by Sally Quinn
It was a painful time, but cathartic in ways. On the outside, I was going through the motions, seeing friends, going to small dinners, the movies, anything to take my mind away from the reality, if only for minutes at a time. Everyone, I found out quickly, has a different way of grieving. One friend of mine whose husband died suddenly in a car crash never spent one evening alone for the first year. Another, whose wife had been ill for a long time but died unexpectedly, hardly went out at all and is still in mourning five years later. Yet another, whose wife died after a four-year illness, was in a relationship with someone else within six months.
I will often hear people criticizing others for their way of dealing with grief and loss. I feel strongly that criticism is unwarranted, certainly not if no one is hurt by the mourner’s words or behavior. If people turn to booze, dancing all night on tables, having affairs, going to a silent retreat at a monastery, disappearing from the social scene, I say do what you want to do because in the grieving process that is often what you’re compelled to do, what you have to do. It’s so hard to get away from the grief. It chases you into dark corners and holds you captive. But it can be assuaged, tamed in a way, made less wild, omnipresent, or inescapable.
I chose life. That meant being around the people I loved and who loved me and especially around those who loved Ben. Quinn was my rock, and we went to as many places with each other as we could. His divorce from Pari was final only weeks after Ben’s death. They had been separated since the April before but we never told Ben.
I went out a lot and found that I was able to laugh. A group of us had dinner and organized a trip to the movies to see Fifty Shades of Grey and giggled all the way through. I refused to be morose in front of others. I also found myself trying to cheer them up. That made me feel better. I did most of my grieving privately. Nobody really wants to be around someone who is grieving. Grief permeates the atmosphere.
The focal point of my day was to visit the cemetery chapel where Ben’s body was temporarily buried in a crypt in the floor until the mausoleum could be built. I always lit a candle in the chapel and would lie on the carpet on the aisle over his crypt, as close as I could get to him, and weep until I was ragged. I begged him—prayed to him actually—to help me through this. There really were times when I didn’t think I could ever be happy again.
Occasionally, the force of my grief would shock me. Once during a visit, I tried to pull back the carpeting and lift the lid on the floor to get to him. I stopped myself even before I realized I didn’t have the strength. When I had run out of tissues and was limp from emotional exhaustion, I would wend my way home, sated with grief until the next day when I would do it all over again. I was never so thankful to have that warm chapel as during the freezing weather when I would otherwise have been standing over an icy plot of newly dug earth shivering and keening out in the open.
* * *
The first Valentine’s Day after Ben died may have been my lowest point to that date, especially since it was the first year we wouldn’t be going to La Samanna. I couldn’t sit still, I paced, I walked, I cried. Nothing worked to make me feel better.
For reasons I still do not understand, I decided to stop wearing black on that very day. It wasn’t as if I had stopped loving Ben or stopped grieving any less. It wasn’t as if I wanted to be with another man. The idea was unthinkable then. I simply felt a slight quickening in my heart, a longing for what we had had together, and I couldn’t imagine that I wouldn’t have those feelings again.
Around that time I met someone I found attractive, a man who had recently lost his wife. He couldn’t have been more different from Ben. The last thing I wanted was an ersatz Ben. At that point I couldn’t imagine anyone who could replace him.
On the other hand, I was beginning to feel sexual. Did I feel ashamed? No. Did I feel guilty? A little. On some level, even being drawn to someone else seemed like a betrayal. My overall feeling, though, was of being alive. I wanted what Ben and I had, and that included sex.
I never was intimate with this man, but he activated that essential part of me, which I thought had died with Ben. I could see that I might one day feel happy again. Besides, I really knew that’s what Ben wanted for me. I knew because he had told me so.
By then I had begun to wear navy blue, the closest color to black, then went on to lighter blues and purples and lavenders. It wouldn’t be until Easter Sunday services at the National Cathedral that I would break out the pink—shocking pink, no less. Looking back, I still think it was too soon for that about-face.
* * *
At the end of February I went back to the monastery in Berryville for another silent retreat. All the attendees were given little diaries or blank books. This time I wrote in mine. I was so sad I didn’t really feel like going to meals or services and often fled to my room, took a shower, and read books on the significance of silence and various meditations.
I decided to walk down to the Cool Spring Natural Cemetery. There were more stones than before, marking the newly buried under mounds of earth. One caught my eye. The stone simply read: “Jody” 1941–2014. Under the stone was a faded and torn blue shirtwaist dress with tiny bouquets of dried flowers. I envied Jody and I wanted to trade places with her, but couldn’t (and wouldn’t) because of Quinn. I felt sorry for those she had left behind. I walked down to the river, sat on the bank, and meditated. I couldn’t stop thinking about Ben and all the memories of being on the river in West Virginia, our times on the rocks, surrounded by the woods. Ben with his ax and his chain saw, clearing brush and cutting down dead trees, burning piles of autumn leaves, coming back to the cabin covered in soot, a wide grin on his face he was so happy to see me. I went up and sat by the chapel for vespers. The sound of the river in the distance was soothing. It was a warm day, in the sixties, and as I sat there I noticed tiny flowers budding near the steps, little white ones, and bluets even though there were no buds on the trees yet. The sun was going down. The cows in the nearby field were lowing. The old monks were chanting prayers about Jesus. A lovely peace settled over me.
