I’m so lonely. It’s the hardest thing to deal with. It comes on me so often in the twilight, just like tonight, when I’m tired and need Rob. I need Rob. I’ve always needed Rob. When I was sixteen and we fell in love and I knew in my bones, in the bones of my soul even, that I felt safe with him, I needed him. I was protected by him. Seen and loved by him. His patience was a safe harbor for me, one I’d never experienced in all my life.
He was always my safe harbor. Always the voice of
reason and calm. He never jumped to conclusions. Never held a grudge. He
wasn’t superman. He had his faults, thank goodness, or we could have never even
been friends. But he was my hero. I was so lucky to be his wife and the love of
his life for forty-six years, all told.
I was thinking today that if, whether by magic or miracle,
he would return to me suddenly, that after all these months and months, three
and a half years, of being forced to live without him, I’ve probably changed in
ways I’m unaware of and he might step in and start telling me how I ought to do
things his way because “it’s easier,” and then the fight would be on. It made
me feel sad. Like I’m in this in between space of waking up and breathing every
day, seeing familiarity develop as each year goes by and I have to do life
without him, making memories without him, and yet longing for him so much that
I can’t stop the deep ache in my heart. I'm doing the impossible, moving forward against my will. But it would be worth fighting with him
just to be in his arms again.
I can’t stop it sometimes, the longing for him. I can’t
“be grateful” most of the time. I can’t “put a positive spin” on it ever. He
should still be here. He should still be here.
It must be a tiresome thing to be a friend to a woman
like me. Deeply mourning her soulmate, well past the time most people think it
should take to be over him. I will never be over him. I’ve written about this
so often, using every word picture I can imagine to describe what it’s like to
lose half your body and, to both your surprise and sorrow, still find yourself
breathing. How tiresome to touch base with me or read my recent thoughts in a
post and discover that the tears still fall every day, my life is still
completely changed, and I don’t know where happiness is anymore. And that if you
truly want to know what it’s like to be a widow, you will eventually realize
you can never fix this.
How tiresome to keep coming back for more of that. How
tiresome of me not to change my thoughts and make my life better and think to
myself that Rob “would want me to be happy.” No one knows what Rob would want.
He never got the chance to tell us.
Surviving the loss, the untimely death, of your person
takes the rest of your life. How ironic to call it surviving, then. We think
surviving is the victory that sets us free to live. To move on. Go forward.
Find your way. There’s no finish line for this kind of survival, though. Never
before have I had to work so hard to get through one painful breath at a time
as I do now in moments like these. To be honest, this happens in moments now
instead of every other minute as they did for the first entire year or more.
But when these moments happen, when grief comes to the surface again, I am
swept away once more in a tsunami of sorrow. It’s true that the waves of grief
become further apart as time goes by, but they are never less intense.
People are ashamed of grieving. Embarrassed by it,
whether it’s their own or someone else’s. There is a vulnerability inherent in
grief. It plays no favorites. It reduces a person to their most basic self,
stripping away pretense, washing away dreams and priorities. You find out who you
are in grief. Do you believe that God is still good or will you spit in his
face and run from him forever? Of the friends who remain when the storm ceases
to roar, which ones have learned to see you and hear you and which ones have taught you how to do the same? Of the magnitude of blessings that remain in
your life, are you able to wrap your arms around them and see their pain in
this loss, too? In a world divided between those who still have and those who
have not, can you be glad that they still have what you don’t? At least for
now? Can you hold space for yourself, hold space for the empty space left
behind by your love, feel the ache that never goes away even while you laugh
and spend time with someone who loves you?
We see through a glass darkly, not yet face to face.
We are not entitled to answers. Perhaps because we can’t handle the truth. We
don’t speak the language of truth. We can’t see what’s waiting for us in a
dimension we’ve never experienced. We’re in the waiting room, and it might be a
long wait. A long time before we see our beloved again, face to face. What kind
of roots am I putting down right now, how far do they stretch into the earth
while I desperately search for stability in the aftermath of being violently
shaken? I don’t know.
I don’t know.
There were long stretches in my life when I thought I
understood how life works. How God works. I had answers, but no questions. Now
I have questions, but no answers. And as time goes on, and I gain more
experience in carrying grief, a thing that cannot be fixed, I realize a map has
been drawn leading from where this began to where I am now. Others are
beginning to need that map. Others are beginning their own journeys along this
inevitable road, and I am sorry. So very sorry. I’m sorry that I once thought a
scripture verse could stop the bleeding in someone’s broken heart. I’m sorry
that I thought grief and loss were contagious and kept my distance from those
in pain. I am sorry that I didn’t know or practice the art of simply showing
up.
Grief was once my enemy. Grief is now my friend. It
reminds me that I once loved deeply, that I was once loved deeply, and that
missing Rob is temporary.
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