Healing

At some unknown point in the recent past, I started to heal. It was a subtle thing at first. A day when I didn't cry too much or when I managed to not think about grief for whole hours at a time.

In January though, life started to come together for me. I took the first week of the year off, sort of my way to use the new year as a new start. One thing I did was go to a chiropractor for the first time ever. She had been at a company health fair the previous month and talked about how chiropractic could help migraines. At that point I was having three or four migraines a month and I thought, what the heck, maybe it will work. For the first time in along time, I was willing to try to feel better. As it turns out, she helped the migraines; she also helped the ankle swelling, the hip pain, and the insomnia and the digestive problems. And my energy level was up and my depression was milder. As I started to physically feel better, suddenly rebuilding my life started to seem possible.

Next step was starting this blog. There were things I needed to express that were hard to just say to someone in person. Holding things inside wasn't helping and when things did come out, they came out in an out-of control cranky, whiny way that I hated. So I decided to write. It helped. I shared the blog address with people I knew and we had some good talks about things I wrote. That helped even more.

I started making more changes to the house. I put in a new door and a new kitchen counter. Well I paid someone to do that. I painted the dining room and filled it with antiques I inherited from my aunt. I hung more pictures of my art on the walls. I worked hard to clean out some parts of the house. It's not done by any means, but it's better. With each change I felt a little lighter and a little closer to building a new life. I decided I needed to be more social and started to go to a photography club and invited friends to dinner. I invited my sister and mom to come visit – I cleaned the house frantically in anticipation.

Then in sorting through some books I came across something I had read earlier but which didn't resonate with me at the time. I started the Artist's Way program (Thank you, Julia Cameron) and started writing morning pages and going on artists dates. I started making fractals again. I worked some on creative writing.

July was my best month in at least five years. I adopted a rescue chihuahua, my family came to visit, I took another vacation, I wrote to my Alma Mater and showed them my fractal art and ended up with getting to have a permanent display of my fractal art in the Math department. I got a promotion and a pay raise. I started painting again. My life is starting to move in positive directions.

About the same time Karl died ,a friend split-up with his wife. We shared our grief and frustrations for two years. He too had a good July, his life is finally moving on as well. I'm happy for him.

In the darkest days, it doesn't seem possible that life will ever be good again. There is that voice telling you there is no point - there can be no future. When you are in that place, hang onto this thought – that voice is lying. There is a future out there, you just have to hang in there to get to it.

To all who are reading this, take care.

Feeling Guilty

You have no choice but to remake your life when your partner dies. You can't keep the same old life; it just isn't possible no matter how much you loved that person or that life.

So you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what you want now and how to go about getting it. For months, maybe even years, you may not have a clue as to what you really want your new life to be. Part of what holds you back is guilt. You feel guilty for wanting something you didn't have when you and your partner were together. It feels like maybe you didn't love him enough because you want something new. And so you feel guilty for wanting to build that new life that you have no choice but to build.

When you live with another person, you make compromises. Decisions are what we want, not just what I want. Some of those decisions will be revisited in creating a new life. Many of those compromises no longer serve a purpose, yet it's hard to do the things you wanted, but he didn't. It's hard to admit there are things you want that you didn't have before. It's hard to realize that there are new possibilities that were out of the question before. Not because you didn't want them, but because we didn't want them. Of course your partner made similar compromises for you, but logic doesn't come into emotional blackmail - especially when the person doing the blackmailing is yourself. (Hey who knows your weak spots better than you do?)

It's taken two years, but now I know that Karl wouldn't want me to keep making compromises that are no longer relevant. He would want me to be happy and reach for a new life because he loved me. It's OK to want something new or to bring up dreams that were left behind when we got together. It doesn't lessen the love we had or mean we didn't have a great life together. It just means it's time to go on something else.

