myself with my mother at six
Some of my friends have suggested that I see a therapist. Recently, after a bout of arrhythmia I was evaluated at the Washing
ton Hospital Center and the psychiatrist there, who saw me for only ten minutes, also suggested I start taking an antidepressant SSRI, and gave me the name of a colleague who could see me.
Maybe, quite possibly, I do need to see someone. The tests indicate that my heart is basically sound, I was reassured. Yet I puzzled over the issue of her referral.
All my life, when I have been struggling with problems, significant problems, I have looked outside myself for answers. I have read books. I have talked with my friends. I have googled what could be googled before there was a google.
But this time, I don’t think this is what I need to do. I believe that I need to turn my search inward.
The truth is there cannot be anything much more devastating to me than to have lost my husband so suddenly, while we were both still quite in the fullness of our lives.
I see now how everything about me was so fastened to him and it was from our connection that I experienced meaning in my life.
We observed our friends, our children, the political process, the beauty of each day, even the despair that comes from defeat or tragedy, from the aperture of our relationship. There was a unity of perspective and experience.
But now I am one again. A lot of who I became in the relationship was unconsciously driven–what we ate, what we accumulated, the way we spent our money, the friends we made, the cultural pleasures we shared–and Lewis, more than I, was much more aware of his choosing and the need to simplify and separate the wheat from the chaff in our lives.
Now that he is gone, the choices are mine alone. The friends I make and keep. The books I will keep and the ones I will throw away. His belongings: where will they go, to whom will they be given? Do I keep the house or sell it? The boat?
Do I try to see more of the world or stay here near my sons, their families, the grandchildren? Some of both?
One thing is for certain. I am more conscious and grateful in my work with my clients. To have the opportunity to share in the depth, struggles and triumphs of their lives is a rare privilege. And without their understanding and support these weeks I cannot imagine how I could have kept going…
And my friends: how fortunate I am to have them. Lewis and I were so fortunate to have made such good friends. My awareness of their kindness, goodness and generosity grows with each passing day.
Meanwhile, everything in my life is re-examined. I am on trial, sitting in the witness stand, pondering in the jury box, standing in judicial robes pronouncing myself verdicts, and then watching from the seats in the court room and writing and reading my daily news, sometimes just a twitter. I am given more days to live but what am I to do with myself?
I remember once being moved so much by a sermon of a chaplain in Huntington, West Virginia. The chaplain worked with young students at the university and observed that when each student came there it was as if they had to sort through every value they had accepted in their childhood and examine each one and then decide for themselves what they wanted to keep and what they wanted to modify or discard. He compared it to a cloak one would wear and there would be symbols or badges covering the cloak and each student wearer decides which figures would continue to worn and kept in their emerging identity. One at a time.
I have to do something similar while I am at the same time losing what has been my comfort zone and I know all too well that I cannot be sure at all what number of days may lie ahead.
To turn inward at this time is challenging. It is easy to glide, to let time pass and pretend or imagine that little has really changed. Some part of me wants this bargain with reality. And as a therapist I know that I help create my own reality and that often in life the best answer to any dilemma is to do nothing. To let things be. So I weigh these paths and choices in my mind. A kind of to be or not to be sort of thing.
Often my loss breaks through and I find myself feeling as if I am broken and beyond repair. I ache in every possible way. Everything I touch, see, smell, or hear reminds me of what is gone, of him. I rebel, moan and lament. I mourn and mourn some more. I am in a blind and altered state and I have missed the fullness that is left, the love that surrounds me. The happiness of my grandchildren. The morning air. The delight and mess of my pets.
I readjust myself and just as quickly, almost, the experience is reversed and everything I touch, see, smell, or hear seems all the more significant, precious and irreplaceable.
My awareness softens and I can see more easily the whole of my life again.
One thing is for certain. I must simplify and redraw the lines of my identity so that I am ME and not what WE were.
And while I am doing that I must deal with the task of reducing the stuff that was his and ours determining what to keep, what to sell or give away, and what I can discard forever not just put in a box somewhere.
I am just getting started. I have a ways to go and a certain zest for the journey, tears and all.
Yesterday I talked with my office manager, Betty, about my decision. I told her I thought I would continue without professional advice or medication.
I asked her opinion. She says she thinks that I am OK and that she would be worried if I weren’t struggling like this. She has assured me that if she sees that I am really faltering she will let me know. She reassured me.
Her reassurance helped. So do the words of others. And so do writers and poets.
Take these poems for instance:
Poems by Rainer Maria Rilke
| Ich liebe meines Wesens Dunkelstunden
I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
the days of my life, already lived,
and held like a legend, and understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
to another life that’s wide and timeless.
