Lessons from Loss #3
The future is not going to be what you thought it would be. Don’t try to predict it. You can’t imagine what it will look like. Fear is not prophecy, and your wishes and daydreams are far less interesting than reality will be. Leave room for surprises– there will be many surprises!!
The Way You Thought It Would Be
One piece of advice I read right after my husband died was something along the lines of “Get used to the idea that your life is not going to be the way you thought it would be.” As the years go by, I am realizing more and more how difficult that advice is to carry out. I think I’ve got it– I think I’ve accepted it–and then I find myself adjusting again, letting go of more, and thankfully, opening up to what “not the way I thought it would be” might look like.
When Anson died, I foolishly thought the next chapter of my life might be better than the previous chapter. Anson had struggled with stress, anxiety, and alcohol dependency, and we had struggled financially for 10 out of the 21 years we were married. I envisioned myself meeting a man who was financially and emotionally stable, who would make a good role model for my children and create a new, adventurous life with me filled with travel and cool adult children and grandchildren. We would get married and create a big, beautiful Brady Bunch family and take a picture every summer at our beach house on the Cape with all of us wearing blue. I wanted a new family that I could insert myself and my kids into so we could just keep cruising forward through life. After dating for a few years and having some six-month or longer relationships with a couple of men, I realized that this dream was not likely to happen. I don’t move in the same circles as men who own beach houses on the Cape. The men I do feel comfortable with come with their own challenges and problems. I had to accept the fact that my new chapter will be better in some ways, but there will always be trade-offs. As my sister once said, “it won’t be better, just different.”
It’s been six years now that I’ve been processing grief and dating. There have been years of feeling lonely, hurt, and sad, and longing for a positive, healthy, nurturing relationship to balance out the loss and pain. I’ve tried five or six online dating sites, and wow, there are some “interesting” people out there. I see my friends and relatives navigating their own relationship terrain and I realize how hard the struggles can be. “Not better, just different” has slowly morphed into “actually, it could be a lot worse.” There are men out there who have harder problems than Anson had. And there is no doubt that being single is far healthier than being in a bad relationship. My daughter works so much that it is very hard to see her, and my son has told me flat out that he doesn’t want to meet the men I date unless I’m sure it’s really serious. Maybe I won’t find a man who will create a new family with me– maybe I’ll find a man who never had kids of his own or who doesn’t earn as much money as I do and can’t afford to travel with me. Maybe I’ll travel by myself or with my sister. Maybe my future partners will be polite to my children, but that’s all. It’s not going to be the way I thought it would be.
Now my son has moved out, and it’s just me and the cat living in this four bedroom home. I so badly want to sell this house and get out of the burden of lawn mowing and shoveling. Every day, I am more tempted to just rent for a year to see what my next move will be. I have been on one coffee date in the past six months. But I have an amazing group of friends through my dance community. They are all younger than I am. Most of them are immigrants. They talk about traveling and living in other places– two years here, three years there. Maybe I’ll do that– rent an apartment, take a year off from teaching to go abroad and teach English, be a nomad for a while. Maybe I’ll have lovers and friends who are 15 years younger than me and my kids won’t even know about it. Maybe I’ll be a cool middle aged woman who’s traveled the world and been on all kinds of adventures. Maybe, if my son and daughter ever decide to have kids, I’ll be that quirky grandma who visits for a few weeks in the summer before heading off to another country to explore. Maybe someday I’ll settle back down with a head full of interesting stories to tell.
Who knows? It’s not going to be the way I thought it would be.
Yes, and….
My son J moved out of our house this week. His decision was sudden but not completely unexpected. He’s twenty-three, after all, and has a steady girlfriend. I’m at a good place in my grief process to deal with this– I’m sad, but I’m going to be okay. It’s hard when I think about my household shrinking from five people to one over five years as my kids moved out and my husband died. Most moms who talk about the empty nest syndrome still have their husbands around. This normal and difficult “launch process” is even more painful for a widow.
Before my son moved out, I had the idea that I might sell the house and downsize to a condo, and J was both stressed out by that idea and grateful. He felt like he needed to get rid of stuff he wasn’t using any more, like when he was a child and we would “update” his toys to get rid of the transformers and LEGOs he wasn’t using. Now it was tools and a home brewing kit and other big “toys” that he had bought and tried out and then outgrown. We had cleaned and tossed, made multiple trips to the dump, and J had a yard sale.
Today, I cleaned out a closet as I prepare for workers to put a new floor in my living room. I found a few more items I could sell or get rid of– two wind chimes, two kites, a basketball and a tennis racket. As I cleaned them up and got them ready for selling, I remembered that one of the kites had been a wedding present from my sister. I tried to think of how many times we had used the kite over the 21 years my husband and I were married. Maybe three? Thinking about the kite brought up memories of the other gifts we had received and rarely used, like the picnic basket that still sits in our garage. I remember getting those gifts as a young bride with a new husband and a step-daughter. I envisioned wind-swept hill-top picnics and days spent in the park flying kites. The same for the basketball and the tennis racket– they came with a cluster of expectations about what my kids and my family would be like.
