Thirty-nine months to the bottom

I hit bottom last month. It wasn’t pretty. Tonight, thirty-nine months after Jane’s death, I seem to have begun to recover from the agony that was mid-February. But I am very aware of how far I have to climb to begin to feel that I have a future beyond pain.

Thirty-nine months is a long time to live with silence.

There are several technical terms for what I am dealing with: prolonged grief, compassion fatigue, complicated grief… The words are a poor attempt at describing what I have faced over the last three years and three months–or the last three years and seven months, if you count the time between Jane’s diagnosis and her death–or four years and one month, if you want to start from the time things really started going south–when she was experiencing swollen feet and the beginnings of her heart problems.

Thirty-nine months–or more–on the point of the spear

There is nothing pretty about watching anyone die from cancer. It is exhausting for the patient. It is exhausting for the spouse. It is frustrating for the patient. It is frustrating for the spouse. You are both out on the point of a spear. There are people trying to help you both, but the two of you really feel alone out there. You feel alone because no one else you deal with intimately is losing their other half at that moment. It is a thing you do not understand until you have been there.

I watched my wife die. I held her hand.

And even when there is someone going through something similar close to hand, you are all caught up in the immediacy of your own issues. Death is a lonely place, whether you are the one dying or the one watching the death of the person you love most.

Thirty-nine months of second-guessing

Grief is also, more often than not, a lonely place. It is, in many ways, more lonely than walking the path of the dead with your loved one. the struggle toward death is something the two of you share. The surviving spouse faces a different kind of loneliness–a different kind of emptiness and pain. I’m not sure either  is worse than the other–but there is a difference.

I didn’t want to write or clean or do anything about anything.

Logically, I know I did everything I could for Jane. Logically, I know letting her die when she did was the right thing to do–and that I chose the right time to let her go. But emotionally is an entirely different story. In 39 months, I have not been able to roll onto her side of the bed. It is only in the last two weeks that I have moved my wedding ring from my left hand to my right–and then for only a part of each day. And it takes a conscious effort of will to do so.

Thirty-nine months–and then a change

There are still times that hours vanish in wandering from room to room or staring at a wall or the ceiling. There are still moments when I see a crocus poking out of the ground and am reduced to tears. Those things are less frequent than they were, but they still happen. They still leave me bewildered.

Grief is also, more often than not, a lonely place.

But something has changed in recent days. The walls do not feel so close. The silences are not quite so unbearable. There is more hope in the tears to go with the still-present sorrow. Something has changed.

Thirty-nine months without hope

I had given up all hope of finding real love in my early 30s. I had stopped looking for it. And then, there was Jane. The weight of grief last month had pushed me down to the point I gave up hope of ever feeling anything else again. I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t want to write or clean or do anything about anything.

So I stopped doing anything for a week beyond embracing grief. Somewhere in that week I found something of myself again. I managed to forgive myself for my own sorrow and my own grief. I realized I had earned the right to grieve and that I was not going to get any better until I stopped feeling guilty about feeling so wretched. I earned the right to those feelings and needed to embrace them and what they meant.

Thirty-nine months of recovery

We talk in my grief group about how each of us got to the “death-do-us-part” part of the wedding vows. To get there requires a special kind of love–one that does not wilt under the first serious disagreement or the opening notes of  the descent into death. The death of one in that kind of love is going to be painful for both the living partner and the dead one.

Death is a lonely place…

I watched my wife die. I held her hand. I helped her fight for as long as she could. And when it was time for her to die, I let her go as gently as I could–and with every honor I could give her. I did all that I could for her while she was alive–and do all that I can to kill the thing that killed her for everyone else.

Thirty-nine months of moving forward

I’m sure I will have dark days again–but I have a sense that the worst of the darkness and pain has drawn to a close. I can at least hope that is true.

I have a future beyond pain…

Thirty-nine months is a long time to live with silence. But even if I have to live through another 39 such months, I will survive them. I may need to close my eyes and rest from time-to-time, but I will endure. There is still work to do here.