And So I Write

August, 2021

“This is pain,” she says. Hand over heart, or solar plexus or gut, wherever your body concentrates your grief. “May I be kind to myself,” she adds, waiting while I repeat after her. “May I be compassionate with myself, may I accept myself,” she finishes. This is the exercise she taught for when grief surrounds me, heart and soul and mind and body and I can’t breathe or find my way out and think I’ll never survive this loss.

This is pain.

This is grief.

This is hell.

I knew coming home to my temporary apartment might feel like this. Coming home after a big trip is always anticlimactic. But this time I came home alone. Without my right arm. My other half. My everything. I drove into the driveway, five thousand miles after I set out for his memorial service in Florida and sat in the car taking deep breaths.

This is it, I thought. From now on, I’m on my own. Still Rob’s wife, but no longer sharing life with him, shopping for us, planning or dreaming or laughing or loving or even bickering. The echoes of our life together are agonizing. The memories are too much, and my brain won’t let me look at them right now.

Today, everything hurts. Unpacking is always a chore. Today it takes every ounce of energy I possess to pull things out of the solitary suitcase and put them away. What is to become of me? What is my purpose now without Rob beside me? All the courage everyone else sees in me is invisible when I look in the mirror at my tearstained face. 

Who knew courage comes packaged in weeping?

I have lists of things to do. Breathing on this planet requires schedules. Appointments. Shopping. Consuming. Repeat as necessary. It’s been five and a half months since Rob died. Died. I hate that word. The only comfort I have right now is knowing how much God hates it, too, even though pastors insist that 'blessed in the sight of God is the death of His saints.' Jesus wept with loud, obnoxious sobs at the grave of his friend, Lazarus. 

Death was never what God had in mind.

But it’s the human experience. We’re all one hundred per cent terminal. That doesn’t worry me anymore personally. Still, the thought of losing another loved one is too much. “Too much.” That’s what my mother-in-law said as we hugged in her house last week. She’s buried all three sons and her two sisters in the space of three years. Nine years ago, she buried her own beloved.

Death is too much. 

I’d love to be happy again. Some people say it’s a choice. “Look on the bright side,” they encourage. “Be grateful for the years you had together.” And, “Remember how many other people are suffering, too.” Or maybe that’s what I tell myself in the moments when grief suffocates me. I’ll tell myself anything just to catch my breath.

Don’t mind me. This is still early grief, I’m told. That’s not good news. How many more day after days lie ahead of me, missing Rob and trying to absorb the truth that he’s not here anymore and never will be again?

A reality like that is too much.

August, 2023 

“This is pain,” I remind myself, thirty months after he died. I put my hand over my heart again the way she taught me to and give name to what I feel. “This is grief,” I say, for the thousandth time. I glance toward the kitchen that he never saw at the framed word art I hung there. “Be Kind To Yourself” it admonishes, reminding me of what she told me at the end of every session until one day, a few months into this sad space where I live, I blurted out, “What does that even mean?”

“It means to allow yourself to be human, to experience the suffering, the grieving. It means to treat yourself the same way you would treat another person who is hurting. With kindness. Gentleness. Compassion for yourself for all you’ve been through.”

For all I’ve been through.

I have lost so much. Some things I can’t mention here. Significant and difficult but also too personal. As for the others . . .

Two and a half years ago, I lost my beloved. My darling. My safe place. My true north. My best friend and playmate and first love and last love. And with him all the dreams we created together. The life we built. And our future.

In short order, I lost the home we’d just bought. The dream of sitting on our newly finished back deck looking out over the acre and a half that merged into forestry land, scanning the trees for glimpses of deer and elk while drinking morning coffee and cocoa. We never sat out there. Instead, we slept in separate hospital rooms until I was released and he never came home.

There’s been more loss since I drove to Florida to mourn with our family for him. Nearly a year to the day after losing Rob, our dog, Brody, died. The one with the tender heart who came to me and positioned himself against me every time the tears fell. He was six. I don’t know what happened. One day he was happy and playful, and the next day he changed. Within a month I told him goodbye as the vet carried him away, his loving spirit gone forever.

Sometimes there is too much loss. Too close together. Six months after Brody died, the counselor who walked me through the worst time of my life and reminded me to be kind to myself, retired. Some healing strategies were left suspended and incomplete. I bought a book she recommended to use on my own. It’s not exactly the same.

Grief, the feared stranger, came to my house to live. And stayed. I’d rather have my dog.

Long before our last session together, I worried out loud with my counselor about crying in front of my grandchildren. Would they be afraid to be around me? Would my tears frighten them or make them feel that hanging out with only YaYa and no Chief seemed empty? Would it remind them too much of their own loss?

“You are modeling grief for them,” she said. “They grieve their Chief, but there will be more losses in their lives. And when they experience them, they will know how to grieve. Because they watched you do it.”

What a strange purpose to have in this life I live daily but no longer recognize—modeling grief and the freedom to live in sadness and sorrow. “For as long as it takes,” she told me. That’s how long grief lasts.

I often describe this abrupt change forced on me as “feeling shattered.” Sometimes I feel an urgency to put the pieces back together as soon as possible. The pressure to get back to normal only complicates the process. The thing is, Rob and I were one. It’s God’s design in marriage. It took forty-six years of loving each other, goofing up together, misunderstanding and forgiving and trying again to discover who we were both apart and as one and then, somewhere along the way, I knew him better than anyone else on earth, as he also knew me. 

We were a team. We had each other’s backs. Sometimes we had each other by the throat, but those times were rare. We liked each other. We laughed together and cried and dreamed together. We won and lost together. That one hurts the most. The day we lost everything together. We lost the “together.”

You can’t put a shattered life back “together” when half the pieces are missing.

I miss him tonight. I miss him every night and morning and the hours in between. How could I not? He’s in my DNA. I hear myself saying the things he said. When I drive home late at night, I reach for my phone to text him that I’m on my way, but no one is there to read that text and I remember too late to stop the catch in my heart. To my surprise last fall, I began craving foods I’d never enjoyed before, all his favorite flavors. Baked goods like pumpkin muffins and ginger snap cookies.

But not fruitcake. I’ll never crave fruitcake.

Maybe tasting the things he loved makes him feel close to me again. Almost three dimensional, the same way he appears when someone is willing to listen to a memory of what we built together. Yet another reason why I journal about this grief. Telling my story and writing about him and our life nearly makes it tangible again.

