As we waited for our pizza at the restaurant across the street from the theater, the man at the next table leaned over and asked, “Excuse me? Do you know where the IMAX is?”
“Yes! It’s right across the street! We’re headed there ourselves to see the movie on the Hubble telescope. Is that what you’re seeing?”
“No,” he replied. “We’re seeing a movie about migration. Gosh, I didn’t know they had so many theaters.”
As he turned back to his dinner, I suddenly had a sinking feeling. I couldn’t have this wrong, could I? I dug out my phone and checked trusty old Yahoo! Movies and sure enough, Hubble telescope. November 19, 6:00 p.m.
We finished our pizza and made it to the theater right on time. I pulled into the loading zone, flipped on the hazards, and told the kids, “Wait here. I’m going to double-check and make sure it’s playing.”
I ran in the front doors and looked up at the listing.
Sure enough.
Migration.
In all my life, I had never known a movie listing to be so completely wrong. I wanted to run up to the ticket counter, shove my phone in the teenager’s face, and say, “This says Hubble, so, by God, you’re going to play Hubble. Look at me! My husband is dead and the only thing that is keeping me from having a complete nervous breakdown is watching something float around in space and not listening to my children for one blessed hour! I don’t care if you don’t have it here. Make it happen!”
Instead, I wheeled around, slammed through the theater doors, and made my way back to the minivan. I plopped myself back into my seat, rammed the gear shift into drive, and yelled, “Home! Pay-per-view movie!”
This declaration was met with noisy applause from the backseat.
I almost made it home when it hit. Complete hysteria. I’m laughing. I’m crying. I’m laughing so hard I’m crying. I may have snorted a couple of times.
The kids were suddenly very quiet in the backseat until finally, Haley said quietly, “Mom? What’s so funny?”
“Oh, sweetie. This was just a bad day. I mean, not all parts of it were bad. We did some fun things. But sometimes things get so bad they’re funny. Remember how I always tell you that if you’re getting bullied, the best thing you can do is laugh right in the bully’s face? Well, today bullied me.”
And all I could do was laugh.
18
And so as year two started, I waited and waited for it to get worse, certain that Sally’s second-year breakdown meant mine was imminent. It was as if I was watching the skies, just knowing that grief was going to drop a bomb on me that I would never recover from. I waited and waited…and the bomb never came.
What happened to me was more of a slow transition in the grieving process. When Sally said that year two was harder, I was expecting exactly what had happened in year one only much worse. But what year two really meant for me was the beginning of the shift from the life I’d had into the life I was developing.
It was then that I learned a very valuable lesson.
I should never listen to or read about what another widow is going through and think it’s absolutely going to happen to me.
And there’s a very simple reason for that.
Because they’re not me.
Our hardest times are as different as we are. Not only that, but how we express these milestones is also individual. I used to feel so inadequate when I would hear other widows talk about the anniversary of their husband’s deaths as a matter of weeks or months, when I couldn’t wait to get far enough out from my husband’s death so that I could say he’d been gone for years (mainly because the awkward silence after telling someone what happened gets a little shorter when you can attach the word “year” at the end). And I felt like I didn’t love him as much as the other widows loved their husbands because I couldn’t calculate down to the minute how long he had been gone.
“Today is so hard. My husband died one hundred four weeks ago as of 5:04 p.m.”
“Really? Wow. I just passed my two-year mark.”
As I moved into year two, the pain of loss had dulled a bit, which was a good thing, but without the overwhelming ache of grief every day, the milestones were so much sharper. By year two, most of the people in my life had returned to their day-to-day routine (as they should have), comfortable with my loss even though I wasn’t. A transition was happening in my life, one that I didn’t feel ready for but had to make anyway.
Most of my days were better, but every once in a while I would start crying and not be able to stop. This would usually happen in my car and not only alarm my occupants but the people behind me who were honking and trying to get me to “move the hell out of the way.” (I think that’s how they put it.)
And many times it would happen and I wouldn’t even know why.
I had been so proud of myself for getting through that second year, and I felt sure I had the second anniversary emotionally under control. I thought I knew by then how to anticipate my grief, how to read the signs when I needed to take care of myself, and how to manage on my own. I had it in my head that by that time, I had conquered all of the “firsts” and that I should be living a life that I miraculously had all of the answers to.
As you can imagine, if you set standards like that for yourself, you’re bound to be disappointed.
As the second anniversary approached, things that I hadn’t witnessed during Brad’s accident began to bother me as much as the things I had. Picturing what he was seeing, through his eyes, the moment he hit the driver’s door of the Jeep turning left in front of him. Then suddenly, my imagination would take me to an aerial view of him lying bleeding and helpless on the road, his body twisted in an unnatural way and his head, heavy with his helmet, lolled to the side. The ride in the Flight For Life helicopter, which for years after his accident made me nauseous every time I heard a chopper just checking the traffic…and then relieved when I would pass the local hospital and see a helicopter perched and waiting for its next rescue.