That night I went to the chapel in the guesthouse and sprinkled my head with holy water and lay down in front of the altar with my arms spread out, totally surrendering to my grief. How could I go from such anguish to such peace and then spiral back down to such pain again so quickly in that short span of time? This undulating experience of profound, naked emotions was all a mystery to me. It was also piercing, overpowering, raw, uncontrollable, and exhausting. Patricia Campbell Carlson wrote, “Grief and gratitude are kindred souls, each pointing to the beauty of what is transient and given to us by grace.” I couldn’t agree more.
I wanted the retreat to go on and on, in part because I was totally alone with Ben, connected with him, nothing and no one else. I felt closer to him there than I had since he’d died.
When the retreat was over, we sat in a circle to share our experiences. I was determined not to fall apart. But when I was asked how it had been for me so soon after Ben’s death, I broke down. I talked about “Jody” at the cemetery and how I wished I could trade places with her. I couldn’t believe I was so open and forthcoming around these people I hardly knew, but it was good to be able to talk about it and make that confession. When I finished, there was a hushed silence, and when I left, everyone hugged me. I felt safe.
* * *
In May I went with a friend to an overnight retreat in the Maryland countryside. It was to focus on the enneagram, which the Enneagram Institute describes as a “tool for understanding ourselves and others.” As with my devouring Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs at an earlier stage in my life, or looking for answers and meaning from so many different sources throughout my days, I saw the enneagram as another way to arrive at some insight into myself.
Earlier in the year I had been introduced to the enneagram by the noted Franciscan friar, writer, teacher, and philosopher Richard Rohr, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation. After that first meeting, I had read one of hi
s books, Falling Upward, about the second half of life, which I read intently since it dealt with loss and grief and moving forward. I had sat next to and interviewed Rohr at a PathNorth event in Washington and found him truly inspirational. After learning about the enneagram from him, I immediately took the test—or more appropriately, filled out a questionnaire, which turned out to be astonishing in its accuracy, as it seemed to fit me to a T.
The enneagram consists of nine personality types, each with a corresponding number. My basic personality type turned out to be Type Two, the Helper, which was the equivalent of saying that this descriptive word was the role that best fit me most of the time, the one that came closest to how I might describe myself. This was good news and bad news, I learned. My deadly sin is pride, which I guess is better than gluttony, but I’m sure some would beg to differ.
The model elaborated on the personality types: “At their best,” Twos are “unselfish and altruistic, they have unconditional love for others.” The danger for Twos is to give too much of themselves and then feel hurt or resentful when the giving is not reciprocated. They can be smothering and possessive. I recognized some of those traits in myself and was revolted by them. This is not an easy test to take—with some questions that are hard to answer honestly, and the results are often difficult to confront.
I had surely been a helper all my life and those traits served me well as I was dealing with the illnesses of first Quinn, then my mother and father, and then Ben. But until Ben started failing, he often balked at what he felt was my overattentiveness and tendency to want to run his life. In fact, it was a running joke in our family and among our friends. At every birthday party I had for Ben, there was always at least one teasing toast about how Ben was totally dominated by me. Sometimes, when I really wanted to annoy him, I’d tell him that it was well known in Washington that he was the most pussy-whipped (one of his favorite words) man in town, which would make him absolutely crazy. As you can imagine, Ben would rather go down fighting than allow himself to be pushed around by anyone, especially his wife.
What was particularly discouraging was the fact that this attitude was not lost on Quinn, and like father like son, he began to push back at me too. I did a lot of soul-searching around this issue and now see that they were both right. I just couldn’t see it at the time. I was trying, especially in my therapy with Steven, to understand it. There was one funny moment when I was trying to boss Steven around and he, unaware—a very rare thing for him—kept backing his chair away from me until he was finally up against the wall. I pointed this out to him, accusing him of trying to escape me, and we both burst out laughing, but it was emblematic of a very big issue of mine—what he called “the too muchness of Sally.”
I so wish I had had that insight while Ben was alive and well. I wish that he could have taken the test too. It would have been such a gift to both of us, because Ben’s probable personality type was a nice fit with mine and also explained a lot about times when we had our struggles. Sadly, this had been about the time that Ben really began to need me the most, but instead of being able to back off from some of my pushiness, I had to double down on my caretaking, which threw me off and set me back on my road to progress. Of course, as Quinn began to lose his father, he became needier as well. After Ben died, I had to regroup with Steven, get my bearings. I had to get back to trying to find “my own True Self.” I had to find the new Sally who could be “brought to deeper and deeper levels of understanding and insight, love and grace,” as Rohr wrote in one of his introductions to the enneagram on his website that he titled “Knowing Ourselves.” I so wanted to know myself more and desperately wanted to be that person of “understanding and insight, love and grace.”
