WHAT TO DO WHEN THE REGULAR PARADIGMS DON’T WORK
Most of us, before widowhood was thrust upon us, gave little thought to what that state would actually be like. And when and if we did try to conceive of it, most of us got it wrong.
” … In the version of grief we imagine (before we are widowed),” writes Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking, ” the model will be ‘healing.’ ”
Didion was shocked to find that that model did not apply. So was I.
So, I think, are many widows.
Why doesn’t ‘healing’ work with widowhood?
BECAUSE, IT WORKED BEFORE, RIGHT?
For isn’t “healing” the resilience story? The much-loved, hopeful, often true, relied-upon tale: hard times, pick-and-shovel work, eventual triumph, overcoming long odds and setbacks for an ultimate win?
The loose outlines: something difficult happens to you. You mourn, process, cry. You work. This work is not easy; maybe, in doing it, you break out in welts, get cold sores or shingles, lose friends, go bankrupt. But you keep going. You don’t give up. You talk it out, with friends, in therapy, to God. Maybe you write about it, or paint, take up meditation, make amends, lose 50 pounds, go back to church or walk away from religion altogether. Maybe you join a 12-Step Program, move to the San Cristobal Mountains. Maybe you report an abuser from your past to law enforcement.
But you keep going. You reach for, and gradually gain, understanding, insight, maybe self-forgiveness. You learn to call what befell you by its correct name. Perhaps you confront others; almost certainly you confront yourself.
You do your work, whatever the work is, given your particular set of difficulties.
And time passes, doing its work.
And then, usually by increments (though sudden epiphany is not unknown), you find you are “healing.” And then, “healed.”
You’ve made peace with your personal dark night; its evil, unfairness, cruelty or incomprehensibility no longer have you by the throat.
And, best of all, now comes the positive Hollywood ending we all love and which often has truth to it: you are not just “good as new,” you are better for having endured! “Yes, it was hard, but if XYZ hadn’t happened, I never would have ABC’d….”
We all know this story. We all love this story! Many of us have lived some version of it, and watched our friends live it. We’ve read about it in books, seen it in movies and on the evening news. We believe it, and in most cases with cause.
Thus it was natural that Didion and I and many other widows (including, maybe, you) would suppose that “healing” would get us through widowhood-grief.
And it was also natural that we were shocked when it didn’t.
And that it didn’t only added to that terrifying befuddlement common to widowhood, especially in its early phases: disorientation, being in a strange, rough, unfamiliar country, where the language is unknown and even the most basic verities are unreliable.
So why doesn’t “healing” work with widowhood?
PERPLEXING
In my own life, previous to widowhood, “healing” had worked miracles for and with me, allowing me to overcome a series of adversities (of course, every life has them).
Here are some that were once mine, some of the large-seeming ones in the first three decades of my life:
* A childhood with an erratic alcoholic father and a mother who for many years enshrined victimhood.
* Being raped at gunpoint in my late teens.
* Learning in my 20’s that I’d never be able to bear children.
None of these, at the time I experienced them, were walks in the park. But I was released, in time and with work, from the psychological bondage all of them had left me with. I was eventually ‘healed.’
How do I know? I rarely even think about these former-traumas. I have to dig to even remember them, and while I can, and can recall both details and that I felt pain and fear back then, when I do, there is no resurgence of those feelings in the present. I no longer feel pain or fear.
(In the case of my parents, these days there is even a certain amount of finding the more outrageous pieces of that screwy childhood interesting and even hilarious, not tragic. Presently, I’m very glad they were my parents. Too, some of the family shenanigans, though difficult at the time, made for great stories. Plus I believe that “nothing is wasted on the writer.” And, too, both my parents did some work on and healing of their own selves in their later lives. But I digress.)
The point is, in each of these three instances, the resilience narrative worked. And each time it did, though perhaps I did not see this fully at the time, I grew.
I grew in the skill of how to heal, learning the process of working through stuff. I grew faith in that process, having experienced it. I grew to believe in eventual good outcomes, as long as one didn’t give up. And in discovering greater resiliency than I knew I was capable of, I grew in compassionate enthusiasm — I became a great encourager of potentiality in others, helping when I could and cheering on and being present for friends, family, and students as they faced hard times.
Over the years, the freedom all this gave me, the access to parts of myself I didn’t know I had or was capable of having, filled me with awe, humility, and faith.