Still not sure what form my life will take, but I'm starting to take the steps now. And if, in three or four years, I look back and realize I'm wondrously happy, it won't mean I was unhappy when we were together. You can love more than one person or more than one life. There are times when the right thing right now wasn't the right thing 10 or 20 years ago. And that's OK. No need to feel guilty.

A Reason to Keep on Living

Before Karl died I thought that “broken heart” was just a phrase. I had no idea that it would one day describe exactly how I felt. It really did physically feel as if my heart had cracked into two and wouldn't keep beating. But it did and I didn't really know what to do about that. You read about how couples who have been together a long time often don't survive each other by very long and now I understand that as well. Karl was central to my life and at first I didn't feel as if there was a reason to go on living with him no longer in the world. I mean, what was the point anyway? The ones who die soon after those they love are often those who never find an answer to “What's the point?” At least it seems that way to me.

Two things kept me going, my dog Rusty and my job. Rusty bless his greedy little heart kept wanting to be fed and wanting to go out and wanting to be with me as I cried. I wanted to stay in bed and never get up again, but he insisted. At length, some days. He was a rescue dog and I couldn't just die and leave him homeless again. I had given him a forever home, damn it, and I was going to keep my part of the bargain as he had kept his. He had more than kept his part of the bargain (which was to keep us company and make us laugh). Rusty was (and still is) a genuine hero dog in my eyes. One night when I was asleep, Karl fell and couldn't get back up. With emphysema, he didn't have the breathe to yell loud enough that I could hear him, so Rusty came upstairs and banged on the bedroom door until I woke up and then he led me to Karl. I couldn't send a dog like that back to the SPCA if his owners were gone, so I had to keep going.

And work needed me. We were shorthanded in the group I worked in and my bereavement leave had put us further behind. So I had to get up everyday and go in and try to work (I worked much more slowly than usual and I cried every day at work, but I went in). I'm not sure what would have happened if I had lost my job those first two years, might have been the last straw that pushed me over the edge. But I didn't and so I avoided the edge until I had healed enough to start thinking about building a new life.

And now I'm rebuilding. Still not sure what direction to go in, still not sure what my new life will contain but now I'm sure I will rebuild. That's progress of sort.

Death At A Funeral

You go through the full gamut of emotions when someone close to you dies. I knew Karl was dying, so I expected the sadness and the pain and the anger. What I didn't expect was the funny side of it all. Sometimes when things are so bad they can't get any worse, all that's left to do is to laugh.

Funerals bring out the dysfunctional in families. Whatever things annoy you the most about your family or his family will be quadruply annoying during the lead up to the funeral.

I still laugh about how I had to get my sister (who had sensibly gotten a hotel room with my mom) to spend the night with me as the guard sister to keep Karl's daughter (who grieved by getting wasted drunk and crying all over people as well as slobbering on them) out of my bedroom at 2 am. It worked too!

Then there was Karl's ex-wife (the one he divorced in 1969) who was appalled, simply appalled, that he didn't leave the house to her. Hello, divorced for almost 40 years, living with me for 26 (far longer than they were married) and living in another state. In what reality would he have left her the house? He didn't even like her.

Then there was Karl's older brother. Wink was in the hospital when Karl died. In fact Karl had gone out to Arizona to see him and died in his house. Wink's wife didn't tell him Karl died. OK she was afraid he wasn't going to live through the news while he was in the hospital. But she didn't tell him even after he got home. In fact no one in the family thinks he has been told yet (they are all kind of afraid to ask). Certainly I've not heard a word of condolence from him. On the other hand he has to wonder why he hasn't heard from Karl in two years.

I told the younger brother about Karl's death. He was playing golf when I called on his cell. He finished the round before going home.

Then there was Karl's friend from FL who came up for the funeral and told this horribly inappropriate story about him and Karl being drunk and hitting on the girls at Hooters. And Karl's son talking about how Karl made him into the man he was today and how much he loved him. Yeah right, Karl couldn't even get him to return his phone calls most of the time.