Evenings are the hardest. I’m tired. I’m cooking for one on the nights I can convince myself to do it. I eat most meals by myself. And regularly I tell God, “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to do this life that I never wanted and never asked for and was forced into living.”

I had no choice. Did I say that loud enough? I never had a choice about being widowed. He never had a choice about dying. And leaving me and our family. Losing Rob still feels like losing an arm. It was an amputation. A tearing away of the two who became one.

This is pain.

This is grief.

Some days, this is still hell.

This is processing all of that, writing about it here, trying to find my way in the dark, doing the thing I don’t know how to do. Because I’ve never been here before and yet here I am.

And so I write.

I have to dump all of this pain out of my soul so I can breathe.

And so I write.

I write because shoving all of these feelings down out of view would destroy me. And that is what I know grief is not supposed to do.

In whatever ways we are alike or very different, we humans have this in common: we will all grieve at some point in our lives. If we let it, grief can connect us, enabling us to have compassion for ourselves and each other. If we don’t, or if we try to fix people who don’t need to be fixed, we all lose.

I, for one, have lost enough.

 

 

“Some things cannot be fixed; they can only be carried. Grief like yours, love like yours, can only be carried. Survival in grief, even eventually building a new life alongside grief, comes with the willingness to bear witness, both to yourself and to the others who find themselves inside this life they didn’t see coming. Together, we create real hope for ourselves, and for one another. We need each other to survive.”

 ― Megan Devine, It's OK That You're Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn't Understand

As Long As It Takes

Every day I check to see if I care yet. Not so far. Grieving takes as long as it takes. This is not only frustrating for me, but possibly for a few others.

Did you know grief was once considered a mental illness? In some circles it still is. My name just came up for jury duty at the Superior Court in downtown Phoenix. There are all kinds of things which make this kind of civic duty really difficult for me under any conditions, especially in Phoenix in August. I asked to be excused, explaining that I have recently lost my husband and I’m not up for the stress of jury duty right now. A judge reviewed my request and gave me a sixty or ninety day extension to get over it—my choice. He has a job to do and he needs jurors to do it. He didn’t care that I don’t care.

What would caring look like if it poked its little head out of my soul to check for its shadow? It would look like cooking healthy food for myself again. Or cooking anything for myself, which would save me money as well as calories. But do I care? Not enough to do it.

It would look like having fun again. Playing cards and games or staying in a cabin in the mountains or traveling to the ocean or going to see a movie. Even going out to eat with someone. The problem is those are all the things Rob and I did together. Everything reminds me of what we once had. What I once had. Having fun on my own doesn’t have the same appeal as it does when you’re doing it with your best friend.

It would look like going back to a gym. Taking risks. Finding a church. Showing up for Meetup groups instead of just signing up online and staying home anyway. Finishing at least one of the two novels I started back when I locked myself in the office to type while Rob watched a movie in his mancave. Finishing the quilt we started together during the lockdown, made from all his fire department shirt logos. Even simply watering the thirsty plants outside my window.

The longer this goes on, this interminable sorrow and the in-my-face change that makes up my life now, the harder it is to get my butt in gear and locate a direction that feels familiar to me. I’ve given up on “finding my purpose.” It’s too transient and vague. Too big and too vast. Too exhausting and obvious—if Rob were still here and we still had the life we’d only just begun as “mountain people”, there’d already be a purpose in place, a dream unfolding, discoveries and fun happening. Together.

It's the “together” part that is tripping me up. Everything in our world, our culture, is built around couples. Two for one specials at Dairy Queen are hard to cash in on if you’re alone in the drive-thru. Getting my hair and nails done doesn’t get me a dinner out. It just empties my bank account. If I could say anything positive about living alone it’s that I have new empathy for singles who’ve been on this path for decades. They know this is a couples’ world. There’s no new life without both males and females.  No baby birds. No baby people. No flowering plants. New tomatoes on the vine. No Hallmark plots. No date nights. No two-seater cars. No reason for Valentine’s Day.

Some may think it’s wrong to say that my identity was us. Now there is no us. Spiritual connection doesn’t count when you wake up with a bad dream and no one is there to put an arm around you. Comforting memories don’t cut it when the doctor removes another melanoma from your body. Mealtimes lose their flavor when you eat all of them alone and no one is there to thank you for cooking. Meteor showers aren’t worth getting up for when you stand in the backyard by yourself. There’s no one here to grin and follow me out the door when I announce, “I can see a thunderstorm in the distance, Baby! Let’s go find it!”

I know this is part of “life” even though it’s brought on by death. We’re all terminal, Rob used to remind me. We all have an expiration date. Sooner or later we’ll all lose someone we love like our own lives and our hearts will break, perhaps forever.

There’s no easy way around this because the only way through it is through it. No shortcuts. “It takes as long as it takes.” Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I need to move to France. Or a convent.  I’m tired of trying to figure out things on my own. Remembering to rotate the tires and change the oil and find a tall person to switch out light bulbs and a/c filters. It scares me to face my fears alone or risk sounding stupid to someone unfamiliar with my neuroses. Rob knew what a lunatic I am. There’s a lot of comfort in that kind of acceptance and a lot of fear in trusting the messy in my life to anyone else.

It's just lonely here in widowland. On top of missing Rob and doing whatever it takes to survive, including eating things that are awful for me and going broke on Kleenex, adding my grief counselor as a beneficiary in my trust and posting short, sad blogs here instead of finishing that silly novel that may never get published—every single thing I do every single day I do by myself.

I’m not a complete hermit, though. Talking on the phone with friends and family is always a bright spot in my day. Unless I’ve talked too long to too many and then I’m worn out. Still, I told my daughter last night that I think I’m turning into an introverted poop. I want to escape the house just like I've always needed to do, and I also don’t want to put on mascara and make myself look presentable enough to do it. I think they call that ambiguous. Or broken. I just can’t get my engine to fire so I can get going again.

On top of everything else that’s not working the way it used to, I think my internal battery is dead.

I know this isn’t everyone’s story who has lost their husband. Everyone grieves differently, I’ve been told in soothing tones by those who’ve never been here. Some days are better than others. Some moments I almost feel like me again. Sometimes I force myself to face my fears, plan a trip that includes driving a few hundred miles by myself, and continue the love of road trips that Rob and I relished doing together.