If that’s not healing, I don’t know what is.
So why doesn’t it work with widowhood?
A VANISHED CO-CREATED LIFE
If someone breaks a leg, you can legitimately expect that s/he will heal. But if a leg’s been amputated it cannot heal, because it’s not there anymore.
Widowhood is an amputation, not a break.
Yes, theoretically you are still complete, it is only (only!) that your partner has died.
But when your spouse dies, what’s lost is not only (only!) your beloved, but the whole co-created life of a marriage. Which was your life too, and which has ended.
You lose the two-person pet-language (“Oh, little Rumple-Pumpkin!”). You lose the encyclopedia of shared referential personal history (“Remember that time when we were driving to Iowa and we stopped for that picnic lunch and we inadvertently screwed up the duck-blind those hunters had set up?”).
You lose your daily, monthly, annual rituals. ( Knowing that, when he says, “Guess what I saw at the Farmer’s Market? The first new-crop apples!” he means, “And so soon you will bake the pie with the walnut crust, while I make the vanilla bean ice cream, just like every October.”)
You lose the individual knowledge your partner carried. (What were the Quicken passwords? Which glass place did she take the car to for repairs when a pebble cracked the windshield?). You lose the vast taken-for-granted particulars of working partnership, the who-did-what of a help-meet; shopping, cooking, vacking, changing the oil, putting up storm windows, calling the guys to pump the septic, cleaning the heating vent filter, remembering birthdays and allergies and vaccinations. (Do you have it in you to keep his beloved aged incontinent dog, the one that tolerated you but adored him, the one to whom he administered daily shots and monthly baths, the one whose rheumy eyes he wiped, the one who smells, the one he cleaned up after? The one who clearly now grieves, in his doggy way, maybe as much as you do? How can you possibly have him euthanized? But the dog is miserable, you’ve never been liked getting shots, you find the idea of giving them impossible. Even if you weren’t already on your knees with all the other inconceivable responsibilities that have now fallen to you, could you, would you, should you, are you able to take on the medical care of a grieving old dog? But it’s his dog, and you share grief… what, oh what, should you do? And then there is the question you will never say aloud but ask yourself in the middle of the night — why isn’t “being put to sleep” an option for you?).
You lose many of the roles you had. You lose identity, routine, the particular rhythm of days, even predictable arguments. You lose, probably, financial resources and income (Can you afford to keep the house the two of you lived in? Do you want to?)
You lose a shared future, or the assumption of one.
When a partner dies, this deeply dimensional shared life is not broken. It’s amputated.
The root word of “heal” is the Germanic hailaz, “to make whole.”
After an amputation, by definition you are not whole.
PHANTOM LIMB
You will never have both legs back. And it’s almost certain that you will never not wish you did have both legs back.
While you, the amputee, may adjust to a prosthetic, become heroically functional, come to peace with loss, create a happy life — that life will be a new one, not a healed version of the old one. There is phantom limb pain, excruciating not just despite, but because of, what is not there any more.
That is the reason why the “healing” narrative does not work in widowhood: some losses are permanent and catastrophic, no matter what we make of them.
Joan Didion lists some of the other suppositions we probably had pre-widowhood:
“… the worst days will be the earliest days… that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place… We have no way of knowing that (the funeral) will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion.
“Nor can we know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) of the unending absence that follows…”
See, with widowhood, you can do everything right, take every single step you’ve used before to heal, take every single piece of good advice you’re offered, and you still don’t get the triumphant answer, the ultimate win. You do not, will not, cannot get the partner you loved back.
Unending absence. That is the non-negotiable fact that every widow crashes into, over and over, time after time.
PS: IF NOT HEALING, WHAT?
Yet, there is legitimate, non-Pollyanna cause for hope: I say this especially to those of you who are young in grief.
Yet how, if one does not and cannot “heal”, is this possible?
I think there is a different model of the slow process of becoming who you will be now, in the life that is not your old life, but is yours nonetheless. A model more accurate than “healed.” Briefly — for this is a whole other post — it is the twin ideas of integration, and composting.
Everything, including every phase of widowhood and grief, though it cannot be healed or gotten over or speeded up, goes willy-nilly into that heap of life-experience which makes you you.
Like a garden compost heap, with its grass clippings, manure, kitchen detritus, is piled up together, to slowly decompose. It’s a process you can speed up a little by turning over these materials from time to time… but just a little. In the end, though, all that material becomes humus: rich, dark brown soil, which can go into the garden, which can nourish new generation of grass and chickens and vegetables. Life and death turn out to be as inseparably intimate as love and loss.
