I pulled up in front of her house and walked down the steps, through her side yard, and into the entrance of her office in her walkout basement as I had been instructed to do.
“Hello,” she said, extending her hand as I walked through the sliding glass door. “I’m Dr. Weiss. I’m so glad to meet you.”
I sat in her office looking around at décor that I think every therapist’s office has. Really. I think they must all google “how to decorate an office to help crazy people” and the same picture comes up. Usually the walls are covered in soothing, pastel colors. There’s an overstuffed couch, trifolded color brochures on a table about how you can take control of your life in one thousand words or less, and the obligatory table fountain somewhere in the room.
There’s the chair in the corner across from the couch that the therapist sits in. It’s always at an angle and never faces you head on. I don’t know why. And then there’s the yellow legal pad sitting next to the chair so that the therapist can either take notes on how crazy you are or work on her grocery list if your problems are not interesting enough that day.
I can’t really put my finger on it, but there was something about Dr. Weiss that I wasn’t happy about from the beginning. I’ve come to realize that those of us who have experienced loss—whether of a spouse, parent, or child—can sniff out those who have not. There was just something about her that hinted to me that the closest experience she’d had with death was when she put Fluffy down two years ago. But I was in such a fog at that point that I didn’t trust my inner voice that said, “Walk away. Grab your purse, that useless grief pamphlet she just handed you, one more piece of cheap candy, and get the heck out.”
“So, tell me what’s going on,” she began, which somewhat annoyed me from the start because I’d already told her over the phone why I was making the appointment.
“Ummm…well…my husband died about six months ago and I’m starting to feel a little bogged down with life in general.”
“Uh huh,” she said, pen scrawling across the page. “And what’s making you feel bogged down?”
“Ummm…my husband’s death?”
“Uh huh.”
On and on this went. I left feeling like I had gotten nowhere but was willing to give it another try. After all, this problem was big. Enormous. Obese. Maybe she just needed a warm-up session until we got to the core of the problem.
But then at the next session, we talked about my life before I’d met Brad.
And then at the next we talked about when he and I dated.
By the time the fourth session rolled around, I was starting to feel so overwhelmed with my past that there was no way I was going to be able to deal with my present.
It took me two months to really figure out that this counselor and I just weren’t clicking. And, even though I’d been willing to give her a try for a few sessions, the moment I realized this just wasn’t going to work happened in an instant.
I stood up from the couch after I had just handed her my check and said, “Oh! I went out to dinner last week with an old high-school friend. He and I dated when we were teenagers. It was just kind of nice to be out with a guy.”
Before I’d even finished telling her about my evening, she popped off with, “You’re not ready to date. You shouldn’t be doing that right now. Shall we go ahead and schedule your session next week?”
There was a moment of silence while I pondered what she had just said. I didn’t exactly know what was wrong, but every ounce of my body was saying it wanted to get out of there. And to never come back.
“Uh. That’s okay. Why don’t I call you when I’ve had a chance to look at my calendar?”
After leaving her house, I sat in my car feeling completely shell-shocked. Not only was I back to feeling like I wasn’t grieving right, but she had somehow implanted in my head the idea that I had done a bad thing. I felt cheap and dirty, like I had just cheated on Brad by going out to dinner with someone I had actually met a few times for lunch when Brad was alive (and told him about it). I drove and drove, taking the long, winding way home. Tears rolled down my face as I thought over and over again, “I can’t be helped. I can’t be helped.”
And I quit going.
I felt utterly alone. Going to counseling was my last resort and now I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that nothing was going to help me climb out of this grief hole. I would live a life alone, with only my crazy thoughts to keep me company. And eventually the grief would completely take me over.
I spent months feeling this way but kept my thoughts to myself. When my mother asked, “Do you need to make another counseling appointment? Let me know and I’ll come over and watch the kids,” I would be intentionally vague about my answer because I felt like I couldn’t tell her why I couldn’t go back.
That I was unfixable.
It was at lunch with Kristi one day, when she was talking about one of the networking luncheons she had been to for women starting their own businesses, that fate threw me a bone.
“You know, one of the women there was Beth, a counselor who works downtown,” Kristi said. “I really liked her a lot. I got her card and I thought I’d pass it on to you, in case you know someone who might need it.”
When I took Beth’s card from my sister that day, I really didn’t intend to use it. I meant to keep it in my purse until I met someone else who might need it, which was fairly likely with the circles I was running in at the time. But as I became more and more mired down, sinking further than anyone around me knew, I decided to give it one more try.
And that time, I hit the crazy-widow jackpot.
Unlike the previous counselor who’d spent several sessions completely steeped in the past and not dealing with my present problems, Beth just dove right in and started talking about my current state, which was exactly what my impatient widow brain needed. Through that process, other past issues did come up, but she didn’t start out digging in so deep that I thought I’d never be able to claw my way out. I never left her office without feeling like I had made some sort of progress. And that’s extremely important when you’re on this journey.