“It’s there,” I would sigh quietly with relief. “Everyone’s okay tonight.”
Those visions haunted me every day, along with the things I’d actually seen, until my mind was so paralyzed with fear that I didn’t want to think about my past at all. A vision of Brad laughing and smiling would end with him lying unconscious in the hospital bed. Remembering when we first met and how much fun we had would melt into a nightmare of him riding blissfully along to work on a summer morning…only to crash into an abyss of permanent darkness.
It was time for a sanity tune-up. So I went to Beth’s office, the anniversary of his death looming before me like a rogue wave, and sat down on her well-worn couch. I knew she could see the anxiety all over my face.
“Are you doing okay?” she asked.
“I’m scared,” I said tearfully. “Memories of the hospital scare me. I try not to think about them, but it’s like they’re in the back of my mind, just waiting to bring me down.”
She shifted in her seat a little, her pen at the ready. “Have we talked about EMDR?”
Sniffle. “No. What’s that?”
EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, is not something that every counselor does. Like hypnotism, it’s something that you have to be trained in and something that affects everyone differently. Beth explained to me that I would have to come in for four sessions, at least one a week, because the therapy could not be spaced out over a long period if it was going to work, and that each session would last an hour and a half. She said that we would actually do very little talking; it was more about me envisioning what had happened while I sat there with instruments in my hands that pulsed back and forth. And then every once in a while she would ask me what I was seeing.
“Now, I have only done this with a handful of people,” she said. “But so far, the results have been amazing. Very few of them have needed all four sessions.”
<
br /> I won’t say that I was skeptical, because I have a fairly open mind when it comes to stuff like that. What I was…was terrified. I had spent two years doing everything I could not to think about those three awful days in the ICU, and I didn’t think I had it in me to sit in her office and think of nothing but that.
But my fear that those memories would someday, somehow jump out of my brain and attack me outweighed my fear of sitting with someone I trusted to bring them out, pacify them, and then put them in a cage where they belonged.
And so I agreed to do it.
With the first session set for a Friday afternoon, my parents insisted that they would not only watch my kids during the appointment, but for the weekend as well. Thinking that this wouldn’t be necessary, but always one to welcome a little break, I dropped the kids off at their house on my way downtown. Dressed in comfortable sweats, my fingers clenched on the steering wheel, my heart racing with every mile I covered, I made my way to Beth’s office.
After getting me settled in my usual spot on the couch, Beth placed two palm-sized oval objects in my hands and asked me to close my fingers around them. They began to pulse back and forth, back and forth, in the center of my hands until I almost felt like my body was rocking with them.
“Now, picture you’re in a train,” she said softly. “The images out of the window are the images from the hospital. They don’t have to be in order. Just envision them as you would frames in a movie. You’re on the train. You’re in a safe place. Just watch the visions as you pass them.”
For an hour I sat that way. I envisioned myself on a gray passenger train traveling around dusk. Sometimes I could see myself in the window, almost as if I were a ghost traveling alongside the train in a passenger cabin with the lights on, watching the landscape. Then the view would shift and I would be in my body, seeing the scenes unfold in the window as if watching the frames of a movie. Every once in a while, Beth would ask me about the vision I was seeing, and somehow she seemed to know to ask when I was stuck with one moment I couldn’t get past. The trauma room. The radiology waiting area. The ICU with every tube imaginable keeping the man I loved alive.
After she slowly brought me back around, I sat on her couch feeling like I had just woken up from the most vivid dream I’d ever had. I left, promising that I would see her the following week, and I drove home, not really remembering the journey.
Every limb, joint, and hair was limp with exhaustion. I climbed into my bed fully clothed and lay there feeling like I was out of my body. I couldn’t move. I don’t know if it was the experience of remembering so many things all at once or the sweet release of just letting it all go that had me feeling like my body didn’t even matter at that point, only my mind and the soul I felt like I was starting to reclaim.
During the week in between the first and second sessions, I felt like a different person. Yes, the memories were sad, but the fear was gone. The two EMDR sessions that followed weren’t nearly as intense, and by the end of the third one, I felt like a weight had literally been lifted from my shoulders.
I had remembered it all. And I had come out the other side.
It was then that I realized that the more I fear my grief and the more I push it away, the bigger it becomes and the more control it has. That fight, that denial, is often more exhausting than actually feeling what I’m going to feel. The battle to remember or not remember pieces of my life is one that really can’t be fought. Not successfully, anyway. I don’t know if I will ever be able to welcome grief into my life.
But I know now not to be afraid of it.