You were loved; you grieve… you had, you lost. This is part of your psychological, emotional, spiritual compost pit. These things are combined, and cannot be uncombined, because that is the nature of our existence.
Here is what I think, dear widow. From our personal compost, we grow our new selves. We do not “get over” loss; rather our deep sadness and ache becomes part of what and who we are and will be. We do not “heal”; we compost, and through that, we integrate our pain and missing, and we go on. Sometimes, to grow a new life.
It is fall as I write this; I don’t know in what season you will read it. But for now, I pick you, my dear fellow widows, a nice summer bouquet, picked, one July, from my Vermont garden.
I know it may hurt your eyes to look at beauty. But I am only offering them metaphorically, of course, on the page and screen.
And so, though you cannot “heal” the old life back, a new life does exist for you. It’s probably unformed and unknowable at present, but it will, in its own time, be revealed to you and created by you.
And there, this bunch of flowers will wait, staying fresh and ready when you are.
People talk sometimes today of a work-husband, or a work-wife, another working partnership subject to dissolution and its own kind of grief. The work spouse may not even be directly working on the same project, but is familiar with the tasks, the people, the policies, and the challenges in that workplace. They can be your ear in times of rant, your shoulder in times of sorrow, the boot in the butt you need to keep on keeping on. And, when you’ve worked with them for a long time, the two of you have that shared history that you may not even realize has become known only to you. I worked for decades at the same company, something less and less likely these days. I was fortunate enough to have multiple work-husbands, and perhaps a work-wife or two over the years. And, having given those hostages to fortune, I’ve lived through years and years now after the deaths of two of my work-husbands, and the dissolution of some of the other partnerships as one or the other of us moved on to other assignments, other companies, or the bright life of retirement I enjoy today. What I found surprising, and sorrowful, as the years went on, was the realization that there was no one left at work who did remember those bits of shared history, no one left to get the joke that this moment was like “that time when”. I remember picking up the phone to call someone to share the joke, and realizing, again, that he was gone, and that there really wasn’t anyone else who would remember, and know why this was funny. It’s bittersweet. I am so fortunate to have had those relationships, and I’ll accept the sorrow when I reach out for someone who’s gone. But I’d so much rather be able to laugh with them again instead.
(and there it is, my unexpected writing practice for the day: this is day 185 in a row)
YES – Widowhood is an amputation, not a break.
YES – it is A VANISHED CO-CREATED LIFE
Oh Crescent! The absolute, undiluted Truth. Of course the loss that cannot be healed. I love the analysis here – right on point and delivered in exquisite language. The oh so painful daily reminders – losing “the two-person pet-language,” the “Unending absence.” That Unending absence is actual. Not a dream, not a nightmare, but an actual, concrete, stubborn torment that is here to stay and that makes you ask, “Okay, so when will the bell toll for me?” When does this end or fade?
I look forward to reading next week’s post – while focusing on the fall bouquet your words have created for us today. Autumn used to be my favorite season. The fullness, the sensuousness, the Keatsian abundance and richness that I used to be particularly partial to, have now become sharp reminders of the time of year. But, then, no time is spared the tentacles of grief. It is a uniform blanket of obliteration and despair. So I will try to focus on the images and fragrance that your virtual bouquet presents. I will have the golden hot soup my friend has brought me today. And I will try to take five minutes of this unending evening to enjoy the flavors. Thank you, my sister.
Sending love, Sumita.
You will get through this.
You don’t have to know how or when, just that ou will.
Like you, fall used to be my favorite season, now my toughest, but “no time is spared the tentacles of grief” — because we were loved by the ones we loved all the time. Still and still.
Sending love.
Crashing into Unending absence …. the big things and the little things… oh so many little things.
I am so sorry, Sharon … I wish it wasn’t such a tough walk.
that of course is why I try to keep talking about it.
So many things, of every scale. xo
Thank you.
You are so welcome, Judith.
I read this in the evening of a very difficult day after much crying and sadness, I am feeling my life has been amputated. Thank you for such a poignant message. But I do have faith that there is a life for me yet. I look forward to hearing about the model that is not a life healed in your next post
Ah, Virginia, I am so sorry for what you are enduring, and glad that at least this post was able to articulate otr maybe validate what you are feelings. We widows are so alone at times, yet paradoxically not… And there IS another life ahead, eventually, after much too long a time, but for real — if we want it.
