Lessons from grief

 

I was cleaning my car today, and looking for a second key. I had been leasing two cars, which was fine until my wife passed away, and I was trying to return one to the dealer.

Anyway, I couldn’t find Renie’s keys hanging on any of the hooks, and decided to look in her bag, which has been on a peg near the front door since I brought it home from the hospital, a week before she died.

I never touched it. The same way I didn’t touch most of the other things in the house, because every picture on the wall and every jar she left on the counter belongs there.

Some of my friends who have lost a husband or wife after a long marriage tell me that is a normal reaction. It’s good to know - I guess that if enough people act crazy, it means it has become normal.

Anyway, after a month or so, I’m trying to expand my world a little bit. I get out to stores, and shop alone of course, but I am talking to some friends and my children have been wonderful and caring, which makes me pretty lucky.

Still, when I hung her purse back on the peg - and yes, the extra key was right there - I said “thank you, darling,” and started to cry.

Which gets me to the subject of grief. I’ve been getting a master class in grief, especially the part where people tell you how much they sympathize and then confess that they just don’t know what to say

Which isn’t their fault. Somehow, the great, ever-changing and vast English language - and probably German and Dutch and Russian and Chinese too - don’t have the words.

I was an English major in college,  and know how language changes over time, as new people and new skills and new needs come up. There weren’t too many words to describe roads in the 1700’s when most roads were dirt paths.

Of course, life and death have been with us forever, but death is something we usually spend our whole lives avoiding. We mention it, of course - Ecclesiastes told us there is a time to live and a time to die - and it was written sometime between 200 and 450 years before the birth of Christ.

Avoiding the topic has left us without the language to really deal with grief.

Even at funerals, we find it hard to give comfort. And I have been to a lot of funerals, some of which I covered as a reporter. The people left behind - the spouses, the children, the friends - take comfort from each other, and hug or sometimes joke. And, they all share a quiet grief. Or, at times, simply cry.

So, what’s the point here? Do I have anything useful to say?

Definitely yes. You learn things in life, and you learn things bitterly from loss. Here’s what I have learned about grief.

There are levels of feeling when it comes to loss. And it seems your sorrow depends, almost precisely, on just how much you loved the person you have lost.

It seems simple to say, but we often forget it. The more you loved someone, the more you will go from sadness to grief to despair,  and you can’t control it.

It’s not a contest. There’s no reward for suffering more, and it doesn’t prove how much you loved someone. No one is measuring feelings of loss.

There is no good part to this, of course, but there is hope. It’s the realization that while it is normal to grieve, the simple act of sorrow is really complicated. Part sadness for what you have lost, and sadness for the things you never got to do. Sadness for being alone and sadness for not being able to share things any more.

But you can never be sad for what you had. Loving someone is a gift. Loving them over decades, changing with them as years go by, even arguing over silly little things have given you some wonderful memories.

And as time passes, other things should start filling your life. Simple things like going to the supermarket, or complicated things that involve doing favors for other people.

Some day, the memories that make you cry today will make you smile. The warmth they bring will never cool down. The stories you have, and the ones that will suddenly pop into your head, will be there to tell over and over, and a lot of people will never get tired of hearing them.

I know Renie would not want me to be eternally sad, just as I would not want to be the cause for her sadness if I had gone before she did.

Maybe this blog is for me, too. When I write something the words that come out on the computer obviously come from the back of my head, and maybe it is time for me to take some of the good advice I pass on to others.

At least I got to turn in one of my rental cars. Something accomplished, and that is a good thing.

The car I am now driving, the other rental, is a bigger one, a Toyota Rav 4. We used to take long trips in it, and Renie often slept next to me while I drove. I could reach over and touch her hand, or just talk to her even though she didn’t answer.

And, I can still do that. Trust me, it helps.

No Words

 

Lots of things have been going through my mind since my wife died a month ago.

As you might guess, those thoughts are jumbled. Really jumbled.

Many of them are sad, with flashes of pain and loss and hopelessness. Yes, I cry a lot.

But, there are flashes of great joy. Happy memories and an appreciation of what Renie and I shared for almost 50 years - an appreciation that I didn’t fully have while she was here with me.

I’ve also been talking to myself. Or to her. Or to the world in general, although no one is in the room with me.

I understand that this is normal. Some of my friends say it will get better in a year or two. A few speak from their own sad experiences, a few more because they have read about grief for some reason or another.

The joy and the curse of being smart - and I think I am - is that nothing is ever simple. Everything is complicated, and by nature and because of my career as a reporter, I have this compulsion to see two or three or four sides to everything.

Now I know Renie loved me as much as I loved her, and she wouldn’t want me to be so unhappy, although she would understand it. If she were here, she would give me an understanding hug.

And she would ask me a question. “Why do you keep saying ‘we don’t have the words over and over again?’.”

That’s a phrase I go back to in my monologues, a realization that our our society seems to have the right words for almost everything. A banker can describe a loan in a dozen different ways, a sports announcer can talk endlessly about a single play. Every Sunday, critics write endless columns about books and plays, recipes and government spending.

But when it comes to the biggest and most dramatic event in most people’s lives, what we have are a lot of sweet sayings on sympathy cards, or talk about God’s unknowable plans. Doctors can be clinical, friends can be supportive, and the burial is always the same.

How can I say that? Well, I’ve probably covered more than a dozen funeral services for my paper, and gone to another dozen or two because of deaths in the families of my friends, or Renie’s friends.

And it is final. The door is closed. This part of your life is over.

No one ever said how hard that is to accept. It is.

And yet, life goes on. I get up every morning, and when I don’t want to get out of bed, Chili and Leo - my two 65-pound Standard Poodles - help me do it. They push me, and I thank them.

Good memories come, too. Pictures that we saved on line, videos that bring back the past. The near past, the times long ago. It gives new meaning to one of the Harry Potter books, where he found a mirror that brought back images of his dead parents. I know part of me wants to just look at those pictures, forever.

But, Renie would’t like it. She would probably encourage me to work through this terrible time. Maybe even tell me to write about it.

So, consider this blog a kind of therapy, for me as a writer and you as a reader.

Go out and make some good memories - more than you have now - and you will have something really valuable. I have some flashes of very good times with my family, and I wish I had a lot more.

All my memories of the plane crashes and hurricanes, snow storms and late election nights, fatal fires and riots that I covered are in a different part of my brain.

Those things paid the bills for us. Going down to Washington to cover protests, or waiting at an airport for the President to land was fun, in a way, but I would happily trade a lot of those things for more memories of holding hands in front of a fire in a bed and breakfast in Pennsylvania or walking along the beach in Orient collecting beach glass.

And I will have those memories forever.

I wish I had better words. But, our society had done its very best for centuries to deny death, or avoid death, or put it in a little box so you don’t have to think about it too much. Not until it is time.

Now, it is a fact that language evolves. It is a living thing. It changes. I learned that when I was an English major in college. 

The corollary is that what we don’t talk about doesn’t grow much or change much. In short, you become like me - trying to say something and not having the right words.

Go make memories. They’re better than words anyway.