Because if you’re not moving forward, you start sliding backward at an unbelievably rapid pace. And that’s the kind of thing that will get you drinking out of a paper bag.
I’d spent most of the beginning of my widowhood worrying that I wasn’t grieving right, something that I felt my previous counselor had confirmed. I watched other people around me do it slower, which made me feel like I was either a shallow person or that I didn’t love my husband enough. I watched others do it faster, getting remarried, buying new homes, and generally moving on with their lives, and I felt sure that I would never get to that place. I beat myself up, wore myself down, and generally didn’t like who I was. All because I never felt like I was grieving the way I should be.
“I’m doing this backwards!” I wailed to Beth during one session, snotty tissues clutched in my hand. “I’ve spent months running around nonstop and now I don’t want to get out of bed when it seems like everyone else has done it the other way around! I’ve been trying to convince myself that my marriage wasn’t that great when I should be putting him up on a pedestal and thinking that no one will ever live up to how great he was! I should be doing what everyone else does! What is wrong with me?”
She calmly looked at me in a very counselor-like way and said, “Who says you should be doing that? You’re doing everything you should be doing. In fact, I don’t want you to use that word ‘should’ anymore. All you’re doing is telling yourself that you’re doing something wrong. And there is no wrong way to do this.”
That idea opened up a whole new world for me, and ten months after Brad died, I began to slowly forgive myself for not being the perfect widow that I thought I “should” be. I began to grieve in the way I needed to, not as some meaningless pamphlet was telling me I “should.” I stopped think
ing that the way others were doing it was much better than my way and using it as a map that would never get me where I needed to go. I no longer felt guilty about times when I would tear up talking about Brad…and also the times I didn’t. My emotions, in whatever form they came in, were no longer my enemy. They were something I began to accept as a part of who I was now. And that was okay.
It’s important to feel like your therapist understands what you’re going through. Nothing made me feel better than when I would tell Beth something that I thought only I did and was ashamed of, and she would respond, “Oh, people do that all the time!” Because no widow ever wants to feel like she’s the only person who’s ever thought about getting engaged six months after her husband died or that if she could abandon her children every weekend to just go sit in her car and cry for forty-eight hours straight she would.
And even if he or she hasn’t experienced a loss like this (and if they have, they’ll probably never tell you), you want to feel like, no matter what, your therapist won’t pass judgment. It’s a very delicate balancing act. A therapist needs to be somewhat sympathetic, but not over the top because you don’t want to feel like your life story is the worst she’s ever heard. I’ve had times when I’ve gone into Beth’s office completely bent out of shape about some problem that seems massive to me at the time, and she will just calmly ask me a very important question.
“Why does that matter?”
She doesn’t ask because it shouldn’t matter. She just asks because she wants to know…and she wants me to know. And you know what? Nine times out of ten, it really doesn’t matter.
After about a year of going to Beth every other week, I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel and regular visits weren’t really necessary anymore. But the fact that we had established a relationship that allowed me to just go in for sanity maintenance was something that I never took for granted.
My “hot” time of the year usually hit the couple of months before the anniversary of Brad’s death when I would stare at the pictures on my computer in wonder, thinking, “How could we have not known this was coming? Look at him! He’s just sitting there laughing and feeding Sarah ice cream! You fool, how could you not have known you would be dead three weeks later?”
I even put together a PowerPoint presentation of pictures of him, complete with a sad song that was timed perfectly. Night after night, after the kids had gone to bed, I’d go sit in my office and play it, trying to get the tears out that I’d kept bottled up while I was with them all day, hoping for an emotional release of some sort.
I thought that if I could just relieve the pressure valve that is grief every once in a while, I would save myself from an explosion. And in a way it worked. But when a heart has been broken, it can’t be healed by crying over a slide show for twenty minutes three times a week. I was, unfortunately, still under the impression that I could control my pain like I tried to control everything else in my life. Like a monster I had caged, I would let it out every once in a while when we were alone, hoping that that would be enough to appease it.
But grief cannot be trained. It will find a way out when it wants to. And when it does, it often happens when you least expect it.
16
My mother swore that by learning how to use the lawn mower, I was putting my children in mortal danger.
“Catherine,” she said in her stern, Southern mom voice. “Call a service. If you’re outside mowing, how can you hear the children?”
My inner voice wanted to reply, “That’s the point.” I had visions of taking a lawn-mowing vacation once a week: forty-five uninterrupted minutes as I strapped on my MP3 and walked my lawn in a mindless pattern. Forty-five minutes of watching my children pantomiming tattles from the porch while I pointed at the mower and mouthed back, “I can’t hear you!” and went on my merry way.
Forty-five minutes of lawn-mowing freedom.
Bet you never thought you’d hear someone daydreaming about mowing their lawn, did you?
