grief

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Missing: One Green Nissan — and Driver.

2004-nissan-altima-virginia_beach-va-4595858251557422887-2Glancing out the kitchen window this morning as I made my tea, it struck me yet again — that ‘Greenie’ was gone. Yes, really and unequivocally gone – just like the man who drove it. That well-used green Nissan racked up more than 250,000 miles on its trek to clients and office each week. But seeing the suddenly inert car in my driveway, appearing like a ghostly mirage without its driver, would take my breath away. When one of my son-in-laws found someone who needed interim wheels, the little car seemed the perfect answer. It quietly, unceremoniously made its exit, heading for a new owner and routes unknown.

How the heck then, can I still be stupefyingly surprised, in moments like this morning, that my husband’s trusty green chariot is AWOL?

I can still envision Greenie pulling into the cul de sac in front of our house, a comfortable reminder that the man I loved was home. I miss seeing that car slowly pull out of the driveway, idling in front of the house until its owner and I waved goodbye, an ‘us’ tradition. I miss seeing that car roll back in at night, allowing me to breathe easier knowing my man was safely home again. That car was an extension of him in so many ways. Continue reading →

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“You Are You. Now isn’t that pleasant.”

winding_road

Dr. Seuss always nails it.

You are YOU — just a wee bit different than you were ‘before’.  The first time you check  the “widow” status on a form, have to change your emergency contact or start to say ‘honey, I’m home’ and realized no one is there, you are a different you. And it sucks. But it’s life now. Whether it happened with no warning or after months of dread, the title ‘widow’ is as foreign as if you shucked your identity for the Witness Protection Program. You feel  like you woke up on another planet — without rocket re-entry to your old life. This is it.

My husband is gone almost 10 months. I should be used to the title but ‘widow’ still doesn’t compute. To totally absorb it, means I need to accept the basic fact that my husband died and is never coming back. Before you think I’ve lost it entirely, of course I know he’s gone. I know he’s not just on a business trip; he’s not on a road trip. I get it.  I’m the one who found him that fateful night.

Cancer perched on the sidelines of every facet of our lives for years. Often sneaky, even silent, sometimes we ‘almost’ forgot it was even there. There were more emergent battles to fight. Debilitating treatment side-effects that dogged him constantly that we both knew would never leave. But sometimes even the most upsetting can be business as usual when you’re immersed in the day to day and you almost forget the gorilla waiting to pounce.  Continue reading →

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Flying Blind

Sixty-and-Me_How-to-Deal-with-Grief-740x416The night that changed everything — is still with me. No matter how I wish I could erase it, it’s part of me now. Less immediate, less traumatically intense these days; sometimes even in hiding but never too far away. As much as I want to securely seal every terrible moment behind bulletproof doors, I somehow also call them out.

Why? It certainly seems a bit masochistic not to work harder to erase what’s so devastating, right? Maybe I do it for the same reason we peel back a bandaid from a wound, telling ourselves we’ll just take a peek to see how it’s progressing. Right. We know that each time we peel it, pick at it, irritate it, it hurts all over again until a proper scar is permanent evidence of what happened.

Do I think that if I lose the throbbing pain of that night that I’d actually lose the vibrancy, the essence of the man himself? That I will not pay proper loving tribute to the history, the journey, or the ending of it all? Or could I really imagine that if the pictures in my head of his very last earthly night leave me —that he will too? That certainly sounds more than a little crazy, and I’m thinking a bit bizarre because even I know he gone. Continue reading →

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Celebrating the Knight who said — ‘pie’

FullSizeRenderThey say a knight in shining armor is a man who never had his metal tested. I met a few of them; I even dated them. You know, the dudes whose metal suit was actually tin foil. That’s why I almost missed the knight whose armor had as many dings and tarnishes as his car bumper. He was the real deal. He fought his share of dragons, especially the most fearsome of all. And when you constantly battle the beast, even the most deepest of loves have emotional jousts. But then again, as I stood all those years beside my husband, he had way more than his ‘metal’ tested. His spirit, self-confidence, courage and self-esteem were tried way beyond what most people can tolerate. And each time, he got back on that horse (or green Nissan) to battle another day.

Today is this knight’s birthday.

He loved everything about medieval knights. He had a little room full of toy collectible Knights of Agincourt who hung around castles he painstakingly crafted. This was a guy who took supreme pleasure in sharing his love of those men in armor with our grandsons at Medieval Times for their 5th birthdays. I could never decide who loved the pageantry more – him or them. The last time we were there, we joked that we had to rest up before we took one the smallest of the teenies but that will never happen. Grandpa knight died barely 2 months later. Continue reading →

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I’ll Get You, My Pretty.

Hearts will never be practical until they can be made unbreakable.

The Wizard of Oz

yellow-brick-road

Lions, tigers or bears, sooner or later, grief touches everyone. And when it does, nothing looks or feels the same, not even your simple nightly routine. You turn off the lights, lock the doors and head upstairs. Simple. Been there, done that more nights than I can count. It’s repeated nightly in every household around the globe. Yet these days, even simple routines — suck. Every nuance screams I’m in a different world now – a world of one. My life made a major detour to the flip side of Oz.

It’s hard not to remember, as I climb the stairs, not only how I found my husband lying there just months ago, but how this home once rang with voices. The only thing ringing now are my ears from the buzzing lack of sound. Like the train tracks I had to draw when I was learning perspective, endless nights just like this, stretch ahead of me. But, when you think about it, don’t most things come down to that – perspective. Continue reading →

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Four Funerals and a Wedding

Happy couple in their new home concept

Nope, not the Hugh Grant comedy.  Jill Smolowe’s book, Four Funerals and a Wedding, is pretty much anything but comedic. Her book chronicles not only her personal grief journey but how she coped and grew along the way. In one chapter she mentions how her therapist suggested that her grief began on the first day of her husband’s diagnosis. That struck me as pretty profound.  Given that my husband’s diagnosis was levied 3 months before we were even married, I realized it would not be at all surprising that unconscious grief followed us through those years. Even as we lived and loved as fully as we possibly could, we grieved by inches.

How do you measure the knowledge, however much you stash it in the closet or ‘put on a happy face’, that many dreams just won’t come true? No, my mind never went in the direction of Charlie Brown’s Sally who said “She didn’t want to live and threw herself in front of a Zamboni”. It was just that gray leaden feeling, a sense that no matter what your plans, there would always be an expiration date that coexisted with the daily business of living. Where cancer lives, everything becomes more complicated and layered. All of life takes on a different hue. Continue reading →

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good grief

hand held

What the heck ever made Charlie Brown think those two words actually made sense together? I can’t imagine what could be remotely ‘good’ about anything that rips your heart apart.

Grief shreds complacency, can change your life in an instant and is one of the only stories that begin – at the end.

No matter how devastated you might be, there’s no escape key, no easy out. Your story ending starts a brand new chapter, one you never wanted to write. Yet, if you’re a write brain widow — you keep writing.

Maybe it’s because you’re crazy enough to think that words will somehow help you find an answer to the unthinkable. Or maybe, that thinking is as wacky as the words — Good Grief. But just in case I’m not alone trying to find the right words to survive this ‘dark and stormy night’, you can join me in my word journey  – beginning at the end.