I have a new friend who is also a widow. We talk on the phone, go to grief groups, and have met up for lunch. My friend happens to be a man, which is just so cool because I know what it feels like to be a female widow, but to hear him express his grief and his feelings for his wife is so very interesting.
I enjoy our talks and he is never afraid to get weepy in front of me and the stuff he talks about makes me teary eyed also. But that's OK.
In many ways, his grief is more difficult for him than mine is for me. He is self employed and the foggy brain that grief gives you makes it very tough to perform his work with the attention and skill it requires.
He is also coping with the loss of his wife's income and of her running the house and doing the shopping.
Today at lunch, which we trade off paying for, I asked him, "Morris(not his real name),--what makes you get up in the morning now? What makes you keep going? What do you look forward to?"
I found it sad that he is still incapable of coming up with a person or an event or a trip or anything that sparks his enthusiasm for the future. His six months without his beloved wife comes up on May 1.
Morris is different than most men I've run across. He is a thoughtful,
expressive man who talks about his feelings. If he was like that around
his wife, she must have known what a rare person she had.
We talk a lot about our spouses, and we know each others' special person pretty well, I think. We listen, and also talk about everything else under the sun including UFO's spirits, death, religion, financial matters, disgusting people and drugs and health. BUT I have never offered him, and he has never offered me advice or suggestions.We both know now that one person can't 'fix' another's grieving.
As I listened to his answers to my questions, I came up with a suggestion that I did not give him: A LIST.
That's what Morris needs. He needs to focus on just one thing at a time. He needs to have a daily list of things that a proficient person in his occupation would do to be a success. He needs to be able to cross off just one item that he completed so he knows he is still a guy who gets things done. He also needs to make another long term wish list. A dream list, a bucket list- whatever you want to call it.
When I asked him the questions about what he looks forward to, I really wanted to hear his answers because I like to hear what other widows do with their lives after they become just one person instead of a couple. While Morris didn't have an answer for me, other than saying. "just getting through each day", I knew that he will start thinking about the questions, and the wheels in his head will start moving toward dreaming about how he wants his life to look like in the future.
The same questions I asked him are ones I'm asking myself. I haven't written my own list either, but I have some things I definitely want to do in the very near future. Long term lists remain too impossible at this point. I haven't seen a bereft person yet with so much focus on their future that they are certain of all the items on some 'Must Do' list.
And for those who read this and speculate that I think of Morris in a romantic way, I don't. Neither of us can. Its a determined decision he made to wait at least a year before a move of any kind or a life changing event. I like that. Its what a friendship should be. No motives, no games, just shared thoughts, ideas, memories and the retelling of stories from our lives with a new companion who is hearing them for the first time.
Today is April 17th. It has been 6 months since I last saw Gary alive. Half of a year. 182 days since I heard his weak, quavering voice, but still, his voice, asking me for help. I'm halfway through this year of firsts in my new existence without Gary.
I talked to my neighbor lady last night who is about 84, and a widow since she was in her early 50's. She said she was dusting the other day and she picked up a framed photo of her husband who died in 1982. She looked at it and cried. She told me, "I asked myself, when will I stop crying about him?" We both know the answer. Never. She will never stop missing him just as I will never not miss Gary. That's the way it is.
I think about the people who just lost their family members in Boston and how they are being forced to grieve so publicly. I feel for them in the long days ahead missing those people who should never have died so young.
A few days ago, I was recalling promises made to me and how they changed my life.
The first, and most amazing promise made to me was from my dad when I was 10 years old. My dad was a fireman and at the time, was required to live within the city limits of Sioux Falls. We lived in a pretty cool neighborhood where everyone knew everyone else and both the adults and kids got along fairly well. Block parties and coffee parties were the norm for us. One neighbor was Barney Barnes who had a Foremost Milk route. Most city dwellers had Fenns or Lakeside boxes outside their doors for milk, but we had Barney deliver our glass milk bottles as the last stop on his route to round out his day.
Barney had always had horses. I LOVED horses! I lusted after them from the first memory I have.
My mom saved a tiny little pencil drawing of a horse I made when I was five. She kept it because you can actually tell that it is a horse with a saddle on it.
Barney had grown daughters so he adopted me as his cowgirl helper. We made twine into rope and then into lariats. He gave me two lariats. For my birthday once he gave me a quirt, which girls use when barrel racing horses. I used it to threaten my older sister with.
Barney occaisionally took me out to ride horses where he kept his, at a farm just a few miles away. His friend Norm had some safe horses that he let me ride. I was in horse heaven.