When I talk to other widows about their grief, we find that we have a common feeling– the idea that marriage and family is in large part an illusion. Widows talk about death lifting a “veil” that covers the eyes of those who are still happily married or happily single. What we think of, before grief, as permanent, solid, and reliable is shaken and ripped apart in grief. Nothing is permanent. Relationships are temporary. The world is not solid, but precarious and liable to go out from under you without warning. Losing an alcoholic spouse in a car accident most certainly adds to that sense of precariousness. Drunk driving takes lives without warning; in the blink of an eye, a happy family enters a vortex of grief, trauma, confusion and pain. Nothing seems stable.
Discovering the kites today reminded me of this illusion. I had the sudden feeling that these were props in a play that I had been trying to stage for the past 30 years. The scene was “family life” and there would be games of “horse” in the driveway, swimming pools and beach vacations, game nights and laughter, sledding in the wintertime, school band concerts, and cozy Christmas mornings. I feel like some families pull off this scene well– maybe they have stronger directors than my family had. It seems like, in some families, all the actors know their lines and play their roles with committment. In an alcoholic family, at least one of the actors shows up on opening night drunk or stoned, or both. Lines are forgotten, and the play veers off into a totally new production while the other actors struggle to improvise, or walk off the stage completely.
And this is why life– especially life with an alcoholic– is not like a play. Or if “all the world’s a stage,” and we are merely players, it is a play without rehearsal. In many ways, it is all improvised. We can bring props to the stage, but they might not be used. And so, I decided, I can let these props go. I can let my son go. Five years ago, that idea would have brought me to tears as I mourned what I had wanted for my family and didn’t achieve. That scene didn’t come off the way I had hoped. I’m still sad about that, but today I feel like I have another scene coming up. I don’t know what the scene will look like– a soliloquy? a dialogue? To a large extent, it’s going to be improv. But isn’t the rule of thumb in improv to say “Yes, and…”? That would be a good mantra for the next phase of life.
This is not a story about my colonoscopy…
This is not a story about my colonoscopy, but there is a colonoscopy in it. Actually, there are two. The story begins in 2006 when my late-husband, Anson, turned 50. When you turn 50–just something for those of you under 50 to look forward to– the universe rewards you with an invitation to join AARP and a reminder to get your first colonoscopy. I drove Anson to the hospital, dropped him off, did some shopping, and went to pick him up two hours later. He was lying on a bed wearing a johnny in a room with other patients and I remember the room smelling vaguely like…well, farts. He was groggy and uncomfortable, and I felt sorry for him lying there. This was the most vulnerable I had ever seen him–drugged, half-naked, surrounded by strangers in a room smelling like farts. When he felt clear-headed enough to get dressed, we left the hospital and went right to his favorite diner for lunch.
Five years later, I was a widow. The surrealism of the years just after Anson’s death are difficult to describe. The pain, the loneliness, the profundity of grief are too great for me to go into here. Suffice to say that there are thousands of details about life that you don’t think about when you are married but that suddenly come to the surface as a widow. Who do I call to fix the drier? If my car is being repaired, who will drive me to work? Will anyone want to date me now that I’m 46? Is there anything I can do about the skin on my neck? Does anyone realize how lucky they are to be alive? And for some reason, one of the questions that bothered me the most was “Who will drive me home from my colonoscopy?”
I actually brought this question up with a man I dated shortly after Anson died. This man had never been married, had no children, and was five years younger than me. When I told him that I worried about who would drive me home from my colonoscopy, he grimaced. “I don’t even want to think about that stuff– I do enough of that for my mom, I don’t need to do that for my girlfriend.” Needless to say, that relationship didn’t last long.
I’ve said many times since Anson died that I feel like my foundation is gone. When you are married, even if it is a difficult marriage, there is a sense of continuity, of stability. You have a go-to person, and if your spouse can’t help you with a certain task, they can at least help you find a stand in. As a widow, I feel like each scenario is up in the air– who do I ask for help? And if I ask person A for help this time, I’ll have to find person B for next time so that I don’t wear out my friends’ goodwill. Who among my friends would be kind enough to meet me at the hospital and see me half-naked in a room that smelled like farts?
Last year, I turned 50. I got my AARP invitation and my colonoscopy notice. My health insurance company even offered me a $50 gift card if I got the colonoscopy within a year! What a deal! Because I am a “good patient,” I scheduled the consultation and procedure right away. My 21-year-old son agreed to drop me off at the hospital and pick me up a few hours later. The preparation was no fun, in spite of all the peach iced tea and Sprite I bought to try to make it more enjoyable.
On the day of the procedure, as I lay on the gurney waiting for the gastroenterologist to begin, I fought back tears. Lying on a table in a hospital johnny open in the back, surrounded by strangers and cold machines made me feel vulnerable and small. I didn’t want the anesthesiologist or nurses to think that I was scared– I wasn’t afraid of the procedure. I just hated the fact that I was alone. I had been there for Anson when he came out of the anesthesia. Why couldn’t someone be there for me?