So I am sometimes like a tree
rustling over a gravesite
and making real the dream
of the one its living roots
embrace:a dream once lost
among sorrows and songs. |
|
Dich wundert nicht des Sturmes Wucht
You are not surprised at the force of the storm—
you have seen it growing.
The trees flee.
Their flight sets the boulevards streaming.
And you know: he whom they flee is the one
you move toward. All your senses
sing him, as you stand at the window.
The weeks stood still in summer.
The trees’ blood rose. Now you feel
it wants to sink back into the source of everything.
You thought you could trust that power
when you plucked the fruit;
now it becomes a riddle again,
and you again a stranger.
Summer was like your house: you knew
where each thing stood.
Now you must go out into your heart
as onto a vast plain.
Now the immense loneliness begins.
The days go numb, the wind
sucks the world from your senses like withered
leaves.
Through the empty branches the sky remains.
It is what you have.
Be earth now, and evensong.
Be the ground lying under that sky.
Be modest now, like a thing
ripened until it is real,
so that he who began it all
can feel you when he reaches for you. |
Text below from Sharon’s Blog
It seems impossible, but we must take these steps. Slow steps. Halting steps. Uncertain and anguished steps. Lonely steps. Fearful steps.
Today is one.
When Lewis died my family and I had lots of very fast and unimaginable decisions to make. And we made them the best we could.
I go back over those first hours, the moment the deputy came to the door, the whirlwind and aching heartbreak of the emergency room, the urgent need to find answers to how and when the tragedy occured, and, finally, the desperation and despair and slow relinquishment of our disbelief. The reality.
How others sometimes do this alone, I do not know, because it would seem to me that without my family and friends I would have never been able to survive these days and nights. Even with their love and presence, there were certainly many nights and days it did not seem to me that I could or would survive another second.
Decisions were made, for right or wrong, better or worse: trying to discern what is fitting to do and trying to keep him in perspective with each choice.
I have painstakingly prepared for today and its finality.
I searched around the region for a fitting monument, one that would express his love of nature, his disdain for pompous display, his strength, and (most especially) the enduring reality of our mutual love of one another.
I realized that it would one day be my memorial as well and that some day hence our children would again wrestle with these realities, and I wanted to make it easier for them when that difficult day inevitably appears on their horizon again.
I hope I have succeeded in my quest.
The stone is large and unspectacular, but beautiful in form and function. The stonecutters have done their work and polished and then etched our names onto its western face. The setting is quiet and among some tall trees on a gentle downward slope toward the top of the hill at our local cemetary. I go by Mt. Rest every day as I drive the short distance between our home and office in town.
It is an old graveyard and some few of our friends are also memorialized there.
A friend who is a bagpiper has been rehearsing to play an old favorite gospel hymn, Just A Closer Walk With Thee, one that I remember hearing Lewis sing when we were younger and sharing our favorites.
A lot of well-known musicians have performed it:
Red Foley, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Louie Armstrong, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Johnnie Cash, Merle Haggard, The Oak Ridge Boys, Willie Nelson, Anne Murray, Randy Travis, and many more. Quite recently the Boston Community Choir sang it at Ted Kennedy’s memorial service and then a jazz ensemble played it plaintively at the funeral service for Walter Cronkite. That is where I heard it and decided to include it in Lewis’ graveside service.
A few friends and our family will be gathered there. A few of his clients who did not know about or were unable to make his memorial service have also been invited as guests should they decided to join us. Our “family” minister Sandy will say the biddings, prayers and final words. Another good friend, an Episcopalian and chaplain, will also be there to help us with our Anglican proprieties should we need it.
And then we will bury his remains under the trees, the sky, on this tiny outcropping in the midst of a marvelous and mysterious universe where we have had an opportunity to join and share our lives together.
And afterwards we will break bread together in the home Lewis and I shared.
I thank God for him. I have been blessed. We were blessed together.
And I loved him so.
May his remains rest in peace and may his joy be fulfilled in the spiritual realm that lies beyond our earthly comprehension.
From Sharon’s Blog
I am beginning to feel myself again, crazy as I am at times.
Sometimes it seems my brain is fragmenting itself, and I need to go around like a cleaning woman and gather up all the pieces and rearrange some of the parts.
Other times I am tracking and on top of my executive functions. But they can go so quickly.
On occasion I find myself crying with a patient. Moments with them can be so tender and revealing of life’s most intimate realities and it is those realities that are painful. Loss of those experiences, recognizing my limitations and how inaccessible some of the those experiences I have taken for granted have become is a sad reality.
