Until The Wind Changes

My heart aches tonight. 

It’s been aching all day. Weekends are hard for some reason I haven’t quite figured out yet. There’s a lot I haven’t figured out. Why I stay up too late when I should be in bed. Why the sunlight on my face when I wake up makes me cry. What I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life.

I’m two months into the upheaval, nine counseling sessions down the road, and every single day I look into that photo of his face and ask him why he isn’t here. Tell myself I can’t believe he’s gone. I keep waiting for him to open the door and walk in. I pick up my phone realizing I haven’t heard from him and start to punch in his number when I remember. I roll over in the night and reach into empty space.

This is going to take a while. There’s no timetable. Just one foot in front of the other.

I know people survive this. I’ve asked a couple of them how. Their answers vary, but in general the response is that I will never get over it. I will never forget. I will simply learn to live with the pain, which of course, is not simple. But I’ll learn to live with it, nevertheless. Like a chronic back injury. Or rheumatoid arthritis. Or a broken heart. The grief spasms will become less intense and further apart, but the triggers will always . . . trigger.

For me, that happens a lot when I’m in our Tahoe. There are nearly 300,000 miles on that truck, and Rob and I put most of them on it together. Sometimes I find myself driving down the road and remember the way he always told me about the wind when we were out driving around, and the next thing I know I’m crying. He knew the direction the wind came from and where it was going. It’s all I can do to figure out where true north is. The conversation was so predictable that, after all those years together, I began to roll my eyes and wait for the science lesson.

I’d give my right arm right now for him to be here next to me explaining the change in the wind.

I’d give my right arm if God would explain the change in the wind.

He doesn’t explain much. I think if He did, I wouldn’t be able to understand it anyway. I guess it’d be like listening to someone talk to me in Portuguese. I think whatever life is like on the other side of the veil where God and Rob are, it’s very different than what I can see and feel where my clay feet are stuck to this ground. Kind of like when I try to watch a sci-fi movie—I can’t relate to the story line because I don’t live there. And everyone has three sets of eyes.

I comfort myself with that odd little piece of logic. Sometimes. Mostly, I just find myself staring at pictures on my phone of my husband and me and our dog, standing in front of that fireplace last Christmas. How could things have changed so fast? We were surrounded by half-opened boxes in that photo. Like Mary Poppins, it turned out we were only there until the wind changed.

The wind can change directions in one heartbeat, I discovered.

How am I supposed to go on without him? My world has held Rob McLeod in it since I was a teenager. Suddenly, and against my will, I have no choice but to make a new life for myself when I was perfectly happy with the old one. I didn’t ask for this. It wasn’t even on the radar. But here I am, waking up to that stupid happy sun every morning telling me to rise and shine.

Let me be perfectly clear. I have never risen and shone. That was Rob’s job. I always mumble and drag.

As unfamiliar as I am with how this grieving thing is supposed to work, others are also in the dark about it. They say I’m in this or that stage of grief when actually there are no stages. It’s just one big melting pot of emotion. Some worry that I’m not finding more happiness in my day, giving me the impression I’m not trying hard enough for them. Others try to provide answers known only to God.

Everything I’m experiencing is the normal and horrible truth about grief. I received Rob’s first life insurance check last week and cried my eyes out. I didn’t want it. I want him. Another widow I know said she had the same reaction when it happened to her. Yesterday I took some empty boxes to the storage units that represent what’s left of our life together and filled the hallways with the sound of sobbing. Fortunately, I was the only one there. I think. Right now it’s hard to watch movies because we enjoyed doing that together. It seems every storyline reminds me of what I’ve lost. Romances are out. Happy families make me cry. The only good flick now is one where the main characters hate each other. There’s no chance that will make me miss Rob.

I miss his arms around me. God, how I miss his arms around me.

I used to have a home. A partner in life. A best friend to talk with and laugh with and fight and love with. Now I have three keys to spaces filled with cardboard boxes and bookcases and a heart full of memories too painful to look at.

In the last hours of Rob’s life, a hospice worker stepped into our space and put my name on their mailing list for the next year. Now an unseen counselor sends me letters of support, assuring me he’s thinking of me in my grief journey. At first, I didn’t want anything to do with this communication. After all, I’ve never even met the man. But every computer-generated note includes pamphlets that describe what I’m probably experiencing, and they’re always on target. And validating.

I got another one last week. This isn’t the kind of reading material I’d gravitate toward normally, but since I, like so many, am unfamiliar with what grief really looks like, I’ve been devouring the information inside.

You can expect, the brochure began,

That your grief will take longer and more energy than most people think.

Your grief will involve many changes and be continually developing.

Your grief will show itself in all spheres of your life: psychological, social, and physical.

Your grief will entail mourning not only for the actual person you lost but also for all of the hopes, dreams, and unfulfilled expectations you held for and with that person, and for the needs that will go unmet because of their death.

Your grief will involve a wide variety of feelings and reactions, not solely those that are generally thought of as grief, such as depression and sadness.

The loss will resurrect old issues, feelings, and unresolved conflicts from the past.

You may have a combination of anger and depression, including irritability, frustration, annoyance or intolerance. 

You will feel some anger and guilt or at least some manifestation of these emotions.

You may have a lack of self-concern. 

You may experience grief spasms—acute upsurges of grief that occur suddenly with no warning.

You may begin a search for meaning and question your religion and/or philosophy of life.

You may find yourself acting socially in ways that are different from before. 

Society will have unrealistic expectations about your mourning and may respond inappropriately to you.

I can’t help but wonder how Rob would be handling his grief had things turned out differently—if I’d been the one who didn’t make it and he did. Maybe he’d have kept it in the Grief Box, pulling it out when he needed to, closing the lid whenever another box needed his attention. Men from Mars are like that—one subject at a time. Women from Venus are the total opposite—I know. Shocker. We don’t have boxes. We have miles and miles of tangled wires, all connected to one another.

This is a tangled journey I’m on. It’s not predictable. It can’t be scheduled. It’s unfamiliar. It’s the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. It’s confusing. It makes me and others uncomfortable and sad. I feel like I was caught in a tornado and dropped here, wounded and bleeding, surrounded by the fragmented pieces of my life.

The wind did that. It changed direction, and we couldn’t get out of the way.

I wish I’d paid more attention during Rob’s science lessons.