It wasn’t my mother’s fault that she felt this way. I come from a long line of women who would rather sell the contents of their homes and hire a yard man than do it themselves. In fact, my grandmother used to go so far as to say, “Every time I see a woman outside mowing her own lawn, I just want to get out of the car and smack her! Don’t you know she’s just letting her husband sit around and watch the game while she does everything?”
In other words, in my family, women’s liberation meant no female should cut her own grass. Ever.
I tried explaining to my mother that I could still watch the kids while I took care of the yard.
“I’ll be outside, Mom. The kids can play in the yard while I mow.”
“Well, don’t you think that’s dangerous?” she replied, looking at me in disbelief like I had just suggested they play with matches next to a propane tank. “What happens if you run over a rock and it shoots out of the mower and hits one of them in the head?”
Now, I’m sure that this is possible, and if it should ever happen to one of my children, I will have to swallow a big “I told you so” from my mother. But I honestly don’t remember her sending my sister and me outside in helmets and pads while my dad mowed the lawn. So I figured I would take my chances.
Up until that time, I had relied on my dad to come over and take care of my lawn once a week, although a neighbor surprised me once with a spontaneous mow. But I was starting to feel like it was time to take control of my household.
All of my household.
Everyone was gone, and I was moving into that phase that most widows experience when they look around and think, “Hey! Where’d everybody go?” I was starting to realize that life would keep changing whether I wanted it to or not, and I’ll be honest with you…that was a really painful feeling. And I can pinpoint, down to the moment, when I felt it.
“I’m pregnant!” my friend Christa said excitedly over the phone. “Due in June!”
“Oh, Chris!” I said. “I’m so excited for you!”
And I was. I truly was. At first.
But when I hung up the phone, it hit me. Christa was pregnant. She was going to produce this whole other person that Brad would never meet. This baby would come into the world and never really know Brad was in it. I started realizing that friends of ours would get married, divorced, move, and have countless monumental experiences…all without him here.
I know that life changes for everyone on the planet, but for widows it seems to happen at a rapid pace. The changes our friends go through seem to happen in fast-forward, and we can’t even keep up with what we have to deal with personally. It feels like our lives are spinning out of control and we spend a lot of time either desperately trying to stop it…or feeling defeated because we know we can’t.
Something uncontrollable had happened to my life, and I wanted to control the pieces that were left. I wanted to know how to do everything Brad knew how to do, and I wanted to know now. I needed to know how to mow, snow blow, and grill. I even remember, in a wild, delusional moment, asking one of his good friends to show me how to put a lift kit on a Jeep.
You know. Just in case.
I don’t know if I was trying to convince myself that by becoming like him, maybe I wouldn’t miss him. Or that by becoming him, I could keep a part of him alive. I do know that part of me was heartbroken that, because the kids were so little when he died, they would never really know how special and smart their dad was. I hated the fact that my son wouldn’t get to work on a car with his dad. That my girls would never have the outrageous tickle fights that only he could deliver. That we would never all be able to lie in the backyard in one, big family heap under the stars and have the man who had been so obsessed with space since childhood tell us which constellations were which.
So I put a ton of pressure on myself to be him for them.
Have you ever tried to be something that you’re not?
If you have, you know how exhausting it is. There was a good reason why I didn’t know how to do the things that Brad did, and it was mainly because my brain didn’t work that way. I could put all of the expression in my body into playing Brahms on the piano, sing a pitch-perfect lullaby, and read stories with funny voices that made my children squeal with delight at bedtime.
But I didn’t have a damn clue how to change my own oil, fix an electrical outlet, or do my taxes.
He did.
After about six months of running in circles, trying to be both of us and desperately failing, I stopped and came to terms with how utterly helpless Brad’s death left me feeling. After getting married when I was twenty, I went straight from depending on my parents (the most dependable people in the world) to depending on him (who tied with my parents in the dependable category).
And then, for eleven years, I had been married to the smartest, handiest person I’d ever known. I knew that if the world should come to a crashing halt, Brad would go out in the backyard with a trap he had fashioned out of curly ribbon and paper clips and catch us dinner. I knew that if we faced a gas crisis, he would be in the garage making an alternate fuel source out of garbage like they did in Back to the Future. I knew that if I had a flat tire, I had someone I could call.
Brad was my rock. He embodied stability. If I could be sure about anything in my life, it was him. Just the fact of him. He was one of those people who could answer any question, fix any problem, and take on the world…all on my behalf. And I’ll be honest with you, just his presence in my life allowed me to operate at about 30 percent of my capacity. Because I just knew that he would always be there to take care of me. There was not a doubt in my mind. Nothing could happen to Brad.
And then he died. Which seemed to make everything I was sure about in my life turn from concrete to Jell-O within a seventy-two-hour time frame. Everything was left up to me, and I had a choice.
Confessions of a Mediocre Widow Page 18