But, when I got home, I would not just feel sad, I cried for days from withdrawl from horses. I wanted one SO BADLY. On my 10th birthday, dad took me out to a riding stable after work and bought an hour on a horse for me. Just me and the horse in a riding ring. Dad sat under a tree most of the time, bored to tears.
I will never forget that birthday gift, though. It was the best birthday ever.
In late 1967 just shortly before this song hit the radio, I was sitting at the kitchen snack bar drawing horses. I was still 10 at the time. I don't remember the conversation's beginning, but my dad told me he was "sick of eating, sleeping and drinking HORSES." I suppose he thought I should have grown out of it. He sat down and gave me a promise that if I still loved horses when I was 30, he would buy me one. I bargained with him and got him down to age 20. "OK, if you are 20 and you still love horses, I will buy you one," he told me. I'm sure he thought he would not have to make good on the promise.
The years went on, Barney retired the milk route and Foremost Milk went out of business. Barney suffered a heart attack and had to take it easy during the long recovery. He rarely rode anymore so we just talked about horses mostly.
I started working and hanging out with boys, but I still loved horses, and the promise was always there in my thoughts. My dad and mom eventually sold the house in town when the city relaxed the rule and allowed firemen to live within 3 miles of the city limits. So they purchased enough land within the allowed perimeter and subdivided it into acreages to sell off as an investment. They kept about 2 acres and built their own home on it, which my boyfriend Gary worked with my dad on before we were married when I turned 18.
I know I told Gary about the promise, but he didn't think much about it, I'm sure. I lived at that house for about 3 months before we got married. When I was 19, I got a 'good job' at The Phone Company(insert fairy dust here) as an operator. It was the usual entry level job that was available in 1976.
On May 20, 1977, my dad called me and told me to come out to the house for lunch for my birthday. I was working a split shift, 8am to 11am, then due back from 4pm to 8:30pm. I drove from work downtown out to the house and parked in front of the garage. Dad hit the button on the opener and inside stood Lady, a bay POA (Pony of the Americas) with a pretty white sprinkling of white spots on her rear. Dad kept his promise and got me my horse.
The other important promise made and kept was from Gary. He promised to love me until death did we part. He did. He promised to be faithful. He was. There are many many times when anyone who is married wonders if it is worth it. I did, and Gary had to have. There were so many times when it was tempting to just call it quits. But, Gary NEVER said that to me, even if he was thinking it. He had a very different childhood from mine. He experienced loss from divorce. I think divorcing was the last thing he would have considered because of how it had made him feel when he was little. So he was determined to stick it out with me and keep his promise even though we didn't get along at times in our marriage. He told me once, if we got divorced, it would have to be me that would ask for it, not him. Its kind of an empowering cushion to know that I held the key to staying together. I never asked, we stuck it out, and we were rewarded for doing so.
I always felt I was the luckier one to be married to him. He was tall, good looking, and a talented hard worker. He could have found many other women to be with. We talked about that shortly before he died. He said he had always been faithful and I know he was. It makes it even harder to give up this guy that I had to give up. He is irreplaceable.
So the two men who were so important to me were the ones who made promises which they kept even years after making them. I mean, really-- what dad would give their adult, married daughter a HORSE!! And what guy anymore is so stubborn that he refuses to give up on the relationship he promised to stay in when he was only 19?
You've probably heard the one, 'Promises are meant to be broken.' Aren't I lucky that my dad and my husband never believed in that old saying?
If you noticed, until the post I made on 4/8, I hadn't posted for over a month. The entry of 4/8 was actually started the first week of March, but sat as a draft for weeks while I did everything else but write on the blog.
I don't know why I took a leave of absence from the blog, but even though I thought of it a lot, I just could not bring myself to open it, read it or add to it. I was avoiding it. Many times, ideas and thoughts came up that I could have written about, but the act of logging in to write just didn't happen.
I have felt strangley 'quiet' inside the last month. That's the only way I can describe how this feels. Certain things that used to be so upsetting before just don't upset me as much. Not enough to amplify their importance by writing about it, anyway. Gary's repeated advice to me, "Let it go." echos in my head so often now that I think I finally am able to take that advice from him. He's just a year older than me, but in some ways he seemed to have absorbed more of a mellowed common sense than I have. Maybe it had something to do with having Parkinson's, because that's when he developed a more easy going attitude. So, thanks for that, Gary.
Additionally, posting these blog posts is mentally trying. I cry when writing and editing them, although when I read them after they are posted, they seem almost emotionless. So, by avoiding the blog entirely, I was trying to put some distance between me and runny mascara for a short time.
I was sweeping the garage this morning with a push broom that Gary has had since the cabinet shop days. I should sell it, because we have two and don't need two. But this one shows the paint worn off on the handle where Gary placed his hands so many times. Now I put my hands in those same spots and remember. Then is when I realized, that this is the stuff that I want to tell people about in the blog. This is what makes it worth writing about the things I remember, big and small, about my husband.