And other days I stand in front of an empty refrigerator deciding which fast-food place I’ll let cook for me again.

It’s not like I’m the only person to feel this way. It’s not like I’m not trying to care. I’m still talking to my counselor and journaling my feelings and going out in public and crying when I need to and opening the curtains and breathing in fresh air and hugging my kids and grandbabies and hoping for a brighter day and believing that Jesus will never stop holding me while realizing He knows what it feels like to be human.

It’s nothing to worry about.

It’s just my grief.

Sacred Cows

    I probably shouldn’t say this. It’s getting so there are so many sacred cows in the world now that they’re all stampeding. I might even say I’m taking my life into my own hands by using them to write my thoughts down. After all, political correctness has taken us so far that we can’t even laugh anymore. It’s insensitive to make fun of ourselves.

I don’t care. I’m just gonna write like no one’s reading.

Every single summer it’s hot. If you look up the word summer in a thesaurus, you’ll find these synonyms: brutal, sweltering, sweaty, exhausting, hellacious. Wait. No. Sorry. Those are the synonyms for Phoenix.

I’ve lived in the Phoenix metro area for forty-five of my sixty-five years. I lived on the gulf coast of Florida for another ten. The remaining ten spent in northern California’s Pacific coast are the only years of my life on planet earth when I owned a coat. I am experienced with hot climates.

What the heck is someone like me doing here? I don’t have the complexion for this.

And yet, here I am, a freckle faced pasty-skinned girl whose pastimes include growing skin cancers, thriving in the Arizona desert. Where summer runs from March until November and spring and fall are tiny bookends to our version of winter. Only the tough survive here and I don’t mean meteorologists.

It must be lonely to be a weatherman. Half the time you’re wrong and the rest of the time you’re not right. It’s miraculous the kind of job security this occupation provides. Still, summers like this one keep us glued to the weather channel, anxious to find out if the heat wave will ever end. Especially a couple of months from now when even locals will be begging for relief and the kids go trick or treating in shorts and tank tops. My favorite ever weather guy was a comedian. Every September the anchorwoman would make small talk by asking him, “When will the cooler temperatures arrive?” And every September he held up the same handmade sign for viewers at home to read: “The Second Week of October.”

He’s the only meteorologist I know who was always right.

It's Arizona. It’s freaking hot here. I don’t know why I live here. Maybe because I don’t know where else to go. When I was a kid growing up, the only air conditioning we had in our house was a window unit in the family room. The rest of the house depended on a swamp cooler for relief, including the bedrooms. We didn’t even have ceiling fans in those days. And when the summer rains, the monsoons, began each July, evaporative cooling was worthless. We hit 118 every single summer which forced us to hide out in that family room for days on end.

It was miserable but not unusual. Unless it happened on a date not previously known to reach 118. Then it was front page news. I ask you, what difference does it make if 118 happens on June 23 or July 2? The difference is called a “record.” As in, record breaking heat.

We love breaking records. Competition is in our boiling blood, even if we’re just competing with ourselves. This summer Arizona has outdone herself. Not only are meteorologists the stars of the show, but our dehydrated state is the belle of the ball. Today we celebrate our thirty-first day spent at or above 110 degrees.

Big deal.

Here’s the thing. Once we hit 105, there’s not a lot of difference between that continuous, monotonous heat and the super scorching 118 I grew up with, or the shocking 122 Phoenix became notorious for in 1990, which I’d like to point out occurred thirty-three years ago. It’s just that big numbers like that make headlines. But is it really hotter than summers in Florida where you still risk heat stroke in the humidity because it’s harder to sweat? Not in my experience.

Miserable is miserable, whether it’s a dry climate or a wet one. Pick your poison.

I know this isn’t a popular perspective. That’s why I’m putting it out there, because I might be the first one to do it. And doing something for the first time is record breaking. Like thirty-one days spent at or above 110 degrees.

Yes, I’m sick of it. The problem is, it’s only July 31. We still have another three months to go. While Hobby Lobby is already rolling out Halloween and Christmas decorations, and department stores are switching out swimsuits for turtleneck sweaters, us desert rats are still hiding inside in the air conditioning and dreaming of a white Christmas.

There’s nothing unusual about hot summers here. We don’t praise the Lord and put on a sweater when it cools down to 102. The numbers may vary, but the intensity is the same. It takes tenacity and endurance to survive this annual season, but we know when the sun moves to the south, the heat will go with it. We’ll get through one more summer just like we always do so long as the media and politicians leave us alone and find something else to panic over. Arizona natives know there’s hope just beyond the horizon. It happens every year.

The Second Week of October.

With thanks to Spike Stitch for permission to use the angry cow photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: cow | Spike Stitch | Flickr

Naturally

I have struggled against this. Struggled with this. Reasoned against reason and listened to the professionals who are paid to know more than I do. But the only one who knows my heart, besides my God, is me. Learning to trust my heart has been harder than learning to trust my God.

Death is not natural.

It’s not. It’s a thief. It’s a liar. It’s an illusion.

I’ve been reassured without reassurance for more than two years that death is a natural part of life. That it is, as songwriters insist, the “circle of life.” This is exactly why music is so powerful. And also, at times, dangerous. Caught up in the emotion of its swell and passion, who really listens to the words? Yet the words are the most important thing.

Death is the enemy. How can we believe it’s a natural part of life when it is the exact opposite of life? The day the palliative care doctor called and said Rob wanted to “die a natural death,” was the day my heart began to beat out of rhythm. Something wasn’t right. Those couldn’t have been his words. It didn’t sound like Rob. It didn’t sound like God either. What is supposed to be so natural about a life ending?

That’s the point. Life doesn’t end. Death is an unnatural separation of a soul from its body. Our bodies were designed by God to last forever. That’s the reason it’s so hard to die, because we weren’t meant to die at all. And by that, I mean that our bodies were not meant to die. Something has interfered with God’s design.

We stood at the foot of Rob’s hospital bed watching as he labored to breathe, listening as the cheerful hospice representative voiced the pattern we were encouraged to follow. “You can go now, Rob,” she insisted. “It’s all right. You can go.” Easy for her to say. He wasn’t the sun to her moon. He was mine.

The idea was that he was now hesitant, despite what we’d witnessed when we asked him ourselves if he wanted to “die a natural death.” Again, words spoken in the pattern of the professionals. The implication was that we were unwilling to let him go. That we had to release the reins of our hold on him so he could escape his body in peace.

