Soon it will be 8 months since my husband, Andy died--nearly 3/4 of a year has passed. During the first few weeks after his death, time stood still for me. Nothing felt real. I wandered in a daze around the empty house, constantly replaying events from our life together. As I touched the items we’d collected during the past 34 years, things that meant something to us, I realized there was nothing in my life that hadn’t been affected by losing him. I couldn’t think straight or carry on a conversation. I couldn’t write about anything except him. And I wondered how a person could ever come back from that much loss.
But time keeps moving forward and I’d like to think that I am moving with it—inching my way toward that other life. The one I will live without him. There are still bad days and nights, moments when I lose my way and fall into a deep hole or trip over an unexpected boulder on this grief road. And there are times I wish I could go back into my life with him, especially the rough patches, and forgive more quickly, reach out and touch him more often. I continue to have days when I cry without knowing I’m crying, surprised to feel a tear drop off my chin and realize my cheeks are wet. Other times I am so aware of the pain that I want to scream, howl or visit a wailing wall. But, of course, I feel that way. My heart and my life were shattered.
However, progress is being made. That heart is mending slowly in the ways that it can. It seems I’m learning new things about grief every day. I’ve learned to find comfort in acknowledging my pain rather than trying to make it go away. Grief is a primitive emotion—instinctive and irrational. The desire to scream or howl is very real and raw. Grief is love in its most turbulent and unpredictable form.
It has helped me so much to write about the grief, to be open and honest about my own journey. To tell it the way it really is—how it feels in the middle of the night when I wake up alone and reach for a hand that is no longer there. I want to rid myself of the fear and shame of facing my pain and allowing others to see it. I don’t want to run away from it. I need to confront it head-on. This loss has rearranged everything in my world. It’s shown me how very fragile and random life can be. And I know that eventually it will make me a better, more grateful, and kinder person. It has taught me so much I didn’t know about love and how to give and receive it.
The reality of this grief is so different from what I thought it would be, if I even allowed myself to think it could happen—that Andy could die and disappear from my daily life. I should have known. I did know on an intellectual level. But I pushed that knowledge aside as I suspect most of us do. The truth I know now is that love and loss are inevitable. It takes courage to love, knowing we will eventually lose that love. Maybe that’s the reason we can’t face it until it slaps us in the face. Life is so fleeting. And, the truth is, all hearts get broken in ways no one can fix.
This grief has challenged me to think about my purpose for being here, to think about what I want from my life now. I want love in my daily life again. We all need to give and receive love. The following stanza is from a poem I wrote years entitled Doubt.
Maybe if He had it all to do over,
God would change his mind about Eden
with its serpents and sins,
dictate a new, shorter list to Moses.
One that commands nothing
except we hold on to love,
in whatever form it finds us.
I challenge myself and I challenge all of you who’ve shared this painful grief in the time of Covid journey with me to hold onto love in whatever form it found you—or finds you in the future. There is nothing else that matters. If I’m sure of anything in this life, I’m sure of that.
But time keeps moving forward and I’d like to think that I am moving with it—inching my way toward that other life. The one I will live without him. There are still bad days and nights, moments when I lose my way and fall into a deep hole or trip over an unexpected boulder on this grief road. And there are times I wish I could go back into my life with him, especially the rough patches, and forgive more quickly, reach out and touch him more often. I continue to have days when I cry without knowing I’m crying, surprised to feel a tear drop off my chin and realize my cheeks are wet. Other times I am so aware of the pain that I want to scream, howl or visit a wailing wall. But, of course, I feel that way. My heart and my life were shattered.
However, progress is being made. That heart is mending slowly in the ways that it can. It seems I’m learning new things about grief every day. I’ve learned to find comfort in acknowledging my pain rather than trying to make it go away. Grief is a primitive emotion—instinctive and irrational. The desire to scream or howl is very real and raw. Grief is love in its most turbulent and unpredictable form.
It has helped me so much to write about the grief, to be open and honest about my own journey. To tell it the way it really is—how it feels in the middle of the night when I wake up alone and reach for a hand that is no longer there. I want to rid myself of the fear and shame of facing my pain and allowing others to see it. I don’t want to run away from it. I need to confront it head-on. This loss has rearranged everything in my world. It’s shown me how very fragile and random life can be. And I know that eventually it will make me a better, more grateful, and kinder person. It has taught me so much I didn’t know about love and how to give and receive it.
The reality of this grief is so different from what I thought it would be, if I even allowed myself to think it could happen—that Andy could die and disappear from my daily life. I should have known. I did know on an intellectual level. But I pushed that knowledge aside as I suspect most of us do. The truth I know now is that love and loss are inevitable. It takes courage to love, knowing we will eventually lose that love. Maybe that’s the reason we can’t face it until it slaps us in the face. Life is so fleeting. And, the truth is, all hearts get broken in ways no one can fix.
This grief has challenged me to think about my purpose for being here, to think about what I want from my life now. I want love in my daily life again. We all need to give and receive love. The following stanza is from a poem I wrote years entitled Doubt.
Maybe if He had it all to do over,
God would change his mind about Eden
with its serpents and sins,
dictate a new, shorter list to Moses.
One that commands nothing
except we hold on to love,
in whatever form it finds us.
I challenge myself and I challenge all of you who’ve shared this painful grief in the time of Covid journey with me to hold onto love in whatever form it found you—or finds you in the future. There is nothing else that matters. If I’m sure of anything in this life, I’m sure of that.
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