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.