But here is what I struggle with. If letting him go was the greatest act of love I could ever give him, why am I still in so much pain? I have been robbed of Rob. He was robbed of the future we dreamed about together. Of watching his grandchildren grow and investing in their hearts and lives. They grieve his loss still. Surely this is not natural.

It’s not. And I’m weary of being told that it is the final step in life, as if we are, as that melancholy shepherd journaled, flowers that bloom in the field only to disappear when a wind sweeps over it. (Psalm 103) Only that’s not exactly what he wrote. It’s an analogy, because David was an artist who painted with words. But words matter. When you read that in context, he prefaced it by saying, “As for man, his days are like grass.” Here today, gone tomorrow, our days are like grass, disappearing quickly, difficult to remember. But mankind, humans, are created in God’s image, the image of the Eternal One. The One Who does not die. And neither do we.

I think the problem lies here—the topic of death has been taken over by humanistic logic. Evolutionary explanation. A reduction in our value. If we are simply another in the animal kingdom, then we can be summed up by the words, “Start” and “Finish.” We become walking tombstones, lacking the details as represented by a three-inch hyphen separating “Birth date” and “Death date.” That’s it. That’s the total summation of a human being. You were born. The wind blew. You died.

Pathetic.

I will not accept that death wins. Nor that it is “normal” and “natural.” I don’t have to. Jesus didn’t, or he wouldn’t have stood in his full humanity at the grave of his friend, Lazarus, and ugly cried like He did. Of course those who are released from the confines of physical bodies are jubilant afterward. I’m not an idiot. I fully realize that Rob wouldn’t want to come back here even if he had the chance, no matter how much he loves all of us. And he loves all of us tremendously. I get that. If he needed my permission or my blessing to be set free from his suffering and an interminable future in a broken body, I loved him enough to put his needs before my own and I did.

I am through being mollified or patronized with the idea that having to make a decision like that at all is “natural” or even “God’s will.” I've lost my person and half of my heart. This is no place for judgment.  I won’t be convinced to put a new spin on Rob’s death by painting it up with flowers and flourishes labeled as “natural.”

If death was not natural to Jesus, then it is not natural to us either. He’s the one who called it the Final Enemy and promised it will eventually be put under his feet. I admit, it would soothe my heart in this terrible meantime between losing Rob and being with him again if I could view his death as a common transition. If I could stop fighting against the unfairness of it all. Stop pushing back against the idea that it is normal and ordinary, even expected, to see God’s damaged, perfect creation perish.

But I can’t. Because He doesn’t.

We are not grass. We are eternal. Created in the image of God.

This Is That Story

Two inches.  

What good is two inches? If you’re hitchhiking, that two-inch thumb might get you a ride. If you’re hangry, a snack sized Hershey’s bar cheers you up. If you like pickles, a gherkin makes your sandwich sparkle. If you don’t like pickles, it ruins your lunch.

Two inches of something indulgent is no cause for alarm. Unless it’s a pickle. Two inches of something crawling up inside your denim capris is a different story.

This is that story.

I’ve lived most of my life in the desert southwest. I was born in Arizona, so even though I should have been born in Ireland, I’ve adapted to sweltering heat and harsh terrains. I owe my resilience to the invention of air conditioning and a good dermatologist. What I haven’t adjusted to very well are two-inch invasive species. It’s a fair descriptor. Native or not, some species shouldn’t invade my space.

When I was in the sixth grade, my family and I moved to a small house in the desert where, one afternoon, I stepped outside and crushed the life out of a scorpion with my bare foot. I didn’t mean to. I just didn’t see him. But I felt him. It scared me to death to step on the creepy thing, but the pain was no worse than a bee sting for me. I thought I’d learned my lesson—shoes matter. It was the only time I’ve ever been on the wrong side of a scorpion.

Until last week.

In my own living room.

Wearing shoes.

And denim capris.

I’ve probably killed about two dozen of the crunchy little demons in my lifetime, but only one of them with my bare foot. All the rest I’ve pulverized wearing sturdy shoes. It’s easy to recognize Arizona’s dangerous bark scorpion, even on my fake wood floors. Sure, they’re the same color, but they still look like a scorpion.

Maybe overconfidence was my downfall.

When I’m sitting at my desk like I was last weekend, lost in my writing and enjoying some iced tea, I’m not usually thinking about scorpions. Not until I realize a two-inch version is crawling inside the leg of my capris. Suddenly, intuition becomes better than vision, and I don’t need to see the freaky beast to realize I’m in a lot of trouble.

No one was here to watch me boogie last week. Or stomp my leg until the terrorist fell to his death on the fake wood floor, crushed by my frenzied dance moves. He deserved it. Nor did anyone hear me sob like a baby as the venom quickly spread across my shin and encircled my lower leg. Within seconds, from knee to ankle, my leg throbbed with fiery pain, pulsating my nerve endings like a TENs unit set to warp speed.

I kid you not. 

My daughter, Katy, came over to administer first aid, but as it turns out there is no pain relief for an attack like this. You just put up with the effects of its powerful neurotoxin for the next seven hours, making sure you can still breathe, and facing the fact that it’ll be close to a week before residual numbness goes away.

Oh, goody.

I had my home sealed last year by professionals against criminals like these. They missed a spot. Yesterday they came back to re-seal my foundation and go after all the door jams that don’t jam and gaps in the plumbing, as well as every air vent in my ceiling. Never underestimate predatory arachnids. They are contortionists on steroids, able to squeeze inside the house my contractor promised was impossible for them to penetrate.

im·​pos·​si·​ble.

I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.

There’s not a lot to do while sitting with your leg elevated except shallow breathe and wait for the poison to work its way out of your system. For the next two days, while every nerve in my lower leg pulsated to the bizarre beat of some frantic jungle rhythm, my unnerved thoughts drifted to my grandmother. Not because she was bohemian or a bad dancer, but because she was well acquainted with scorpions.

For twenty-five years, she and my granddad lived on fifty acres of desert land, raising their family in a home devoid of both air conditioning and evaporative cooling. In the extreme heat of Phoenix summers, equipped with only floor fans and cross ventilation to alleviate their suffering, she developed frequent, massive migraines.

