Widow

The Weight of Grief by Celeste Roberge

8-4-18

I am living with “fully alive, heart-centered, resignation” toward widowhood. These are the words my friend, Fran, says to me. As she speaks, I remember several months ago not wanting to identify myself as a widow, wanting desperately to distance myself from the reality of this word, this state of being. But that is exactly what I am now, or at least part of what I am, and her words remind me that I am in the process of resigning myself to a fully alive, heart-centered widowhood. What a difficult task!

The word “widow” still feels sorrowful and disconnected. It conjures images of sad, old women dressed in black, and the “w” sound seems inherently mournful, or at least wistfully poetic. And then there’s that silent “w” at the end. Oh, the silence.

One of the things I’m realizing in this widowhood is the silence. There’s a goodness in it, a stillness. But there is also a terrible loneliness that nothing and no one can fill but Michael. And part of me, very oddly, continues to feel that he might be there to fill that hole, to fill the looming emptiness that awaits me at the end of each day. It’s completely irrational, but I can’t help thinking that he might be on a long, weird vacation. I’m not sure when or if that feeling will disappear, but it’s with me daily, that sense of him not really being gone.

Of course, he’s not “gone.” But that gets into all the things we imagine about our dead, about where they are, about how it is in the land of the dead, and about what our relationship with the dead really is. For instance, I often feel that Michael is watching me, hearing me, even helping me. I think many of us feel this way. Most of us end up talking to our dead, telling them what we’re feeling, how we miss them, giving them magical qualities that allow them to help us from “the other side.” Or at least, I do. But there’s not much comfort in this.

I really don’t have a clue whether any of these thoughts are true. I used to think I knew something about the other side, but I realize now that my thoughts were probably wishful thinking, or hubris, or some combination of ideas from various sources. Because the truth is, even if they are helping us, hearing us, seeing us, we really don’t know. I want it to be true, but all I really know is that Michael is in Spirit now. Whether there is any form or memory left over from the life he had with me is up for grabs. I imagine Michael is “there” but I’m still alone and lonely on this earthly plane, and this leaves a terrible sense of emptiness hanging in the space around me.

I realize that these thoughts have put me in a new phase of widowhood. In some ways, it’s a harder phase. All the excitement, which isn’t quite the right word, is over – the dying, the death, the memorial, the cards and flowers, the focused attention – all of that is over. And now it’s just the living with it. The daily grind of getting through it, of finding a life that begins to fill in the emptiness, of making a conscious effort to stay connected. Thankfully, on most days I am washed in my connections with beautiful others.

But there is still a large amount of time alone. I’m finding this alone time to be quite a challenge for it actually involves forming a new identity, and this is slow-going indeed. I hear myself referring to “our” house, “our” garden, “our” business. There’s 35 years of “us” to contend with, and that’s not going to go away.

I’m also noticing a strong need to talk about Michael. It’s some kind of struggle to keep him alive inside of me, and I realize I’m not ready to let go yet, that my separate identity hasn’t formed yet. And maybe one is never really ready to let go of those they have loved. All I know is that I miss him fiercely. It’s inevitable and there’s no way around it. There are just too many ways in which we are intertwined and entangled, too many ways in which his energy is part of me forever.

To deal with the endless time alone, I start cruising on the Match.com site. I’m embarrassed to say this, but it’s true, and as I said before, if writing isn’t about the truth, then it’s worthless. I’m just looking so far, but I’ve got to say, it’s pretty grim in Iowa Match world. Lots of men on motorcycles, lots of Hawk fans, lots of lonely hearts with whom I have little in common.

I haven’t put my whole self into this search. I just can’t. I’m looking around and it’s probably too soon anyway. But I’m not looking for marriage or a lifelong partner. I’d just like to go out for coffee, or for dinner and a movie. Mostly, I’d like to find a new friend. But as we all know, making real friends takes time.

So, a new identity needs to be formed. A new way of being in the world as an “independent woman.” I notice that I have to put this in quotation marks. This independence doesn’t feel quite real to me yet, and I can see myself floating on ego as a way of coping. “I love my work. I own a business. I’m a good partner. I’m alive and alert to life. I still look pretty good, etc.” This ego patter goes on until a new wave of grief washes over me and I realize it’s all just nonsense. Finally, I cry and my heart bursts open once again.

Then, I know that identity requires an ego upon which it can ride, but it’s the higher self that I wish to embody and become, the higher Being that is the only real truth, and ego has no ability to encompass this. It’s damned hard to build this new higher identity when I’m consumed in grief and loneliness. For it looks to me like there are two obvious paths here – one in which I move on into a new life, and one in which I cling to the old life and never truly let go.

Any loss, in fact, every loss, must ultimately force us into redefining who we are. From the smaller losses of things such as money to the larger losses of friends and loved ones, we are forced to re-forge who we are without that thing or that person in our lives, forced to re-grow ourselves around the empty space.

I know that it is grief and pain that allow the higher self to emerge. For it is suffering that either crushes us or entreats us to expand. I know I am in the process of choosing growth. But so much of what must be new growth feels like it is going on underground. I can dimly sense this growth in the liminal spaces vacated by Michael, in ways that I can barely imagine, in the fleeting winds of freedom that blow through me. But often the newness feels shaky, or false, or forced. So, I back off, retreat into my house, my dog, my writing, my books, until the next time life breathes me out into the world again. And thank God, it does. Over and over, I am flung back into the sacred flow of life.

I tell my friend, Fran, that I’m tired of being sad, that I’ve been sad for too long, that I want to be done with grief. She says, “What you really want is for grief to be done with you!” She’s right, of course, and I find my resistance to widowhood softening a bit, I find my identity shifting.

At the highest level we are always dealing with elemental forces – love, grief, fear, forgiveness, grace, and more. We can learn to see these as primal human experiences that are not under our control, and ultimately, we don’t move through them. In fact, our tiny ego selves literally can’t move through them. The forces move through us! And when we know this, rather than being captured by them, we witness them with curiosity and bated breath. For there isn’t any act of will that allows grief to end. It is Grace that moves us. Or it is Grace’s other name, Love. All of it, all movement, whether we recognize it or not, is in our surrender to this beauty we call Grace.