I find myself saying yes over and over again as I read your words. And in the fog that is widowhood for me, I can’t seem to find my prosthetic leg… it must be here somewhere, right? Thank you. There’s a satisfaction of feeling pain acknowledged. Especially so eloquently.
I think it HAS to be acknowledged, that pain. I think all those who want to help us so but try to smooth it over and don’t or cannot acknowledge it make it so much worse, so isolating.
This was a brilliant piece of work. Thank you so much for your words. My husband died a little over a year ago. It was sudden. It was devastated and it felt like I got half of me cut off. it really IS an amputation. And no one can expect us to just get back up like we have both legs. Even when we “function” we still have a sizable limp. We always will.
Thank you so much, Sharyn. I wish I didn’t know this, and I wish you didn’t, but there it is. I think the period between one and two years is the toughest, for those of us who were fortunate enough to truly adore our partners, and who were with them for a long time. Wishing you well, as well as is possible, on this journey, my dear. It DOES get better though… never healed.
You mentioned the second writing next Wednesday. I have been trying to find it every since. Do you think you could e-mail it to me please. I’m a recent widow.
Thanks
Jeanene
Someone posted this on a board that I frequent. I’m on my way to almost 11 years out, and I definitely remember when I felt this way about widowhood.
I don’t feel this way anymore. There came a moment where my process was healing, and I’m not afraid to say it. Sometimes, healing isn’t what you think it is. It isn’t the “all better now,” after much toil and tribulation that you have so expertly described. Sometimes healing is acceptance. And boy is that a tough one.
We all go through trials and tribulations and if we’re still here, whether we want to admit it or not, we survived. Some of us survive more than others, and there’s no simple reason as to why. Like everyone else, life is so very complicated. And just like I’ve learned not to invalidate another widow’s experience, (or why she feels one way about her grief in opposition or perspective to mine); I’ve learned that our outcomes will always vary. I don’t have a new husband and I haven’t been in a relationship since my husband died, but I’m ok with that. I am whole, and as absolutely painful as my experience was, I can say that healing is part of my process. Things are different. Things are ok. Things are better.
That may not happen for you or anyone else, (although I do know quite a few widows that have reached that point), there is one thing we all seem to have in common: We never forget the love, the memories and the wonderful life we lost. It just doesn’t hurt the same way, anymore. The lack of utter despair doesn’t invalidate our grief, either. I will always miss and love my husband. But I have healed. No one can take that away from me.
This was a good read – thank you for sharing.
I think you are exactly right, Maria. Each marriage, each relationship, each loving and being loved is different, and thus each grief is different, because grief is part of love. I deeply honor the individuality of the process. I write a lot about early-stage grief, for those young in widowhood, because I just don’t think there’s enough truth-telling out there. I am SO thankful I’m not in that any more, yet I remember so deeply how disorienting it was — writing this is part of the way I serve others who may be feeling that disorienting isolation on top of the direct grief… the same impulse, I think, that leads people to start Facebook widowhood pages.
I especially like “The lack of utter despair doesn’t invalidate our grief” — agree so deeply. “I will always miss and love my husband. ” Me too.
“We all go through trials and tribulations and if we’re still here, whether we want to admit it or not, we survived. Some of us survive more than others, and there’s no simple reason as to why. Like everyone else, life is so very complicated. ”
I also can’t explain why some of us, over time, are able to integrate grief and “never forget the love, the memories and the wonderful life we lost” yet not “hurt the same way.” I wouldn’t say I’m “healed” — but that to some extent is semantic. Yes, acceptance is HUGE, and tough, but necessary if one is to grown to what is next. And can’t be hurried. 18 years on, I’m happy to be here too, solid, in many ways a different individual than I would have been without his life, love, and death.
In contemplating the question of why some of us get to where you have and in our own ways, I and many others, I have sometimes wondered if there is a resiliency gene. Or if it has to do with how many other losses and hits a person has accumulated over a lifetime. As you say, no simple answers.
Thank you so much for taking the time to write so thoughtfully. You, in your resilience, are a beacon for others, too. Those of us that have reached some kind of “other side” having lived through the worst — I feel we somehow owe it to life and truth to shine. You are!
