to, so that the occurrences of this world, however awful, are intentional, meaningful, carrying a personal message for us) is unknowable.
Because while wanting to believe that there are such reasons for the cruel happenings inherent in existence, and believing we can therefore know that reason, is natural, the answer to a basic human question which arises out of understandable inquiry, that question does not have a definitive human answer. Any supposition about what God’s, or one’s Higher Power’s, “reason” for something happening (assuming that there is a God or Higher Power, or that you believe there is) is, is purely speculative.
Or, as some would say, faith-based. And others, a delusional fairytale we tell ourselves because randomness is too awful to contemplate.
29. It was Ned’s death that, for me, burnt that belief to ash.
30. And I mourned this — losing “Everything happens for a reason.” I had loved that belief! It was so comforting! I had loved the feeling of certainty it gave me, a certainty I now recognized as illusion, or wishful thinking, or magical thinking, or a misplaced form of control.
Though I could no longer hold “Everything happens for a reason” with integrity, I missed it.
31. But out of its loss, I gradually found and built a new foundation: less elegant, less simplified, but with the large advantage of being undeniably, objectively true, and in the locus of my control.
Holding this new foundation also means I no longer have to contort myself imaginatively and uncomfortably, creating a fiction to explain why the incomprehensible, horrific, and tragic has taken place.
32. “How can I make use of what has happened? ” That is a question a human being can both ask and answer.
I cherish this question.
I ask it of myself often.
33. And speaking of theology: why the eff don’t people who are attempting to console others who have suffered grievous, non-negotiable, disorienting, devastating loss, keep their effing theology to themselves?
Never, ever offer verbal or written condolences that assume a shared spiritual viewpoint unless you are positive there is one. And there is almost no way to be positive about this, even if you have gone to the same church or meditated together for decades.
34. Someone actually said this to me after Ned died: “I guess God must have needed him worse than you did.”
35. Like if I had been more whiny, insecure, needy, clutchy, God would have said, okay, Ned can stay on earth awhile longer?
36. Even if this were so, who would want such a God? Who could find comfort in such a theology?
37. But my own theology does say this: choose love.
In whatever way you can. Friendship love, dating again love, passionate sexual love, loving a pet, loving nature or grandchildren or the Earth (which desperately needs activist-lovers at this moment if it is to continue). Loving, even, getting into bed, even solo, between clean, line-dried sheets. Loving the way sunlight slants through the window and falls on a bowl of honeycrisp apples.
38. Despair will sometimes make choosing love seem impossible, maybe for a long time. Grief drains so much, including the capacity to imagine that one’s life might ever be “better.” Because after all, since he or she cannot return to life, how could it be “better”?
Grief is an eclipse in totality, a shadow so dense all light is blotted out. Easy to believe the sun, obscured, might no longer be there. That all light has ended permanently. But the blocking factor moves, and it turns out the sun was there all along, and not just for other people, but for us, those who grieve. It was just not available to our sight for awhile. Understandably.
Is that theology? At least the eclipse part isn’t, it’s natural science. It’s true whether you believe it or not.
But light as metaphor, light as love, okay, that’s theology-ish.
And I believe it.
Having said, “Keep your theology to yourself,” I hope this does not give offense.
39. “To love less in order to lose less seems like no solution at all, ” continues Gopnik. ” … but to see loss squarely” (as an inherent condition of life) “sounds like wisdom.”
40. “Lots of different stuff from lots of different places which we drink and think and do can help us manage (loss).” More Gopnik.
41. Grief is individual, after all.
42. Because grief is one face of love. Because every marriage or relationship is different, and so is the widowhood which follows it, as well as the particular circumstances of the death.
So amen to the “different stuff” Gopnik references.
Whatever works. Whatever helps you through widowhood, especially in early-stage grief, however long that is for you, as long as you can hold it with integrity, well, by all means, do it or think it or take it.
43. What would I call “early stage grief” ? For me, I would say I resided in that awful state for five or six years after Ned’s death, long after I appeared functional to others.
After David’s death?
Maybe five months. I hate admitting that. I squirm inside saying it.
