SEPARATION
Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.
~ W. S. Merwin
Category Archives: grief
While waiting…
“Murder postponed” was the first title I came up with for this post, but that is unnecessarily sensationalist for my usual taste. However, it probably does reveal the current tone of my meditations.
I’ve been thinking about why this swimming pool demolition project is proving to be more emotionally unnerving than I expected. I did fully expect that it would start today, which is why bright and early I was waiting and ready. Bright and early dear Mr. Bread was on hand as well, but we soon discovered that my lack of familiarity with the communication style of contractors had caused me to misunderstand a particularly misleading worker. The work will not proceed quite yet, so I have time to think about it all here on my blog..
I was until recently married, for most of my adult life, and I am trying to adjust to the ending of that earthly relationship. For more than half of my married life I was also a pool owner, so I had a sort of relationship with my pool, and that is ending, too, not by death or divorce, but by me murdering my pool.
I hope it is not dishonoring to my late husband to think about our marriage as being in any way similar to that concrete container; I am just contemplating the emotional strain of things changing. If my husband were here helping me change the backyard landscape, I would no doubt be comforting him, and probably not acknowledging my own angst, but now I have to comfort myself about one more change.
Kate wrote that she is trying not to be too emotional about what is a very logical decision. 25 years ago when we were house-shopping, we reluctantly settled on a house with a pool, having originally excluded that option from our plan. We had only expected to live here a couple of years anyway! Of course, our whole family became invested in that pool and enjoyed it, and many of our friends have written to tell of their important memories of swimming and baptisms.
But for me to go on here in this house and on this property, it is very helpful to be able to create an alternative physical space to go along with my new life. This pool has outlived its usefulness as a place for people to have fun, and now presents as only a big bathtub that needs to be kept clean. Not being a great one for that kind of chore, I’m thankful I have the resources to change it out for a living and breathing ecosystem that will be friendly to bees, butterflies, birds, children and tea parties.
Once I didn’t have to stay around for the work that wasn’t happening this morning, I realized I could go to church after all and celebrate my priest’s name day with a warm and joyful church family brunch after Liturgy. It was encouraging to talk to people about my ongoing grief and projects; I am so thankful for this community that upholds me in so many ways.
I have some more time to finish my preparations for my first meeting with a landscape designer who specializes — and what California landscaper doesn’t? — in what we call waterwise gardening and irrigation. Yesterday I dug out the few plants I want to keep that were on the edge of the pool, so close that they might end up in the hole, and I put them in safe and moist places until we figure out where they will work into the new landscape.
I got so hot and tired in the middle of that task, and mused as I worked over the timing of my project: should I have waited another year, or at least a few more months, to begin? I concluded that it was right and good for me, being a gardener and naturally taking
delight in planning a garden, researching about plants, and imagining a beautiful natural space. If I didn’t have this creative work to do, just what would I be doing right now?
I’d probably be feeling guilty about not doing all the sorting and cleaning that needs attention inside the house, much of it the kind of work that requires decision-making or skills that I’m not so good at, and that feel too formidable right now. Also I’d feel bad about putting water in the pool all summer long! Once I get through the next weeks and begin to see the unfolding of the vision, I will be less anxious. And for now, we can all take a little longer to say good-bye to the pool that we didn’t want, but were thankful for, and now don’t want again. Good-bye, Pool!
When Husbands Die
Soon after my husband’s death I read When Husbands Die
One reason for the solitary aspect is the uniqueness of every relationship, and of each griever. This collection of women’s stories was interesting in that the women were all educated and able to write articulate and thoughtful responses to the questions, whether they were in their first months of grieving or years down the road. Most of them did not have to struggle financially, even if their husbands had died fairly young.
Shortly after reading the book I told people that it was something like reading a sociology textbook, and a little dry, but now I think, wasn’t that what I needed? I certainly didn’t want to read anything dramatic about someone else’s trauma. C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed was not as helpful, partly because it was only one person’s story, and that of a man, one who hadn’t been married very long. I am a woman who had been married a long time.
I especially liked hearing from women who were at a later stage of grief, about how their lives had changed over the years since their husbands had died, and the ways in which they had built new lives that were good. I went back this week and reviewed the passages I’d highlighted on my Kindle. Here are a few of those favorites:
“…the shared stories indicate that women must work through three to five years of grief and change before they feel well on their way to a recovered, reinvented life. The hard work of grieving must be accomplished before healing takes place.”
“…disorientation, fatigue, loss of self-confidence, feelings of abandonment, shock, and bone-deep sadness.”
“…our culture…is not open to the commonality of death, and how important it is that we come to terms with it in our lifetime.”
“I think women are better able to cope. We are greater realists and more skilled at accepting change as part of life because of our biological natures: monthly changes, pregnancy, childbirth, etc. Widowers tend to remarry sooner. They don’t know how to nurture themselves.”
“Is it ever possible to have no regrets; to have accomplished all you wanted to do; to have said everything, done everything? No. Omissions you recall later may bring sadness, sometimes guilt, until you understand that it was important for you and your husband to do things in your own way. That’s the only way you and he had.”
“…dying is something each of us has to do alone, at least in a human sense? The moment must come when, in dying, we move beyond our surroundings into another space.”
“…it is a sudden time, when things must be left unsaid and undone.”
I ask this much.
When I think of the possibility that I might go on living on the earth another two or three decades without my husband, it seems preposterous, like a steep mountain I’ve been asked to climb after my feet have been amputated. How could Anyone ask me to do such a thing?
The truth is, He isn’t asking me to climb a mountain, and I am not so crippled. I have enough strength to do what the next hour and day demand, and that isn’t actually very much. A mountain may in fact be there in front of me, and the road does lead upward, but what peak I will eventually reach is certainly unknown and unimportant.
As long as I keep to my usual fashion of delighting in every flower and singing bird along the path, and while I enjoy the company of the Sweetest Companion on my walk, the time will continue to fly by and life will be good. Yes, I feel weak, and I am going at a snail’s pace. Sometimes I just sit down on a rock and bawl for a while, but I do get up and put one foot after the other again.
And every day, I feel a great Love surrounding me, like the pleasant air that holds me and gives me oxygen even while I am having those pity parties. Or like the sun whose heat is keeping me alive and giving me energy. This poem was the catalyst that brought all of these truths together for me.
PRAYER at SUNRISE
O mighty, powerful, dark-dispelling sun,
Now thou art risen, and thy day begun.
How shrink the shrouding mists before thy face,
As up thou spring’st to thy diurnal race!
How darkness chases darkness to the west,
As shades of light on light rise radiant from thy crest!
For thee, great source of strength, emblem of might,
In hours of darkest gloom there is no night.
Thou shinest on though clouds hide thee from sight,
And through each break thou sendest down thy light.
O greater Maker of this Thy great sun,
Give me the strength this one day’s race to run,
Fill me with light, fill me with sun-like strength,
Fill me with joy to rob the day its length.
Light from within, light that will outward shine,
Strength to make strong some weaker heart than mine,
Joy to make glad each soul that feels its touch;
Great Father of the sun, I ask this much.
–James Weldon Johnson 1871-1938
(Both photos are from Yosemite – upper one is Tenaya Lake.)
Gladsome Lights 