But anesthesia today is so lovely! One deep breath and I was out. I woke up a few minutes later in the recovery area– no nausea like I remembered from the anesthesia of my youth. The nurses were warm and funny and they were checking on me and bringing me water. They told me to go ahead and fart– it was good to fart! But the room didn’t smell bad the way I had remembered with Anson’s procedure. There were other patients around me; some had friends picking them up, some had spouses, some had adult children. I had survived! I actually felt great. And all these people, at different phases of later adulthood, with different life situations– we all had found rides home. The nurse called my son; he was on his way to get me, so I got dressed and waited for him. Other than riding down to his car in a wheelchair, I felt as normal as could be.
So it was over. My first colonoscopy! (By the way, SURPRISE! You have to have one EVERY FIVE YEARS!!!) I had done it without a spouse or a boyfriend to drive me home. It was not a big deal. So, this is not a story about my colonoscopy. I had been a widow for four years, and this is a story about learning that I was going to be okay, alone.
Every, Every Minute
Last night at a dance, a friend of mine asked me why I hadn’t been out lately. I knew I would hear this question– I had been dancing only once since February and here it is mid-May. I told him it was because I had been feeling more and more lonely at dances and after them. Of course, he couldn’t understand that feeling as dances are social events and because he is married, so he dances and then goes home with his wife of 35 years. I tried to describe the odd loneliness that comes from being single at 52, being hit on by married men or men much too young for me, and he told me I should consider it a compliment that men find me attractive. Then he said what many of my married friends have said to me: “If something happened to my spouse, I don’t think I would even bother with dating. I’d be happy to be alone.”
I said this too once, to a single friend of mine. I regret saying it now, although, at the time it felt true to me. That idea– that after 35 years of marriage he would be happy being alone– falls into the same category as “You don’t need a man,” and “Aren’t you lucky to be able to do your own thing?” Well intentioned sentiments, but they miss the mark for me.
First of all– I know there are true introverts in the world who relish their alone time. I like some alone time too. And maybe there are people in the world who truly don’t want to live with another person for the remainder of their years on earth. Could be. I’m just not one of them.
Secondly, as a person fascinated by social psychology, I know that we are social creatures. We like contact with other humans. Solitary confinement kills our souls. This is not just a matter of personal preference, this is who we are as a species. To tell someone “You don’t need a man” is true– I don’t need a man to complete me or to make me “valid” as a human being– but it ignores the basic instinct that I have as a hetereosexual woman to be in contact with a mate. I won’t pretend that I don’t have that drive.
And lastly, what bothers me about people’s well-intentioned admonitions is this: I don’t think married people understand what it means to be alone for years at a time. I don’t think people can fathom what it means to come home to an empty house day after day after day after day after day. Not just for a week or two while your spouse is away on a business trip, but day after day after day stretching out with no end in sight. In my world, the sweetest four words I can think of are “How was your day?” If I could just hear those four words every day– how rich I would be!
Last summer, my dance teacher asked me to dance with him at “Third Thursday”–a street party in our city that happens every summer. I was thrilled– not only would I get to dance on stage, but we would be promoting our new dance group and maybe inspiring people to take up salsa. There was a live band playing, and several of the people from our class danced in the streets while Alan and I danced on stage. Other women came up and danced on stage with him too, and then we all joined in a conga line and wove through the audience and around the street picking up willing spectators as we went. It was exhilarating– the band fed off of our energy and vice versa, the audience cheered for us and smiled, we had a blast and people were impressed by our skills. After the performance, people from our class stood around and talked with the members of the band and each other. Alan’s whole family was there– his wife and four of their kids, including their new baby. His aunt and uncle were visiting from Spain as well. We talked for a few minutes and then the kids started tugging on Alan’s hand and asking for food, so the whole family set off together looking for dinner. The other students from class found their significant others in the crowd and two by two, they wandered away. I found myself standing in the middle of the street alone as the next performers set up on stage. Should I walk around Third Thursday alone? I wondered. I went half a block up the street looking for a food vendor, and then felt awkward, so I turned around and went to my car. I drove home feeling a wave of loneliness building. What a blessing to have someone who you can turn to and say “How did I do?” or “Did you see that??” To hear someone say “You were awesome! You did great!” Such a simple exchange.
How many people notice those exchanges as they happen? I’m often reminded of the line from “Our Town” when Emily goes back to a normal morning from her childhood and watches her family interacting. She says to the Stage Manager: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?” He responds: “No. The saints and poets, maybe–they do some.” Well, I am definitely not a saint and I am sure I lack the patience to be a poet, but here again is one of the gifts of grief– to appreciate those small, every day exchanges and niceties that so many people miss or take for granted. To my married friends, I say this: You may not be able to help me find a partner in life, but please–at least–as a favor to me–be grateful. Realize life– and love–while you live it– every, every minute.
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