One afternoon while dealing with one of those awful headaches, a scorpion, meaning to add insult to injury, crawled over and stung her on the leg. Unfortunately, I don’t know how she would describe the pain that followed. All she told me is that her migraine instantly disappeared.

Gone.

Kaput.

Vanished.

Vamoose.

Umm, bu bye. And instead of showing up every few weeks, it didn’t return for six months. So, while she rubbed her throbbing leg instead of her throbbing temples, she came up with a brilliant idea.

Now, this might have been a side effect of the neurotoxins ravaging her body at the time. Possibly she was hallucinating from the pain. I’m pretty sure that’s what I was doing last weekend. I actually wonder if Grandma had an out of body experience, perhaps something akin to what Peter Parker encountered when a radioactive spider bit him. (Well, they are distant cousins of scorpions.)

Yes. I’m saying it right here. That savage beast changed Grandma on the spot. She leaned into her new superpower Spidey Sense and, every six months after that, whenever a new migraine tried to take over, she invited another willing scorpion to sting her. On purpose.

I’m telling you the truth, they don’t call them the Greatest Generation for nothing. That woman was tough. Sad to say, on the advice of her doctor, who lacked spidey sense, she eventually gave up on her homeopathic remedy and resorted to enduring regular migraines for the rest of her life.

I often wonder how much better she’d have felt if that horrified doctor hadn’t discouraged her from trusting her own instincts. It’s not like the poison transformed her into some kind of mutant. She didn’t start climbing up walls with her bare hands. She didn’t develop supersonic hearing. And she didn’t become a crime fighter on the back streets of Phoenix. She just wanted to get rid of a bad headache.

In other words, the neurotoxins from scorpion stings seemed to counterattack whatever triggered her migraines. It’s like two negatives making a positive. Isn’t that what science is all about? Or maybe that’s math. I don’t know.

So, while I sat there ruminating on Grandma’s courage, I wondered if I, too, would reap benefits from a severe scorpion sting. Maybe the poison would clear up my chronic hives. Or my chocolate cravings. I don’t really want to look through walls like Superman, but it would be nice if my eyesight became an even 20/20 again. Is that asking too much for everything I went through?

Science and math will never know. Because I’m not as brave as Grandma. I’m doing everything I can to keep two inches of pure terror from ever tormenting me again. I’ve sealed up this house so tight I’ll probably asphyxiate from lack of oxygen.

This is my new normal. That, and glowing in the dark. Hmmm. Grandma never mentioned that side effect. 

With thanks to hjl for permission to use the great visual aid seen above. His original photo can be viewed at this site: Horizontal Measure [50mm + 12mm macro extension test] | Flickr

Spaced Out

In the last two months I’ve knitted three blankets, one sleeping bag, and I’m halfway through two more throws. Meanwhile, the experts in Utah still have no clue what’s behind all the anomalies lighting up the skies every night on Skinwalker Ranch. At this rate, if they don’t sort it out soon, JoAnn Fabrics will be out of yarn and my wrists will be in traction. At least I do something productive while I binge watch mysterious documentaries. 

I’m addicted to learning about things no one can explain.

Exactly the reason, I think, why they never find explanations. It keeps the sponsors happy and their bank accounts delirious. I think I’m okay with this arrangement. I have an insatiable curiosity and if ever it were to be satiated, I might lose my reason for living. And knitting.

Yesterday morning I woke up in time to sit on my back patio and enjoy what was left of a cool morning in the shade. I brought a cup of hot cocoa out with me, leaned back in my mesh patio chair, and looked up at the thousands of green leaves hovering above me while a refreshing breeze swept across my skin. There were birds hiding in the branches, but I could only hear them, not see them, camouflaged as they were by the dense foliage. And it occurred to me that in about four months every single one of those leaves was going to metamorph or something and fall to the ground on my clean patio like an avalanche of orange, and I’d be forced to sweep their daredevil little lifeless carcasses the entire length of my house and out the gate to decompose.

Leaves are selfish little narcissists.

This might be the reason I got a C- in high school biology.

And then I remembered a story I’ve heard several times about the changing of the colors every fall. Supposedly, all those vibrant reds and yellows and oranges which explode from deciduous stands of trees were there all the time, hiding beneath their green exteriors, just like all those invisible birds who drop poop bombs on my patio table every day. When cold weather arrives in September or, in our case, every February, the sap stops flowing, the chlorophyll starves, and a tree’s true nature is exposed. Or something like that. I reference here that C minus.

I wondered if I could convince a leaf to reveal its true inner self early. What if I carefully skimmed one with a razorblade. Would it uncover a golden underskirt? I ran that idea by my granddaughter, but she scrunched up her forehead, exposing the eleven between her confused brows, and told me, “No.”

Fine. That’s what comes of earning an A in biology. No sense of adventure.

Before long, I abandoned my hypothesis and let my mind wander across other mysteries of the universe. Between the leaves of the tree, I could make out patches of blue sky. Now my thoughts turned heavenward where stars and galaxies and exiled planets like Pluto exist. And, with my thoughts going full circle, I wondered once more, what is going on with Skinwalker Ranch? Could there be visitors from other worlds planning vacations in ours? Are these lifeforms friendly? Are they actually superior to us in intelligence? If so, why do they keep crashing their aircraft into our mountains? Don’t they have mountains of their own? Sure, we’re mesmerized by the speed and vibrant lights emanating from their space age, sophisticated saucers, but don’t you think an advanced race of beings determined to explore outer space should hire better pilots? I do.

That’s why I’m not afraid of aliens. I’m not any good at flying aircraft either, but at least when I know I’m terrible at something I quit making a fool of myself and find something else to do. Like knitting.

That’s not my main concern about UFOs, though, or, as they are now referred to, UAPs, which stands for Unidentified Aerial Phenomena and, of late, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena, because even scientists who came up with the Scientific Method can’t make up their minds what to call things that they can’t identify.

Here’s my real question about the whole subject, though, whether we’re discussing UAPs in Utah or mysterious lights over Phoenix. Let’s suppose for a moment there really are spaceships which are not of this world but which keep flying over us and crashing into us. And, let’s assume they’re not manned by Artificial Intelligence, the way Washington is, for example.

Who created their pilots?

I’ll wait.