I saw myself (rightly or wrongly) as pretty much in the healthy range of the Twos except for one thing: gossip. I realized I would never be able to improve on that score. I was toast. Happily, my saving grace has been that I recently learned the word gossip comes from “gospel.” Except for malicious gossip, it can be healthy, a way to connect with and be interested in other people.
Rohr quotes Carl Jung about his point “that so much unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept ‘legitimate suffering’ that comes from being human. . . . Ironically, this refusal of the necessary pain of being human brings to the person ten times more suffering in the long run.”
That didn’t seem to be my problem. I feel that I gave in to my grief and allowed myself to suffer in a way that got me through and would continue to get me through the worst times. From the beginning of the first year without Ben, I took to heart the idea that grieving was beneficial and the only way to work through it was to allow myself to experience it rather than deny my feelings.
I began having dreams again about Ben. He kept coming back and appearing in the dreams alive. Everyone was so excited. “Ben is back!” they would exult. “Yay!” I was devastated and totally at sea. In my dreams, I was the only one who realized he was dead. I kept trying to convince them that he wasn’t here, that he had died, that he would not be coming back. In my dreams I even went so far as to go to the Post’s newsroom to plead with people to accept the truth. I couldn’t go through his decline, death, and funeral again. I had the dream over and over. I still have it. I think that what I’m dreaming is my own need to convince myself that he is gone.
On my birthday, I spent an hour and a half with Steven discussing this. Acceptance was really the hardest part. I wasn’t there yet. Oddly I never experienced anger or guilt during the first year without Ben—and haven’t still. I was expecting to but it never happened. I really believed that I had taken the best care of Ben that I could have. How could I possibly be angry? He had lived to be ninety-three and had had, as he wrote in the title of his book, “a good life.” Besides, there was so much suffering in the world; mine was nothing compared to what so many went through. I never once asked “Why me?” but rather “Why not me?”
* * *
We had always spent every August at Grey Gardens. The summer after Ben died was to be no different. I started making plans to spend the month on Long Island, but something held me back. A voice in my head kept telling me not to. This is where Ben and I had spent so many years on our vacation, full of rest and relaxation and friends and lots of love and laughter. I somehow knew going back there would not be a way for me to move forward and would be no relief from the grief. I decided to rent out Grey Gardens for the whole summer, rent a place in Corsica for part of July and August, and invite friends to come and stay so I wouldn’t be alone. I chose Corsica because I wanted to be in France, but didn’t want to go anywhere Ben and I had been together. It’s a French island, off the coast of the south of France, famous as Napoleon’s birthplace. The terrain and the people have a reputation of being slightly untamed in their beauty and natural setting. It was not a tourist mecca, another mark in its favor.
In the weeks before leaving for Corsica, I was in a frenzy of activities—continuing to work on the book, working on the website, remodeling a new studio apartment in New York, planning the trip, packing, and checking on the construction of the mausoleum. A large part of the frenzy was because I had decided to have a ceremony to commemorate the first anniversary of Ben’s death. It became clear at some point that the mausoleum was going to be finished at about the same time as the anniversary. I had decided that, rather than have him moved unceremoniously, it would be nice to have some sort of occasion to consecrate the mausoleum and bring Ben properly to his final resting place.
At first I didn’t know what to call this day or any kind of ceremony. The Christian faith doesn’t really have a name for this sort of thing, but there is a Jewish ritual called yahrzeit. It’s a German word. Yahr means “year” and zeit means “time.” A year’s time from the death of a loved one. The Jews unveil the tomb on the yahrzeit. October 21 would be the anniversary of Ben’s death and this would be its unveiling.
Several days before I was to leave for Corsica, I got a let
ter from the Washington Home and Community Hospices, the group that had kept such an incredible watch over Ben in his last weeks and days. I had been receiving helpful mailings from the group, but this one was special. “Dear Friend,” it read, “it has been nine months since the death of your loved one. . . . Many of our family members find the nine months’ mark to be difficult in its own way.” Included was a list of suggestions for coping with grief. How appropriate and how uncanny! Who would have thought nine months had passed and that this often was a troubled milestone? What was so particularly disconcerting and agitating about this mark in the calendar of death? But it seemed to explain much of what was going on with me. Three sentences in the letter particularly spoke to me. “Accept yourself—your pain, your emotions, your own way of healing, and your own schedule for doing so,” the letter read. “To cry, to experience your pain and express it is a sign of strength and love and is necessary for healing.” I needed to hear that almost as confirmation of how I was reacting to loss. It was also comforting to read another thought they shared: “Always remember that your grief will ease and that you will reestablish your life.”
* * *
I decided to live those three weeks in Corsica with abandon. I invited a number of friends to visit and we had a magical time, sleeping late, eating croissants for breakfast, discovering new coves and small beaches for swimming, hiking to waterfalls, lunching in small villages, walking in ancient hill towns, and returning to the villa for naps. We would have cocktails either on the terrace overlooking the sea or on the rocks by the beach, our rosé the exact color of the sunset, then long lingering wine-filled dinners with typical Corsican dishes. I wore only bikinis, as did every woman we saw on the beach. (Of course I wouldn’t have dreamed of doing that in this country.)