CD
Wow I stumbled upon your interesting post.itt really hit home. My beloved had several amputations in the months before he passed. I saw firsthand how hard it was for him and me as we tried to figure out what our new life would be.
And now I am taking the journey alone. I miss him more than I ever thought possible. It has been 8 months sine I last held his hand. My life has a huge hole as I struggle to find a way to be whole.
Dearest Miss Crescent’
Thank You for that nice bouquet of that July day from your Vermont garden’ which did bring colour and warmth in my presently cold winter weather season’ and my emotionally cold and frozen grieving season’
Thank You for today’s therapy from far far away’ every word hit my heart’
A widow of five months’ after a fulfilling ‘ loving’ romantic’ blissful marriage of 44 years’ it is terribly difficult to not be that loving pair anymore’ to go around as only one’
Grateful for your realistic guidance on this unfamiliar widowhood path’
Laura
Dear Vartan,
Thank you so much for your thanks and kind words. I am oh so sorry that they fit your present life… Five months after a happy marriage of 44 years duration is tough tough tough tough. Almost impossible to get through, and a tough phase (I felt that between 6 months and two years were the hardest for me, but everyone is different). I wish you well from the bottom, and middle, and top, of my heart. It is just so hard, and lonely, in a way no one else can ever real understand (fellow widows come closest, but for each of us, we loved so individually, and our spouse was him or herself so individual, it is such a private and particular pain).
I would send you a bouquet every day if I could.
This journey— it’s like the old Union saying: “We make the path by walking.” Keep walking, love. Keep walking. xo
CD
Hello,
I have been following your amazing work for many years; a writer with the rights words. These are the right words for a second mother to me. My question is , may I purchase this piece to share with her?
Kindest Regards,
Maria Ginger-Wiley
From Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel “The Sharing Knife : Beguilement”:
“How long?”
“Time wears grief smooth like a river stone. The weight will always be there, but it’ll stop scraping you raw at the slightest touch. But you have to let the time flow by; you can’t rush it. We wear our hair knotted for a year for our losses, and it is not too long a while.”
Lovely, Nora…
Some of us wear our hair knotted for much, much longer than a year…
xxoo
This is so beautifully and perfectly said. I did not lose a long life with Larry — some time as friends while we were college kids, 16 months we were together. But I lost the long life we PLANNED to have. I lost everything we dreamed, wished for, intended. I lost not only someone I adored, but someone my daughter adored. It’s been seven years this spring, and it doesn’t get a damned bit easier — even though I have a life I like very much right now. And this time of year, I add anger to my grief — because only a few people understand.
Dear Becca, it is so infuriating and WRONG that many don’t get it… Not how long it takes (like the rest of one’s life) and that you lose not only the person and the life you had, but the life you COULD have had.
This is why people who can articulate this — as you can and do, and me, and many others who comment here and elsewhere — have to keep saying it.
Not so that others will treat us and other widows with more understanding and kindness (though that would be good) but because grief and loss wait for everyone. Understanding and preparing for that is I think a life-skill that is taught almost not at all.
It is ten years for me. I survived. I have a good life. I do things I enjoy. I am not wandering around looking depressed. And there is not a day goes by that I don’t want to tell him something, ask what he thinks of something, just sit quietly across the room from him, be in his arms. There is this great big hole in my life and there always will be. And if I ever love someone else that will not fill this hole. Not at all.
Kathryn, oh so precisely, truly and painfully said. You know I DO love someone now (eighteen years later) and I rejoice in this… but as you say, it cannot and should not fill the space the first and lengthiest love of my life occupied.
Dear Crescent,
Thank you so much for writing this article. I lost my husband 16 years ago, we were together for 25 years. I very much agree with you about the healing process applied to widowhood. I have struggled for years trying to understand my grief and its stages. In particular I feel your words, “Unending absence. That is the non-negotiable fact that every widow crashes into, over and over, time after time.” Over these years, I have questioned why it is taking me so long to heal. There are some years, I am more at peace with it, and some years where I am angry still. Widowhood is not something you get over. I like what you write about growing a new life. We do have that possibility. Though it takes courage and a great strength to do this and we need to hear of others who have moved into this as you have.
I am grateful that you have shared this writing which you have articulated so well. Thank you.
Mary
Thank you, Mary. I feel that all of this who endure it owe it to ourselves and everyone else to articulate it to everyone else — because, for most people, their turn is coming, and, my god, if they can be a little more prepared than we were and we can help them…!