Even without logging into the blog, the week before last I had two awful days where I could not stop crying. Everything made me so sad that Gary is not here with me. Maybe it is God, or maybe its Gary speaking to me, but lately I often feel that some 'thing' is getting into my head with whispers and thoughts(no, not voices) that make sense. After those two exceptionally bad days, I was sitting down, just putting my shoes on, and I 'felt' the words of this thought: "I am not sorry for Gary, but I am sorry for myself."
I know on a previous entry I wrote that in Gary's last days here in our house, he told me, as tears ran down his face, "I'm not crying for me dying. I'm crying for leaving you all alone after I'm gone." Now I do cry for me. It is self pity and I don't feel it constantly, but it makes its comeback now and then.
The year of anniversaries marches on. I got through an angry anniversary- the one on March 13 when it was one year since Gary had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. April 9 was another anniversary. It had been one year since Gary's last day of work. Next comes Gary's birthday on April 13. That date in 2012 found us in the radiology department at Scottsdale Healthcare while I sat listening to Gary talk to the tech, telling her it was his birthday and she responding cheerily, "Well, Happy Birthday!" as he recieved his first CT scan to show a baseline of where and how big the tumors were before he began chemo. Just the other day I ran across the folder they gave us that day. It has "Happy Birthday!" and a smiley face written on it by a person in records. It was not a happy birthday, though. We were staying in a motel in North Phoenix, it was already hot and Gary was depressed at all of the changes he had been through in just one month. We went to Paradise Valley Mall to eat at Ruby Tuesday and I went into a Body Shop store to use a gift card I had from there. Gary was too tired to walk any further and sat on a bench while I was in the store. I came out with a gift set fit for a man. Olive essence soap, liquid body wash, shampoo and olive body butter. He liked it; especially as he had to start using the body wash in the shower instead of the bar of soap that he dropped but could no longer safely bend to pick up. He loved the body butter to rub on his dry skin and feet. I ended up using the shampoo up, as Gary's hair vanished down the drain soon thereafter. I finished off the body wash in January. Last week I watched the last sliver of his pretty olive green bar soap slip down the sink and I have just one more swipe left of the body butter. I am thinking that I will buy another set this year for his birthday as a small way of remembering a simple pleasure he got from it.
I think that Gary's 57th birthday will actually be better than his 56th- for both of us. Gary is no longer doomed to go through something so painful, frightening and horrifying to us both. He has no dashed hopes, no sleepless nights or endless days, no anxiety, no sadness, no regrets about what he did and didn't do, or couldn't do. In comparison to what he had to deal with last year, our journey now is a piece of cake. I will NEVER say, however, that he 'is in a better place'. The best place for Gary is still HERE, cancer-free, working, laughing and getting to grow old with or without me.
I plan to celebrate the way Gary would have if he had been able to last year. With family/friends who are one in the same at an 'All You Care To Eat' buffet complete with cake frosting and soft serve ice cream.
And later, when I open the wrapping on the new bar of Olive Essence soap, I can breathe in the fresh smell of Gary after he stepped out of the shower. And I will remember how good that is.
I want to give a shout out to a friend of Gary's who recently put something on his facebook page that was especially important to me.
First an overview:
Gary had a company truck for the 10 years he was with his company. The two of us never took this luxury for granted. I know that Gary would have wished for nicer trucks- perhaps one with an extended cab or cruise control, but hey- beggars can't be choosers, right?
Those plain vanilla Ford F-150's came in handy every day and we got to run around with it as if it were our own vehicle. It was from those trucks that Gary honked at Robbie and me on our morning walks as he drove past us on his way to work. >Honk Honk< "Hey Robbie!!" Gary would yell. I tried to get Robbie to see who it was, but the dog didn't connect the dots that it was his person in that truck telling him goodbye.
Gary was a truck guy from day one. His first car was a tiny Opal I'm told. I never got to see it, because when I met him as an 18 year old, he had just purchased a shiny new navy blue Ford truck which was very very nice, but also very unusual for the average 18 year old to own. With stock rims, and not jacked up, it was meant for WORK that a carpenter would do.
Throughout the years, Gary owned a lot of nice trucks and a couple of nice GMC vans, too. But if he ever was behind the wheel of a car, as in a rental, he looked very out of place. One reason- his head always hit the roof of a car, he was so tall. Trucks fit him like a glove, though.