I don’t recall reading in the Bible about civilizations in other galaxies. I’ll admit, there were parts of Deuteronomy and Numbers and even Leviticus which I may have skimmed over in Sunday School, so perhaps in the long list of genealogies recorded in those books some of the names mentioned are of extraterrestrial origin. I mean, you’ve got to admit a lot of them sound pretty weird. Adonizedek comes to mind, although not without a lot of effort. Or Cushan-rishathaim. If my parents had given me a name like one of those, I’d have crashed my spaceship into a mountain, too.

But back to the question of creation and the physical evidence of pathetic piloting. I don’t mean to alarm anyone, and possibly our government is lying when they say they are not developing sub-standard aircraft incapable of making it over a mountain, let alone to infinity and beyond. But what if they’re telling the truth for a change? Are you thinking what I’m thinking? That God has a secret family He’s not telling us about?

Oh. That’s not what you were thinking. You were thinking that our government can’t handle telling the truth. And also about that C minus. 

You're right. Good idea. I’ll just pull out those knitting needles and get to work on another blanket. Maybe tomorrow I’ll explore the existence of Bigfoot. I’m pretty sure he’s mentioned in the Bible, too. 

With thanks to Arnet for permission to use the phun photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: UFO ? | Arnet | Flickr

The Voice of the Heart

I thought I needed a good night’s sleep. Maybe a long drive through the desert at sunset. A cold, chocolate Breeze from Dairy Queen. A solid cry from a bottomless well. A moment with God. A talk with a friend. A comedy clip to make me laugh. A hug from a grandbaby. Some days one or all of those things help. Yesterday wasn’t one of them.

But I never. Never. Ever put on music to ease my pain. It doesn’t work for me. So why am I tormenting myself watching American Idol? For three years I turned away from this favorite show of ours. In 2020 when they made people perform in isolation on their own back patios. In 2021 when I recovered from covid and watched my husband die. In 2022 as I packed up my meager belongings in the garage apartment I’d called home since Rob’s death and prepared to move into a home of my own. In each of those years it was easy to say no to watching the dreams of young people come true. There were more important things on my mind.

Like surviving.

2023. There’s a silent rhythm now in my life. The sound of my own voice is all the company I have most days. It’s not enough. I long for him. I ache for him. My soulmate. My darling. My best friend. My love. Gone in a heartbeat, Solomon’s ageless words come to mind. Life is a vapor, vanishing quickly, leaving nothing behind. Except Rob left everything behind, including me.

Maybe there should be college courses on sorrow. Something to give people like me at least an outline of what grief looks like. Because when you fall into this deep, dark place, devoid of light and without even a map, everything is upside down. The echo of my weeping bouncing off the walls of this captivity make it that much harder to get my bearings.

How long, Lord? How long? Will it take forty-six years of sorrow, equal to the time we had one another, before I can breathe again? This roller coaster ride traveling between relief and desperation is confusing. Just when I think I’m on level ground again, it gives way and I’m catapulted into a freefall once more. My expectations do a nosedive right along with my heart in those moments. “It’s been more than two years,” I hear myself say. “Snap out of it. Trust in Jesus. Look on the bright side. Rob’s really happy where he is. You know he’d never want to come back even if he could.”

Sometimes I hate the sound of my own voice.

So, last night I turned on the TV so I could listen to someone else for a while, and landed on American Idol. I’m rooting for every single musician on the show. Their stories of heartache, survival, broken dreams, terrible experiences, all of it winds up in their music, drawing me in, making me weep, drawing you in, reminding us we’re not alone.

Music is the voice of the heart.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that music makes me cry. I’m crying anyway, draining off every new day’s pain, looking for some sunshine after the dark clouds. What I find strange is that I can read song lyrics without crumbling. The words are always the most important thing to me, but they rarely affect me like music does. So, when a friend with good intentions sends me a YouTube link to a song that makes them think of me, instead of listening to it I look up the lyrics. Give me the black and white text. I can handle that. But let an orchestra touch the shattered places of my heart? I won’t make it through to the first chorus.

The world is divided by cultures, religion, appearance, politics, and language, among many other things. But when it comes to music, there are no borders. A pianist from Japan can read the same sheet music as a musician in Milwaukee, both will perform it as written, and never need an interpreter. They say it’s the universal language. That it’s more powerful than words.

I’ve tried to write songs. It’s really hard to condense my thoughts into three verses, one bridge, and a chorus. It takes poetic license and often leaves the curious listener wondering why clouds’ illusions mean you really don’t know clouds at all. It’s because you need more words.

Words, as painful as they are to read sometimes, feel safer to me than music. It’s the personal stories behind the songs the Idol contestants sing that capture my attention. I’m just putting up with the orchestra. Maybe music makes me cry because it doesn’t speak clearly enough. It makes me wonder what the composer meant. It makes me work too hard to find hope.

I still love music even if I rarely listen to it anymore. I love drives at sunset and long talks with friends, hugs from grandbabies and Dairy Queen ice cream. But when my heart is scrambled with pain and longing, upside down in another whirlwind of sorrow and I’m lost in the darkness, I gather up these shards of glass and piece the fragments together. Making sense of my pain is one way back to solid ground. For me, words are everything. The mosaic reveals the story.

Thank you for your willingness to listen to my story.

With gratitude to Leeds Harold for permission to share the beautiful mosaic seen above. The original photo can be viewed by following this link::

DSC00416 | A mosaic created from broken pottery and glass. T… | Flickr

Addictions

I’ve taken up a new hobby. Well, to be honest, it’s an old one with a new twist. I was dinging around on You Tube since there’s never anything on TV, and with a mouth full of chocolate chips and half a cookie still waiting in the queue, it occurred to me that if I kept my hands busy doing something besides snacking, I’d feel less guilty about my sugar addiction. 

Deep in thought and polishing off those cookie crumbs, I pondered this idea. Mmmm . . . I mean, hmmmmm. There are so many hobbies I’ve taken up over the years. Sewing clothes for my troll dolls in the 60’s. Creating clothes for myself in the 70’s. Stitching outfits for my babies in the 80’s. In the 90’s we wove rag baskets. Which led to lap quilting. Followed by stamping. Pie making. Pie selling. Pie eating. Coupon Sense. Fermented foods. And blogging.

With all these hobbies to manage, it’s amazing I ever had time to clean house or make dinner.