44. And, this is not because I had “been through it once.” Of course there was some commonality, but those two experiences of widowhood and grief were far more different than they were alike. Different both circumstantially, and in my emotional response. In what I felt was required of me, and where and how I felt helpless.
45. Maybe it was because Ned was deep in life and wanted so much to remain in it.
One of the ER nurses who was working the night he was medi-vacked in, said something to a friend of a friend, and it got back to me.
“All of us who worked that night were just wrecked by it. That man fought so hard. His heart stopped and restarted three times.”
Sometimes this comforts me. Sometimes it wrecks me, too.
46. And David didn’t want to be here, or his disease didn’t want him to, or made it impossible for him to stay.
Because, and I come back to this, too, over and over, and most “suicide widows”, I think, do: Did David “take his own life”? Or did depression take it, the final theft after robbing him a little at a time for years?
47. Or maybe I just didn’t love David as much or as well or as deeply or as something as I did Ned.
I hate that too. It seems one more heartless and disrespectful cruelty to David, as if how heartless, cruel, and disrespectful he was to himself were not bad enough.
And it makes me ask unanswerable and pointless questions.
Pointless because whatever the degree of inadequacy with which I loved him, I did love him.
Pointless because it always comes out the same way, which cannot be undone: he’s dead. He killed himself.
48. Gopnik continues: “Sometimes it helps to dwell on the immensity of the universe. Sometimes it helps to feel the presence of ongoing family and community. Sometimes it helps to light a candle and say a prayer. “
49. And, “Sometimes it helps to sit and breathe.
50. I take a lot of deep breaths this time of year.
This post is part of Crescent’s Widowhood Wednesday series.
The quotes from Adam Gopnik appeared in American Nirvana, which appeared in The New Yorker, August 7 & 14, 2017.
The illustrations above are from the website Mexican Sugar Skulls, which explains a great deal about Dia de las Muertes, and offers gorgeous Mexican folk art and other items related to this holiday.
The photograph below is of the pumpkin kitty carved by the late David Koff, in 2012.
Oh Crescent, once again I have been moved to tears by your writing. This time though there is a deeper reason. My best girlfriend who battled depression for many years finally succumbed and took her life last August. She left me her journals which i have tried unsuccessfully to read/understand many times. She was a believer in Abraham, the entity of beings who have gone on, come into total understanding or some such, and are accessible to us through a woman named Ester Hicks. Ester goes into a trance and Abraham speaks through her. While some of the ideas expressed are “good” and useful perhaps, as a whole it seems to me soooo much like a cult and so manipulative. She told me she had “moved on” but she had not. As a student, she had studied to be a religious leader, but got lost (I guess?) somewhere on the way. Sorry to ramble on. BOTTOM LINE: I have been trying to write about her but could not. This simple form you have just written gives me the hope that I may be able to write small bits about her and find some understanding and’or healing. Thank you.
Oh, Beverly, I am so so so sorry for your loss. Losing a friend in this way, after seeing them suffer for so long — heartbreaking. And if it hadn’t been Hicks/Abraham, it would have been something — depression is a disease of disordered thinking. They cram the disorder into whatever is going on (for David it was in good measure a house he believed he shouldn’t have sold — by selling it he had ruined everyone’s life. I mean — it could be anything. )
If I have helped you find a way to write about this, hallelujah. Strongly suggest reading The Suicide Index: Putting My Father’s Death in Order, by Joan Wickersham. Brilliant book, brilliant form.
xo
Thanks for the reply. I will certainly check out this book and may be able to share it with her brother, who is having a very difficult time. So far, his wife tells me, she thinks he Is ignoring or putting it behind him, but she knows it affects him tremendously and he has not come to terms with it. Will read and write and think lovingly of my favorite dragon. Bev
Oh, yes, dear Crescent Dragonwagon… so often, especially in the midst of a grief storm, it does feel literally like insanity. Somehow, there is a part of me that always manages to call me back out of the raging storm, help me to go on and be peaceful.
As I read your post, I found myself nodding in recognition of a shared response to grief or a shared trigger… ah… geese… I’ve always loved them. the two pitches of the honks – sounding like a question and reassurance of each other’s company. It used to be comforting to me and bring a smile to my face… when my dear Wesley was here. But now, the tears flow.
