Even If

"Guilt is the unwanted companion of Grief."

David Kessler wrote that, a man who is an authority on grief. I don’t think as a little boy that he grew up thinking that’s what he wanted to be someday, but life is unpredictable. I’m learning that.

I’ve written a lot about sorrow and loss. Sometimes I do a deep dive and bring up the depths of guilt I feel over your death, Baby, but it’s a tangled mess of murky thoughts and rotting feelings. It smells bad and looks worse and I don’t know what to do with it once I bring it to the surface. Will I be judged by others the way I judge myself for my failures in your final days? Quickly, it becomes a heavy load and I release it back to the depths and hope it will fade away somehow.

But that’s not how we get free from dead weight, is it? Shame keeps it tethered to my ankles and no matter how hard I try to kick it away, it just hangs on. We have to bring our fears into the light. Speak them out loud. Take a look at them and see if they’re telling us the truth about ourselves.

They’re not.

I joined an online support group for widows, did I tell you that? I'm still finding my way. I know it’s been three years since you left us, but it’s hard for me to believe that. You still look so alive in your pictures. I still listen to your voice mails. I still sleep with your shirt at night. It helps me to meet with this international group of women via Zoom to sort out all the tangled debris left behind when our husbands died. We’re an Ambush of Widows, a Widow’s Army, Warrior Widows. We each know how much courage it takes to walk through this. We understand one another’s broken hearts.

Our fearless leader led us through the complex problem of guilt today. Why it burdens us even though we did the best we could with the information we had at the time. It comes down to this: we would rather feel guilt about not saving our beloveds than face the fact that we have no control over life and death.

It’s easy to look back with 20/20 vision and see where I could have done some things differently. But here’s what I learned today. Rather than view those desperate circumstances with the thought, “If only I had . . .” and be weighed down with a mountain of regret, the truth looks more like this: “Even if I had . . .”

Even if you and I had secluded ourselves away from every other person on the planet -
Even if I had realized we had contracted covid when we'd dodged it for a year -
Even if I had sought help for us sooner -
Even if I had beaten down the doors of that hospital and demanded they let me be with you still–

Even then I still might have lost you.

I have been punishing myself for what I didn’t know and for what I could not control. Now I know why I do that. Now I know it was not my fault, though I will have to keep telling myself the truth until I no longer question it. Now I know life and death are not in my hands.

Now I know - I just didn’t want to let you go.