Alas, the golden age of nearly all these fads has passed. No one asks me to weave a shabby basket for them anymore. Stamping has gone the way of troll dolls. Frankly, I just got bored with most of these things. Sewing clothes is more expensive now than buying them already made. Everything changes. But eating chocolate chip cookies? That’s forever. 

And so are the pounds they accumulate.

I had to do something. Finding a fresh pastime seemed like a good idea. It turns out I’m not one of the fifty percent of grieving widows who gag at the thought of swallowing food when their hearts are broken. Lucky me. I blame that on all the cookies I was given as a child in exchange for my tears. Homemade chocolate chip cookies. I mean, come on. As in touch with my emotions as I am, I never even had a chance.

I wracked my brain, trying to get it off of chocolate. What about in-person classes for senior citizens? Now that the pandemic is more or less behind us, it’s considered safe to gather as human beings again. I didn’t know if I wanted to commit, though. What if there were no snacks? Or worse, only the healthy kind?

Enter You Tube. Such a lowly name for a resource that rivals all of the World Wide Web. Want to learn to bake a cake? How about repair stucco? Maybe you want to install a dishwasher? Or diagnose your own terminal illness? Well then, sit back, turn up the volume, and prepare to be enlightened. You can do all of that in your pajamas and no one will ever know the difference. You Tube is better than a dictionary and more current than the encyclopedia, which isn’t saying much. Every time I have a question about how to do anything, my kids remind me they discovered how to perform brain surgery while living off the grid, just by watching this channel.

Forget millennials and xennials. This is the You Tube Generation.

I put on my pajamas, grabbed my favorite cookies, powered up the television, and hit the search button. “K – N – I – T – T – I – N – G,”  I painstakingly spelled.  Baziiinng!  I knew it. You Tube even cares about Baby Boomers. And to prove it, here was the hobby first taught to me by own grandmother. I scrolled through all the options and settled on a beginner’s project I thought I could handle—blankets using only a knit and pearl stitch. Cuz that’s all I know how to do and it's all I want to do. I’m not trying to get fancy or make sweaters here. I’m trying to overcome my chocolate chip cookie addiction.

I found a blanket pattern I thought would make a cozy addition to my living room, studied the technique, and took notes. Then I drove to JoAnn Fabrics, bought a bunch of yarn and tools and, as soon as I got home, I started knitting one and pearling one and knitting one and pearling one. Instantly, I was addicted. And elated! I’d solved my snack problem and identified my purpose in life. As long as there is Christmas and people who don’t know how much they need my blankets, I will never overeat chocolate again. It was that easy.

You Tube is a genius.

Except. The girl on the tv wasn’t giving directions away for free. She was advertising for her Etsy business. If I wanted to find out how many rows of knitting make either a throw or a lap blanket, I would have to track down her Etsy account and pay for that information. Aren’t they pretty much the same thing though? You know, like, “Throw me a lap blanket.” I felt confident I could figure this out on my own. I graduated high school. It doesn’t require a college education to know when a blanket is big enough. I’d just cast on a few stitches and knit until I was done.

I found an exciting UFO documentary to binge watch, and in hardly any time at all I knit and pearled a blanket all over myself. It was awesome. I loved the texture of the yarn, the color I’d chosen, and the clickety-click of the needles.

Knitting was better than cookies.

It was relaxing. It was comforting. It was low calorie. I knitted and pearled and knitted and pearled until my shoulders ached and my hands cramped and the wooden needles caught fire. I couldn’t stop. I didn’t want to stop. I had to stop.  I ran out of yarn. Proud as punch with my finished project, I held it up as high as I could in my stocking feet and then took ten steps backward. It stretched out in front of me like a woolen river, covering the living room from side to side with every skein of Lion Brand Natural Heather I could find. I was as proud as a new mother could possibly be. It didn’t look much like what I’d seen on You Tube. It wasn’t exactly a lap blanket. And it was too heavy to throw anywhere. In fact, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of a creation like the one I brought into the world.

It appears I knitted myself a sleeping bag. If you fold it in half and put in a zipper on one side—yep. That there’s a sleeping bag. Hunh. Maybe I didn’t need to purchase quite that much yarn. Or watch that many episodes about aliens.

I think we’ve all learned a lesson here. A lesson about moderation. About trading one addiction for another. And about overconfidence. But the most important thing we’ve learned here today, something they won’t even tell you on the You Tube, is this. Sometimes the best things in life are not free.

I should have just paid that Etsy girl. It would have been a lot cheaper than buying all that yarn.

With thanks to Martin Cathrae for tempting me with the mouth watering image seen above. While I go bake up a batch for my next binge watching event, you can view the original photo by following this link: Saturday Night Cookies | Allie made cookies to aleviate her … | Flickr

If Only

I miss you. My head hurts today and you’re not here to rub my neck. For two years and one month today, you haven’t been here to rub my neck. It feels like forever since you’ve been in the same room with me, talked to me, lived life with me in the ignorance we used to enjoy. We didn’t know you’d be gone so soon. Too soon.

I cry a lot. I make sounds I never knew could come from a human being when sorrow smothers me. I cry so much it makes my eyebrows hurt. Who knew crying does that? Two years and one month. Eleven more months and I’ll hit three. Maybe then I can take a deep breath again. Maybe by then I’ll have found direction for this life I’ve been left with, the one without you in it. Maybe I’ll feel passion again, or a slice of happiness. Or hope. Maybe.

It isn’t fair, Rob. Can you read this from your side of the veil, the side I can’t see but I assume through which you can? You were strong. You cleared an entire cabin of furniture on your own, carried it down wooden steps and stacked it in the cabin’s garage while I was at Walmart picking up groceries. You took care of yourself. Seeing a doctor for annual checkups, keeping up with INR checks for the blood thinners. Your levels were right where they were supposed to be from the very beginning. You never wavered. You were optimistic and excited about retiring to our mountain home. You always beat the odds. Always won when things were stacked against you. We called you the luckiest man on earth.

And then we got sick. Both of us. The same day, the same symptoms, the same diagnosis, the same hospital. And that’s where everything changed. Now nothing is the same.

I miss you. I miss everything about you. I miss the way you teased me just so you could get a rise out of me. I miss your bare feet and seeing you in the orange Gators sweatshirt I keep in my dresser now. I miss the crooked index finger on your right hand that you injured as a two year old spinning the blades on a push mower. I miss your laughter. Your goofiness. Your stubbornness. Your kindness. Your tenderness.