• • •
After a few years, the birthdays got easier. My Christmas spirit returned.
But my throat would still catch when he missed something. And it was usually some small, everyday occurrence. During the first six months after he died, I tried to get the kids to church every Sunday. Eventually, though, I had to quit going. Now this is something I have never understood because, when he was alive, there were plenty of Sundays I would get the kids to their various Sunday schools and then go sit in the sanctuary on my own while he was out of town. In fact, I looked forward to it. With Brad gone so much, that hour on Sunday was often my only break during the week. But for some reason, after he died, I just couldn’t do it.
I would drop the kids off in their classes, find my usual spot on the pew, listen to the sermon…and cry. After I stopped going regularly, I would try and get us there every once in a while so that I could have a test run and see if it was still a problem. And it always was. Maybe it was because I was being forced to sit there for an uninterrupted hour, and even though I tried to focus on what was being said, I couldn’t help but look around at all of the men with their arms planted firmly around their wives’ shoulders. Maybe it was because, while I had never been raised in a very religious family, going to church was just so Brad that it made it hard. Or maybe it was going to the place, every Sunday, where I said my final good-bye.
After months of struggling with this, I finally went to speak with Pastor Teri about it, certain that she would have an answer for me.
“I don’t think I can come to church anymore,” I said, somewhat embarrassed to be saying this to a pastor. “I don’t know why, but it’s just too hard.”
She leaned over and gave my hand a quick pat. “Don’t you worry about it,” she said. “When my husband died, it took me four years to come back to church. You’ll come back when you’re ready.”
I don’t think she could have said anything more comforting to me. All that time I felt like I would be letting Brad down if I didn’t bring the kids every week. And here was this woman, this widow, who had gone through something similar but had not only found her way back…she had become a pastor in the process.
And she was right. Three years later, I did start going back. I was ready. I announced to the kids that we were going to start going to church, and my goal was to get us there every other week.
“But why?” ten-year-old Haley groaned. “Why do we have to start going?”
“Because it meant something to your dad,” I replied. “His church community was extremely important to him growing up, and I know that he’d like for you to have that. And so we’re going to try.”
And sometimes just trying is the best we can do.
I still anticipate the days that I know will be hard. Even though I was hopeful that the passage of time would make my cluster of dates in June and July easier (and in some ways it has), I’ve learned by now that it will never be easy. By the fourth year, I knew to clear my calendar of important things for at least three weeks and forgive myself for the days when I just needed to stare at a blank wall. I journal, cry, and don’t even attempt to explain to the people around me why, years later, there are days when it feels like he was just here, playing in the yard with the kids. And that there are days when it feels like yesterday that he was suddenly taken from all of us.
I know that when Haley and Sarah get married, I’ll wish with all of my heart that he could be there to walk them into their new lives.
I know that when Michael graduates, he’ll be wishing his dad was sitting in the audience cheering him on because he knew he could do it.
I know the first time one of them has a baby, I’ll be looking into that little face to see if I see a resemblance to their grandfather.
And you know what? That’s okay.
Knowing these things and acknowledging the fact that there will be times that I will miss Brad for the rest of my life will never stop me from finding a life that I can be happy with. What has been one of the greatest “healers” for me is attempting to live my life as fully as possible so that my new memories are just as happy as my old ones. I laugh when I think about all of our misguided Daddy Days. I get a smile on my face every time I see my dad curse over a Christmas present that has five hundred pieces he has to put together. I can acknowledge my grief and sm
ile through my tears, wishing that Brad could be here but being happy at the same time.
My life is not just about the old milestones.
It’s also about enjoying the milestones yet to come.
- Dating -
mom…don’t read this part
19
I’m just going to get this out of the way right now.
I started dating early.
The reason I wanted to come clean is because questioning whether to date, or when, are usually some of the first things that people think of when they lose their spouse. And it took me a while before I was able to tell myself one simple phrase.
It’s okay.
It’s okay to wonder just days after your husband died if you will ever fall in love again…or even if you want to. It’s okay to be curious about whether you still have it in you to be attractive to another man. It’s okay that you suddenly start paying attention to bare ring fingers much more than you ever used to…and then are curious why you even care.
It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s okay.
My wonder and worry about dating pretty much started right after the funeral. I suddenly became painfully aware of how middle-aged and motherly I had allowed myself to become, something that I think Brad was comfortable with but that probably wouldn’t go over well with someone new. Much of what I thought about when I was out on those long walks, trying to outmaneuver my grief, was that I’d better start paying more attention to how I looked to the outside world and get my shit together. Otherwise I would be alone for the rest of my life. Around and, around my neighborhood I would go, convincing myself that I was improving myself and that love, a stable relationship, and, therefore, some kind of inner peace were just around the corner.
Confessions of a Mediocre Widow Page 23