Yesterday a couple were reveling in their newly regrown love affair with one another and there I was–tearing up. My clients are very understanding each time this happens. We go on a sideline for a while and come back. I am sure it is meaningful to them in some ways, but it is tough for me to have the boundary of self-revelation become so porous.
I think it reflects a positive quality about my nature. .
And most folks I see recognize this and appreciate it.
Now, back to my changes:
I can spend time with my grandchildren without being self-preoccupied.
I can go to the movie and enjoy the plot line without interruption (Wall-E, last Saturday night on the lawn at the town hall).
I can sit still and enjoy the conversation of others.
I can make it through a staff meeting without having to get up and leave.
I can enjoy being in the shower and not cry there.
Not bad. Maybe I’ll have a future that is fulfilling in some new and different ways.
Lewis is irreplaceable. No one could love me like he loved me or be so compatible with me. No one.
What an extraordinary blessing we had to have spent all these years together and to have raised our fine sons and have five precious years with granddaughters.
How blessed. Very blessed.
The Williams Brothers - Can’t Cry Hard Enough
I’m Gonna live my life
Like every day’s the last
Without a simple goodbye
It all goes by so fast.
And now that you’re gone
I can’t cry hard enough
No I can’t cry hard enough
For you to hear me now.
Gonna open my eyes
And see for the first time
I let go of you like
A child letting go of his kite,
There it goes up in the sky
There it goes beyond the clouds
For no reason why
I can’t cry hard enough
No, I can’t cry hard enough
For you to hear me now.
There it goes up in the sky
There it goes beyond the clouds
For no reason why
I can’t cry hard enough
No, I can’t cry hard enough
For you to hear me now.
Sharon posted the following entry to her blog on July 17, 2009.
Lewis is still gone.
Some large part of me still deflects this grim reality.
Last evening I had to get some medical procedures done and they were more than a little painful and invasive of my personal privacy. Any other time, now for forty years, he would have been at my side, holding my hand, and there to continue to calm me on the way back home, a true buffer and ballast in my distress.
I went home and sat on the edge of the bed and cried out for him. “Help me,” I sobbed.
I am so, so alone.
A neighbor man has tried to befriend me. He is more than a little helpful, a thoughtful, complex and intelligent man who is grieving still in buckets himself. His much beloved wife died of cancer after a four year long period of difficult treatment and final decline: hopes were built and then broken when the cancer re-emerged to ravage her lovely frame and presence.
He is much further along of course. Well, maybe not. One cannnot measure such things. But he seems to be gaining some security of direction in his life and his has been over many of the agonies that I am enduring. And more.
I need his comfort and the comfort of others, but I am so afraid and I feel embarrassed about the extent of my needfulness. Because he is a man and had been a virtual stranger, I am finding it particularly difficult to share and be open with him. Last week at church another man whom I have known now for about twenty years came up to me and started speaking in extraordinary compassion and empathy to me. He told me about his own experience, not so long ago, when he had lost his wife of many, many years. Somehow, because I had known him longer, it was a little easier to share some of my scary thoughts with him.
He is quite happily married again, and I have enjoyed moments with him and his new wife over a number of occasions these last couple of years, including some time together at a parish retreat. His wife is warm and bubbly, but at the same time very calm. He is more quiet, and in all these years of knowing him, I could not have imagined just how real and present he could be until he spoke with me Sunday morning. I felt his compassion so deeply. And he sought me out.
In all these years of being married to Lewis, I have not often talked intimately with other men, except for client contacts and these are unique because of the discipline of my work.
But now, here are these men and they are truly present in a way only a man can be there for a woman. I can feel their strength, their kindness, their willingness and commitment to help me sort through my distress and this immense upheaval in my life.
I feel something quite similar when I speak with my sons. They do not rush our phone calls. They listen for me and give me time to breathe. Time for silence and reflection. And willingness to listen to my tears and anguish.
I understand now why the Hebrews (and also the Punjabs, Tibetans, and Mongolians) had the practice of expecting the brother of a deceased husband to care for his widow. I understand these scriptural references to widows now as I could never understand them before…
The psalmist says that God is a defender of widows in Psalm 68 (also see Deuteronomy 10:18) and that God’s compassion goes out to them because of their difficult situation. Jesus was so compassionate for a widow that he raised her son from his bier and delivered him to his mother again alive. According to the New Testament, Peter raised Dorcas from the dead because of the broken-heartedness of her widowed sisters in Joppa.
Lewis has been my rock for forty-three years. How can I live without him?