Then there was the former co-worker who emailed me after hearing the news to proposition me. Really, trust me, when the love of your life has died less than a week ago, you do not want someone to ask you out. Just another dating tip for the socially inept.

About a month after the funeral, my friend Lory invited me to dinner and to watch a movie after. She said, “It sounds weird, but you have to see Death at Funeral.” She knows me well. It was indeed the perfect funny movie for my mood. Ah yes, funerals can sure put the fun in dysfunctional.

Writing as therapy

One thing I have found most helpful about writing this blog is that I can say all those things I've kept inside because people don't want to really discuss grief in detail.

As a result, I now feel better than I've felt in years. Some of the weight of all this stress is gone because I've been able to express it. Oh it's not perfect and I still feel the grief, but I can see progress and can start to visualize rebuilding my life.

If you are reading this and seem stuck in your grief (not immediately after the grief, we need to take the time to actually feel the feelings), I recommend you take the time to write down what you are going through and have gone through as a way to clarify your feelings and release them. You don't have to share publicly as I am with the blog; you don't have to show anyone at all. But try writing it out and see if it helps. And let me know if it did.

Therapy

I've been dealing with depression and bi-polar disease for 40 years. When Karl died I knew I needed help to get through this, so I immediately made an appointment to get back on Depression drugs. I thought that with my history and the grief complications that the doctor would surely send me to therapy, but he didn't and I was in too upset a state to insist. It was the first of several tries at therapy where I felt discounted and not listened to because I was in grief and we know all about that.

I tried with him for 3 months, the drugs weren't helping the way they had in previous bouts of depression and the doctor gave me something new rather than listening to me when I told him what had worked before. Then he wanted blood to check my liver function and that was the last straw. I don't do needles and I would never have consented to take a drug that required blood tests. I refused the blood test, left and never came back. But of course I still needed help. After six or seven more months of grief and depression I got up the courage to try again. No drugs this time, right to therapy. Three sessions later when we were still taking history and hadn't talked a bit about what was currently my problem, I quit that therapy too. I was starting to feel invisible. I went for four or five more months just barely getting by. I tried again, different doctor, different drugs, different therapist. She told me that I was a loser who would never be happy unless I had a complete personality change. She hadn't even talked to me and heard any of what I had to say and she thought I was a loser. It's no surprise that I never went back.

I had never had this kind of luck with therapy before. But as a person dealing with grief, I never once, through 4 different caregivers, felt that any one of them actually heard what I wanted to say or let me show them what aspect of grief I was having difficulty dealing with. I had become invisible an interchangeable part with all other people suffering grief.

Well, grief is not like that. People cope differently, people have different problems that most concern them. And most especially people who seek therapy to deal with grief need to feel they are being listened to. When I went to the therapists for depression treatment in the past, I was listened to and they paid attention to what issues I was having and how to deal with it. I was a person. Going to therapy with grief, I was no longer an individual, I was suffering from grief and steps a, b, c would fix that. One size fits all therapy isn't just wrong; it's harmful to the grieving person.

He was my extrovert

Talking to someone at work today, I noted that Karl had been my extrovert. And as an introvert it was hard for me to got out and mingle - especially with strangers. It's funny, I hadn't ever really noticed how much Karl helped me to be sociable and how he pushed me to move out of my comfort zone. It's hard to take over that function on my own.

I recently attended a meeting of a digital photography club and it was all I could do to force myself to get in my car and go even though I had been planning to go for a couple of months. Of course, I had to think about it for two months before getting in the car was even a possibility. It will be good for me to start getting out and do social activities; I can't sit home and cry forever. But taking that first step was harder than I thought it would be.

But it got me to thinking about the nature of relationships. We need to have people in our lives who are brave when we are fearful or who are responsible when we are carefree or who are funny when we are too serious. The most successful relationships I have ever seen are those where each partner brings different strengths to the partnership. Of course when that relationship is broken through death, we suddenly realize how much that person was doing that we found difficult.

