Keep Breathing

This past week, we lost a cousin-in-law to cancer. The battle was hard-fought for four years, but in the end, the cancer won. He was a couple of months younger than me. A strapping, handsome man, physically fit, athletic, competitive, and charming; he had a great legal mind and a greater sense of humor. Ziggy and I were both fond of him, and we always looked forward to seeing him at our extended family functions. He left behind a wife, sons and daughters-in-law, and little granddaughters. 

If the truth be told, I knew his wife long before I knew him, back when I was in grad school and she an undergrad who was in the pool of actors I used for scene work. I really did not know her well, and we were never terribly friendly even after we discovered we were quasi-related. Still, as I sat at the funeral, I could not help thinking I once stood in her place and have an unfortunate understanding of the road ahead of her. The things I could tell her.

There is no Handbook For The Recently Widowed and no one can tell you how to grieve, how long to grieve, how to manage your grief, or if there's even a work-around. (For the record, there really isn't one.) This is a solitary journey you get to take all by yourself. You might have people to support you here and there, but the reality is that when the lights go out and you’re lying in your bed alone, you are the only one who can come to grips with the empty space of the missing body. 

For whatever the cosmic reason, I've been in several discussions about widowhood lately. Some were with other widows, a couple with clergy types, and one rather painful one with a person wanting to know "what it's like." The only ones who really get it are other widows; those conversations are relatively easy and often enlightening. Conversations with clergy are just weird because they look like they're listening, but you kinda know they think you're some kind of nut job when you say you feel invisible. "Why don't you call so-and-so to volunteer?" they ask. How do you explain invisible hands have a tough time dialing a phone? And the person who was curious? I answered the questions as dispassionately as possible. What was Plan B for that one? But in that conversation, I said something I'd not said aloud before, and realized it was a breakthrough for me just saying it out loud: 

The minute you become a widow, you are no longer a care-giver for that someone else. 

I don't know why it was such a smack on the forehead, but it was. And I did not let on that it was a true Muppet News Flash.

Let me explain: if you've ever done long term care-giving....like for a husband, a family, a parent, a friend, or even a pet, the abrupt loss of that function can be crippling. You've not only lost a piece of yourself that can never come back, you've lost your job. Sure, you may have other jobs and functions, but a central piece of your total inner space has just be vacated and made into a vacuum. That recipient is gone and you are standing there empty-handed and not all that sure what to do about it. 

[Note to readers: This is why when people say seriously stupid stuff like, his suffering in over or he's in a better place now, a widow should feel free to smack 'em into next week, or at the very least, tell them to shut the hell up.]

We never talk about that part of the loss, but it's there: idle hands are guilty hands even when there is no reason to feel that way. "Keeping busy" is like frosting over a cracked and crumbling cake; it looks nice, but the problem has not really gone away, it's right beneath the surface. We know it, we recognize it, and we deal with it without anyone else knowing how broken we are inside. Even if you detested the dead person, a piece of you is still broken inside. That's part of the paradox; you feel like you missed something, you could've done more, or you did something wrong. Those feeling are real, they are there, and they are scary. And you get to deal with them. And you do.

At some point, you begin to make choices for you. You learn how to decide what you want to eat for dinner. You figure out what you want your house to look like, but this doesn't come fast. You keep waiting for the other opinion to chime in. You wake up looking for the dent in the bed that isn't there.  You may never stop startling in the night when there's no butt next to yours (I still do) but you keep breathing. 

I think Nora Ephron nailed it in SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE;

 I’m gonna get out of bed every morning … breathe in and out all day long. Then after a while, I won’t have to remind myself to get out of bed every morning and breathe in and out.

Come this June, I'll be living in WidowWorld for a decade. Yep. Ten years. A little more than one third of the time we were married. Half as long as I've had this day job. Once upon a time, a decade seemed like a whole lifetime. Now, it's too short, too quick. How can I have been without Ziggy for a whole decade? That's impossible. But it's not. It's very possible, very real, and very surreal. 

Sometimes I think my life is like one of the Chinese torture things: you stick your fingers in and the more you pull, the tighter it gets. Once you relax, well, your fingers  slide out. The moral of that story? Relax; being uptight is more painful than useful. If you're still upright and sucking air, you are alive. You may not feel alive all the time, you may feel lots of things you can't/won't/ don't wanna explain. But widowhood is only about the widow. It's all about us, how we manage, how we deal, how we sleep. No one gets to have an opinion except the widow herself. No one else gets a vote.

Anita D., Jill C., Susan C., Gail H., Cynthia G., Joan N., 

Marilyn S., Gladys S. Carol S., and Ruth M.:

you all know exactly what I'm talking about. Right?

I cannot tell these things to the new widow. She won't listen to me, and I wouldn't expect her to. She has to learn this stuff on her own. But I've stood where she is standing now. There will be moments of terror and moments of painful clarity. And guilt. Survivor's guilt. More than enough to go around. And around. And around again. Time doesn't really heal all wounds; if anything, all it does is insulate us from the intensity of that moment when we were capable of stopping our own breathing, but didn't. 

Widowhood sucks. That's just the way it is. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Do not sit around waiting for phones to ring or 

for people to remember one is still breathing. 

When it happens, be appreciative, but do not rely on the kindness of others. 

Most important, be kind to YOURSELF.