And I am so, so sorry for your loss.
I can’t say that it was, or even is, exactly easy to “move into this” (the growing a new life) as I have. Only, eventually, not doing it was harder.
However, nothing about widowhood is easy, is it?
Wishing you well, dear Mary.
CD
My partner had a devastating stroke over 3 years ago. When I read about widowhood and the loss compared to an amputation I understand that analogy. However feel I don’t seem to fit anywhere. Could you please make suggestions to those of who have experienced this amputation, there is no end in site but daily see deterioration until our partners no longer seem to know us.
Oh, Ellen. I feel for you. The dreadfulness of this limbo you are in, and in a different way, your partner. The living loss, the “not fitting in anywhere” … how excruciating and cruel. It is an amputation, yet in a sense not a “clean” one… perhaps one could say the limb is no longer there, but the wound is still open and septic. You can neither hold on to your old life nor let go of it, it seems to me, under these circumstances.
I remember maybe three years after my husband died saying to myself, “What would have been worse would have been had he survived that accident yet been in a vegetative state, perhaps for years.” So I have imagined the hellishness of your situation, but I am sure inadequately.
Unfortunately, then, I have no advice. Not only do I not know the particulars of your situation (what your partner’s illness is, how long it is projected to last, if there is insurance or another source of funding to have relief or respite care or assistant caregivers or if your partner is or could or will be in a facility — what an astoundingly tough decision that one would be!), I am not a therapist or a professional, just another person going through life — its tough beautiful contradictory impossible self.
The one thing that comes to mind, and I’m sure you have A) thought of it, and B) it’s inadequate, is perhaps there is some kind of group that meets at a local hospital for spouses of… The husband of a friend of friend mine was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimers, and she did find a support group, and found it so helpful in both practical and emotional terms. Too, even though your partner is still living, it see,s to me Hospice might offer some support in this line, both for him and you. It’s worth checking.
The main thing I can say, and it’s a generalization, is that to whatever extent possible (given your temperament, finances, etc) don’t go through this alone. Some combination of a team of friends, an illness- or situation-related support group, a therapist, perhaps relatives, perhaps a church or community group, hospice… this is just too heavy a burden to carry alone.
I know this is not much help. I wish I could offer more than seeing how hard this has to be, and expressing my sorrow at what you (and your partner) are enduring.
CD
I love what you wrote, Crescent. It describes so well a similar kind of grief I have experienced, although it is not because I became a widow. Your words “And so, though you cannot ‘heal’ the old life back, a new life does exist for you. It’s probably unformed and unknowable at present, but it will, in its own time, be revealed to you and created by you” ring especially true for me.
This is a beautiful, heart poured out in full, description of what is often so hard to describe. Thank you for “painting” my picture. As a young widow, many feel that I will “heal” and “move on”. Your words are my truth!
As my face drowns in tears reading this, I also get whatever we get psychologically out of being able to say, “yes, you get it, you get me”. Thank you!
Wishing you more beautiful flowers in life.
Thank you so much, Jen.
I think widowhood and grief are so not understood until we have actually lived it. That is why I felt I had to write this. If it has made you feel even the slightest bit less alone in what you are experiencing, then it also makes it the slightest bit more tolerable to have endured it myself, because it gives some meaning and purpose to it. The only way I know, really, to listen the suffering. That and time.
Wishing you well — sending out a safe hug to you.
CD
After reading, I must say thank you for beautifully capturing the pain and despair experienced when loosing our spouse. At five months out, I only just realized that all the small joys I experienced over 52 years together are gone. Holding his hand while walking, cooking a good meal and focusing on getting it just right, watching a sunset, digging in the garden, knowing he was just inside reading his book—the knowledge that he was there to touch or talk to whether with me or at a distance—these are all gone now. My only and overriding focus is on thoughts and memories of him and how my life is empty of the small and large joys experienced because he was in my life.
I am so sorry, Yvonne. 52 years is a long time, and five months out is very young in widowhood.Oh my goodness, this is a hard time, and my heart goes out to you. A step at a time, a breath at a time. Sending (safe) hugs of sympathy across the time and space and air. Again, I am as sorry as I can be.
Wow! This was a much-needed read. Especially this time of year. Composting is the exact word for what happens with widowhood grieving. Thank you for this post. Love you.
Thank you so very much, Sumita. I am sending hugs and kisses.