I was reading facebook and an entry by Javier made me tear up, because it was so thoughtful. Dear Javier is the recipient now of Gary's old company truck, a nicely worn 2011 Ford F-150. His entry on facebook stated that he doesn't really like a song he heard on the radio the other day. Called it poorly written and badly constructed(he's a music critic in his spare time). Yet, listening to the words the other day, he was reminded of the history of the vehicle he was driving and when he looked in the rearview mirror, it wasn't his own face he saw, but Gary's.
Here is the song by Lee Brice:
Not being a country music fan, I had to pull it up on You Tube myself. But of course, it was just so appropriate, and so like Javier to make this kind observation.
Yesterday, April 9th, was the one year anniversary of Gary's last day of work. He drove the truck home and cleaned out the glove box and all the canvas organizers he had gotten for the truck with his Pep Boy points. He found the spare keys and I followed him as he drove the truck over to his then assistant manager's house to leave the truck in his driveway. I can only guess what what going on in his head. I felt kind of sick myself.
It was the last time Gary ever drove a truck.
Javier, as assistant manager, now drives that lovely truck that Gary and I spent so many hours in and I have so many memories of. It takes Javier all over Southern California on the same roads Gary traveled on and will do so until it has so many miles it will be replaced. For now, that truck is still a piece of Gary's legacy proving that he was THERE.
Why do you think I write this blog?
For fame and fortune? Hardly. For my ego?
I would much rather lose 60 lbs because that's a legitimate ego booster!
Some would say it is so that I get sympathy.
With all the crap going on out there, wanting others to feel sorry for me is the last thing I need.
I write this because I learn things about myself. I also am obligated to educate others as to what grieving really IS. This edict comes from many of the books addressed to grievers, but mostly I hear it from the bereavement group sessions and the things we are told there by our counselors. We are the ambassadors of grief.
There's one major thing I've learned; there is no such thing as an expert griever. Just like a marriage, or being a parent, we can never master this. We are always works in progress.
I remember a little embroidery picture that my mom made for one of the kids' bedrooms. It had a little boy on it and the stitching said, "Please be patient with me, God isn't finished with me yet." Years later, I think that relates to me as an adult dealing with my life and situation now, just as it did to mothering my little boys.
"Patience is a virtue". That's an old adage. And here's another one that graced many bathrooms in my childhood, "Cleanliness is next to Godliness". Humankind sure comes up with a lot of pat sayings to most of life, don't we?
The 'patience is a virtue' ideal can work both ways. I ask for others' patience who have not experienced what I have YET. I also need to have that same virtue when I have the gnawing feeling that everyone is tired of putting up with my drawn out grieving. (I mean, really, its BEEN almost six months!)
It never ends you know- the grief you feel when someone has physically gone away. I met a man in a grief group who lost his wife 15 years ago. Even though he had remarried, he was grieving his first love still and even more now because he just lost his adult daughter. In some ways I feel like I miss my dad more now than when he died in '93! I have cried sometimes because I didn't do more for my grandma before she died in a place too far away from most of her family. I still LOVE these people very much and I always will miss them and appreciate them
Grief is not about 'moving on'. Please don't use that tired old phrase. We are ALL on moving conveyor belts and we like to think we have control, and can jump off at any point, but there are walls that keep us on that moving sidewalk which we didn't plan or build. For most of our lives, we assume that the sidewalk will get us to the destination we plan and can see up ahead. But, there are times, when we are just along for the ride and there's this big hulking guy ahead of us blocking us from seeing what's in front of him. We can't move on when we can't get around this blockage.
Grief is not all bad! Part of it is like being 16 and you just got your drivers license and your mom is sending you on an errand in the Chevy. You have freedom and choices. When you are in high school no one knows WHAT the heck they will do two months from now, let alone two years from now. Everyone has suggestions though, "Try this.!" "Do that." "Go here- go there!" That's exactly how you feel when you suddenly get your unwanted freedom from someone who died and left you alone. There are choices that you never wanted, but you have to make. There is also some freedom about what choices you do make.
I haven't taken the time I had wanted to to read the tomes out there written about death and grieving. I talk to some fellow grievers about how I feel and listen to them talk about how they feel. Neither of us comes up with any advice for each other. Please- we can get that in spades from other sources. Still, it would be nice to read real life experiences from literate people who are going through this. When will I take the time? I don't know.
Since I just started this class of Grief 101, I haven't gotten very many answers. Its mostly an online course so there's no access to an instructor in the flesh, just the TA out there in cyberspace who grades my papers. I didn't want to spring for the expensive textbook either, so I just listen in on the discussions and get what I can from the other participants.
I have a feeling that this will be a lifelong learning class for me. No A - F grades, not even a Pass/Fail. Hopefully, grading is on the curve and the curve is made up of all people who have and who will experience death. That's the only fair way.