So even though it's hard and even though I didn't want to do it, gradually I've come to realize that the grief process is also a growth process. You have to tackle those weak parts of yourself that you were able to pass off to the other person before. I'm a stronger, more compassionate person for having been in this place.

Sorting Through the Pictures

The one thing that helped the most the first week was going through the pictures for the memorial. Marty and I laughed and cried and told silly stories as we sorted through photos neither of us had looked at in years. It was a way to remember the good of my life with Karl in the face of the overwhelming pain I felt at his death. It was the only part of that first week that I can remember with any fondness.

There was the picture of Karl holding our dog Kiki the day his daughter gave her to him for Christmas. We loved that dog and she shared our lives for almost 17 years. He took her everywhere but especially to the park where he would let her run and run and run.

And there were pictures of Karl in uniform and with his grandkids reading to them when they were small and pictures at the lake and picture of me at horse shows that he took and him in his recliner and in his hammock in the backyard – which reminded me of the day one spring when he lay in the hammock watching the leaves come out on the trees.

And pictures of him building his experimental airplane. I remember well how much he enjoyed that and how when they first put it together, they found the wings somehow had ended up two different lengths. Pictures with his Cessna and his scuba gear (Oh my, remember the time my nephew almost drowned in the Marty's pool with that scuba gear?) Not many picture of him as a young boy, but then again, he was born in 1936, people didn't take as many pictures then.

Oh and look here's that newspaper clipping of him and our old neighbor, Teresa, at the opening of the trail at the Great Dismal Swamp. He and Teresa became such good friends after her husband died; he even cut a gate in the side fence between our two yards, so she could come over more easily. I remember, too, how hurt he was when she died unexpectedly. And I remember sitting with him at his sister's funeral.

Oh and here is his 60th birthday party, the one with the dancing girl. And remember this cake our friend June made. It had a little airplane on a runway and tiny candles as the runway lights, but when we lit the candles, they melted the wings on little plastic airplane.

And picture of his ex-mother-in-law who used to come visit us when she was still alive. Even though her daughter lived just four doors down, she would stay with us because she liked Karl better.

It's really a modern ritual this sorting through the photos. It's an emotionally healthy activity. It takes you back through the deceased's life. It helps you remember why you were in relationship to this person all along. And why that relationship was worth it even though it ended in grief.

Other things about the modern grieving process are not so healthy. In our busy, push-push world, we don't think people should take time out to grieve. Take a week off, be sad for another week and then never mention it again. Or of course there are those who seem to think it is a commercial opportunity – sell the grieving family on a memorial website, a fancy coffin, a bigger and better marble stone, a decal for your car window, etc. The costs of funerals rivals the (also way overblown) cost of a wedding - only you don't even get happy memories out of it.

The older rituals do provide some comfort or at least closure. Karl wanted a viewing, so we had one. And yes it was comforting to have the huge number of people who loved him or me to show up to remember him and comfort his family.

The funeral itself gave me a chance to publicly speak about my feelings for Karl and describe what a wonderful person he was. It was difficult to speak at the funeral but I'm glad I did.

The most moving part of the process was Karl's interment at Arlington National Cemetery. The formal ceremony was beautiful, the day was beautiful and Arlington is such a peaceful place. Karl had wanted very much to be buried there, I'm glad we were able to make it happen.

I miss him still; I will always miss him. But at least going through the pictures helped bring back the vital, interesting person he was after several years of serious illness. He hated being diminished; I'm glad the ritual of the photos helped restore the old Karl as foremost in my memories.

The Look

If you've suffered a serious grief, chances are you seen the Look. You know the “Oh please, hasn't she gotten over this” look or maybe the “Don't annoy me with your pathetic emotions” look or even the “How inappropriate of you to be talking about such an uncomfortable subject” look.