I think this too is one of my favourite Widowhood Wednesday posts (along with the Table of One). Whilst reading it I heard a song playing in the back of my head… Forever Autumn by Moody Blues. It was a favourite of Wesley’s. I thought it was beautiful but, even when we were first married and he introduced it to me, I couldn’t listen to it without crying. Autumn was always MY favourite time of year, and back then, I imagined HIM listening to it and missing me. It always tore at me, imagining him going on without me. He even said to me more than once near the end, that imagining me having to be alone without him, caused him the greatest sadness. But on I go… as you said… taking a lot of deep breaths… and then taking the next…
Loved reading this, Crescent. This validates my sadness. This is real to me.
Fall is stunning and cruel and yet, why do I care? “Why should there be weather?” – to quote your poem. Sometimes I feel I am just floating on the river of life. I don’t have the energy to swim or look at my surroundings or care about them. And then when that particularly gorgeous Maple radiates its vitality and glitters like cranberry juice on a Thanksgiving table, or I hear my son’s voice on the other side of the phone, it seems that life is calling me back to the table again.
Laurel is a nature person. She finds consolation in the tiniest details of a flower blooming or hearing the geese honking. I admire the way she is reaching towards peace, at least for a tiny part of every day.
I have so many opportunities to choose peace. I have friends who have offered to take me to meditation classes, my children have downloaded helpful apps on my phone, people send me books, my former Vedanta class peers are calling me back to class with them – and all the while I am pulling back. I am doing nothing. I have no energy. Something deep down inside tells me I should look inside. All the answers will ultimately surface from the inside. But I am coasting along, embracing my grief, not trying much to change my thoughts or telling regret “Enough is enough.” Regret is both useless and powerful. I have to confront it and disable it, even if I cannot destroy it. There has to come a time when I can forgive myself. Some mornings I can. I feel I will accomplish a lot and I do. But whenever it has the tiniest sliver of a chance, Regret slithers up and smothers me. That’s when I forget the jeweled red of the maple and what it awakened in me. Even my favorite songs seem lost to me. I feel like I don’t have the luxury of listening to music. Like that was a part of the happy part of my life. Now, when music should most comfort, it seems to have disappeared from my horizon. (The truth is, I suspect, I banished it.)
I can forgive the stupid comments people make (-because I always remind myself that I was on the other side not so long ago). And yet, I find it impossible to forgive myself. For not saying everything I needed to say to my husband. For being frozen in my fear and my panic. Why I find it so hard to overcome that I do not know.
I love talking about my loss and listening to others who have suffered loss. I am often impatient with people who are talking “endlessly” about other things. I catch myself asking “Why.” And then I realize I am the one who is being unreasonable. But having said that, there is Certainly a great deal of comfort in talking to those who understand this kind of devastating loss.
And that is why your Widowhood posts mean so much to me. As always, this one comforts me – in all its varied fifty shades. Grief, you have usurped so much of my life. Words are weapons on this field. I will use whatever words help.
Here is something from Rumi (I love Rumi!) that I recently read and liked:
“Longing for you savages me each moment
Let the world be my killer, not you
Don’t kick the man you sent sprawling in the dust
Don’t kill him you made, for the first time, alive.”
Oh Shishir, I can hear you telling me “Don’t worry so much. You will do it.” I wish I could. Come back – and tell me that, just one more time.
PS:
Also, I love that picture of David Koff’s pumpkin kitty. And his geese comment. He was so witty and talented! I can’t get that last picture of him out of my head – Shishir and I were pulling out of the parking lot after the restaurant closed and I saw him walking away towards the Thai place. I wanted to call out to him but I felt he was deep in thought and decided not to. Little did I know he was hurtling towards the end and that would be the very last time I would see him. It was late January.
Shishir was also cremated at Ferncliff. In some strange way now, our different shades of that infinite grief have a finite commonality in that they all turned to ash at the very same geographic locale.
thank you for all this. i found it all via a widows’ site (one of many via Facebook_) and shared it w other widows who are helped. thank you thank you. i am 3 yrs in to this misery and terrified and alone and overcome by grief and the anxiety that is in the grief soup, and the horror and panic of being alone in the world after 35.5 years with a perfect partner in all ways –we had one shared life…his death was sudden and an inexcusable medical mistake and i blame myself for lack of vigilance…misery abounds and i am immobilized by anxiety and have not been able to write…….the mundane is also impossible to do alone…you know, you know…thanks ~ps we might have a mutual friend, verandah porche who knew my husband back when he was at the sister commune at montague….Steve Marsden, his memory for a blessing…his loss my loss and the world’s …3 yrs yesterday on the gregorian….