We all know the Look. It's the one that trivializes your grief and makes you feel less than nothing for having sad feelings. It's the one that says don't bother me; I can't be bothered with your pathetic emotions; I'm too important for you to bother with this.

The trouble with the look is that it makes the person who is grieving feel worse for not being Little Miss Happy Sunshine. It tells you clearly that the other person doesn't care about you and thinks he or she is much more important than you are.

Oddly, I never get the Look from strangers when I happen to mention my beloved who died or my grief or anything to do with mourning. No, the Look comes from relatives and friends and co-workers. It wounds so deeply precisely because it comes from the very people you expected to support you in your grief.

Sometimes, it's not even a look but a sudden silence when you say something or a drastic change of topic. At any rate the common theme is that it says, “Your grief is unimportant, I don't want you to talk about it.”

There is nothing guaranteed to make me angrier than the Look. All those people who don't want me to talk about the event that most affected my life or the 26 years of life that preceded it are going to be disappointed in me, because I will talk about this and the Look will make me more determined to tell you about it. I don't give into the Look and shut up like a nice girl. So try to have a little compassion for those of us suffering grief and don't make it worse by making us feel we can't talk about the most significant event in our lives because it's too sad for someone who only has to spend five minutes with it. I have to spend a lifetime with it, so forgive me for not feeling very willing to accommodate your lack of sensitivity.

Not all of us who are grieving want to talk about it, I can respect either choice. But when someone does want to talk, don't cut them off with the Look. Honor their grief and treat them like a person worth listening to.

Cranky, Whiny, Bitch Girl

One of the the things about the grief process is that you lose yourself for awhile. Sometimes you turn into this person you don't even like very much or who seems like a stranger.

Me, I turned into cranky, whiny, bitch girl. I was very easily upset, I felt a little like I was was coming across as poor little me (well to be honest, I felt a lot like poor little me), and I got angry so much more easily than at any other time in my life. I did things I wouldn't normally do; I complained and cried and sighed and screamed and cried some more. I'm an introvert and usually I'm pretty adept at keeping my emotions to myself, but cranky, whiny, bitch girl sure didn't keep any of her emotions to herself and none of her emotions were pretty. Sometimes I was amazed that anyone I knew was still talking to me.

For a year and half at least, I was not fun to be around. Even at work I had trouble staying professional. It didn't help that the workplace made some policy changes that I strongly disagreed with and in cranky, whiny, bitch girl mode, I had no trouble at all letting them know. Well, maybe I should have kept my mouth shut a couple of times, but they hit every one of my psychological triggers. And I was in no mood to play nice. I have to thank my coworkers for understanding that I wasn't myself and giving me the benefit of the doubt. I didn't want to be that awful person, I just couldn't stop myself.

Two years later, I still have cranky, whiny, bitch girl moments although they are getting farther apart and now mostly hit when I'm really, really tired. I'm glad to see her leaving. I didn't like being unable to control my emotions and I don't care for the feelings that I felt. I knew it was all part of the grief process, but still...cranky, whiny, bitch girl? Really, did I have to go there?

I grew up being the good girl, the nice girl, the one who followed the rules. I had no idea that side of me even existed. Well, if there was any positive to this at all, at least I realized how easily I could be pushed into being angry and out of control and that it was best to express emotions before they got to that point. I've suppressed my emotions (except around the very few people I trust) for so long, that I'm not sure I can do that long term, but at least I'm going to try. 'Cause I sure don't ever want to descend into cranky, whiny, bitch girl again.

How do you go on after you lose the one you love?

I'm not sure exactly how to go on even now, two years after Karl died, but I am sure that other people are going though the same thing and need suppport and words from someone who has walked in their shoes. So I'm starting this blog to talk about grief and the process of rebuilding your life when it all falls apart. Maybe what I've gone through and how I deal with it can help someone else. Maybe someone else can help me. Maybe just putting it down in writing will help clarify my way. And maybe I'd better publish this first post now since the dog wants out. Be back later.