This is deeply moving, thank you, as always for your beautiful words and thoughtfulness. Halloween begins my season of grief as well but it has always been my favorite holiday, nestled so closely to my birthday. I feel close to those who have died, dreaming of them and making an offering to the spirits who wander by. Grief is different for all of us and for each person we grieve. Like births. I echo your sentiments about everything happening for a reason. It seems unbearably cruel when spun out to its logical—theological?—extreme. I prefer to believe that we make meaning from the things that happen in our lives, that we learn to sit with the grief and loss and death just as we learn to celebrate the joys and loves and arrivals.
It’s hard to speak up about “everything happens for a reason.” So many well-meaning people say it! But… I just can’t. And I’m glad and relieved when I find others who also come down on “I will do my best to make meaning from this,” rather than trying to lip-sync a reason onto the divine, which has you say gets unbearable when taken to its natural extreme. Thanks for getting it, my dear. Sitting with whatever happens — what a life’s work that is. xo
Not a widow but so in awe and thankful for your writing and honesty. This sharing is sacred. Thank you for it.
You are so welcome. I am so glad that it spoke to you. You know… what other work do we have in this life, really, except to try and be transparent? xo
I am finding it difficult to breathe again. I catch myself feeling light-headed and realize it’s because I’ve forgotten to exhale.
This Autumn begins the leadup to the third anniversary of our daughter Erin’s mid-December death by suicide. Last week I helped make seasonal autumn greeting cards for hospice patients and their families. We decorated mini pumpkins with seeds and gauze and tiny felt leaves as accompaniment. All the verbiage about harvests and reapings, the brown and beige and black and crunchy dead motifs … it was quite triggering. Subtly.
Which is the worst – that slow creep of buildup. Even the crafting brought me to Erin, as we enjoyed creating art together.
I know it will get easier, living without her. In some ways it has already. I seldom think of her absence first thing when I wake up in the mornings these days, but I’ve usually re-reconciled that she’s really gone by the time I’ve padded my way to the Mr. Coffee station.
I’m nearing 60. I don’t want to wish what remains of my time on earth away or brush the holiday season off for another year because it stings. But sting it does. Clang of grief, flare of anger, endless pit of guilt, rinse/repeat.
Also, Erin enjoyed baking pies. She had a collection of vintage pie plates. Fu*king pumpkin spice. I wish I could snip this final quarter of the year completely off my calendar. I do enjoy getting out the snugglies, though. Even if they’re only for evening-wear. (We live in S. California now)
Thank you so much for sharing this publicly, Margie.
Given that grief is so shockingly raw, at the beginning so wholly disorienting and then the “clang of (it), flare of anger, endless pit of guilt, rinse/repeat,” as you said, over and over… that few of us feel able to express it socially. Which of course only adds to the disorientation and isolation.
But that is why we — though of us who can, who are willing to ask this of ourselves — are better off expressing it. For ourselves, sure, but also for those who can’t (as I have learned by writing these posts, and being the surprised recipient of others’ relief or gratefulness at hearing what they felt said).
Thus for those who are certain that no one else ever felt this way (and sometimes it looks like that, as others do insist in behaving as if life was normal, when it no longer is and in fact never was).
It is a gift, though a strange one, when one realizes that at that most isolating of experiences a person is probably never closer to the beating cut-open heart of what it means to be human.
Thank you, Margie. Again. And I am so sorry that Erin took her life and left you with this. xo
Thank you for expressing what many feel. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason either. It almost irritates me when people say this about a tragedy. Even years later grief can come unexpectedly when triggered by a song, a place. Both widowed and divorced were painful but when the person you love doesn’t want to leave you it’s definitely worse.
I’ve about reached the point where I break out in a rash when I hear “Everything happens for a reason,” Carol!