I miss the way you looked at me. I miss the cards you loved to surprise me with. I miss the Peppermint Pattys in the refrigerator that you brought home when I wasn’t looking. I miss curling up in your arms and taking a nap while you chewed your fingernails and watched football. I miss our disagreements and misunderstandings and the way you tried to improve how I make meals. There’s no one here to tell me how to rearrange the dishwasher because “it’s easier.”

I miss wishing you’d go play golf so I could have a few hours to myself after you retired, knowing you’d be back for supper. You never come home for supper now. You never come home at all. I miss your snarky comments and the way we narrated mystery movies together and figured out in the first ten minutes who done it. I miss being bored together and talking you into going for a drive. I loved watching you drive.

I miss having you hold my hand, and guide me through a door with your hand at the small of my back. I miss driving through Starbucks and texting you to see if you want anything. I miss breathing the same air you breathe and reaching for your hand in the dark and knowing you’re there when I have a bad dream. I miss the smell of your coffee in the house but I won’t keep a coffee pot around here anymore because you’re not here to drink from it. I miss seeing your excitement about playing the tenor drum with the pipe band.

I miss watching you with our grandkids. Planting trees for them. Trimming trees with your daughter. Sharing a beer with your son and son-in-law. Teasing your daughter-in-law and watching her laugh. Reading to the grandbabies. Tucking them into bed after you sang their favorite, The Unicorn Song, to them.

I miss competing with you at cards and Rummikub and Scrabble. I miss trying to figure out if the current argument is in my limited four per cent of being right and if I should hold my ground or give in to your computerized memory. I miss my Florida boy. My Gator Eyes. My K.I.N.S.A. I miss the inside jokes and the life we built together and the movies we watched and enjoyed side by side and hearing you sing and whistle. I miss the good, the bad, and the ugly because we got through it together, you and me, the way we promised each other that we would.

I miss what it feels like to be married. To take a long term marriage for granted. To live every day convinced that death will never come to call, never threaten to destroy, never tear us apart. Ignorance is bliss. I miss bliss.

I used to be able to breathe because all the things I miss were once right where they belonged in my life. But when the shattering happens and what was whole becomes fragmented, now every time I take in a breath another jagged piece of what we used to be together stabs me. Do you know how hard it is to breathe with broken shards stabbing your heart?

I don’t know who I am anymore, Baby. The woman I was died the day you did. Grief changes a person. I’ll never again be who I was. I’ll always know how easy it is to lose your world with one heartbeat.

I keep hoping that if I keep writing that it will help my soul find rest. Find relief. Find peace. I don’t think that’s going to happen. It’s like turning on the faucet so the water will run out. It never does.

You used to write poems to me. Love letters in those unexpected cards. Post pictures of us every time an anniversary of any kind came up so your Facebook friends knew how much you love me. I would so much rather read your current words of love than my words of sorrow. If only the tears would run dry. If only the clock would go backwards. If only we could have saved you.

The saddest two words in the English language are those.

If only.

An Invisible Tide

There are days when I feel more like a widow than on other days. Strange to see that written here. Some words, once reserved for the misfortune of others while kept safely out of reach behind museum glass, reside in my life’s story now. And I hate it. Words like widow, died, when, and I can’t imagine. Those were the descriptors for other people’s pain. Other people’s tragedies. Other people’s sorrow. Now I know how it is. There are no other people. We’re all human and we’re all going to lose people we love. 

Love is a risk.

I regularly chat with another woman who, like me, is also a reluctant member of the Widows’ Club. We’re pen pals, separated by a distance of seven or ten states, depending on whether or not you take the scenic route, yet joined together by this simple phrase we use often while writing to one another, “I know that you know.” Five simple little words that say it all. Your heart is shattered like mine, and the pieces reflect one another. We process our pain, refusing to offer advice, weeping in the reading, validating with our responses.

Sometimes when one or the other of us writes, the letter begins with, “Today was a grief day.” Five more little words that need no explanation because, “I know that you know.” Grief days roll in on an invisible tide, which is so unfair because you never see it coming. At least when you stand at the ocean’s edge, you can watch the waves gather and rise, backing up dramatically into the horizon beyond before they slam in fury onto the beach where, only moments before, you walked in peace. If you’re paying attention, you can get out of the way.

But you can’t get out of the way when the tide of sorrow rolls back in. There’s no escape. And there is no warning. It catches you up in its undertow, threatening to pull you out to sea which, on some days, would be a huge relief. No one could blame you for expiring in the depths of an angry ocean that refuses to let you go. But no, these sorrowful waves spit you out Jonah-style, choking and sobbing with nasty green stuff hanging in your hair, onto the salty shore of your own tears, exhausted and weary, but still . . . breathing.

The most you can expect from your life on a grief day is to keep breathing.

Those are the days when I feel the most like a widow. When the waves beat relentlessly against the shoreline of my battered heart and I wonder if I’m about to lose my mind right along with all the security and dreams that were stolen from me when I lost Rob two years ago. Just when I think I’ve turned a corner, there it is in the shadows, waiting for me again. Grief. It’s not a condition—it’s an emotion to be managed, like hormones and low blood sugar. Oh, people told me it would change, but I think that’s splitting hairs. It never goes away. Grief steps into the void as a companion you learn to live with—a really lousy substitute for Rob, if you ask me.

On the days when I’m swept out to sea, drowning in my own tears, I worry that I’m right back to square one. Back to the moment the doctor called and said Rob couldn’t fight anymore and I had to let him go. That day. That second. That nightmare. In those agonizing moments, which I’ll admit have spread themselves out since the early days when their assault on my soul felt like a Normandy invasion, I fear that I will never be happy again. Never know my purpose again. Never find passion again. I didn’t know until my life was shattered how much those things matter to me. How much we need them while we keep getting up and putting our feet on the floor every morning.

By now, I think I’ve heard and read in one way or another all the platitudes that try to offer hope and vision for my future. “People grieve differently.” “Everyone is different.” “It’s going to take time.” There is truth in all of them. We do grieve as individuals because no one else can feel firsthand what we each feel in our hearts. I know of people who fill up every waking moment so they won’t have to think about all they’ve lost. Distraction is the name of the game. But I wonder if there is healing in it, or simply a covering over that camouflages the wound beneath the surface. Sometimes you have to take a break from the sorrow, for your body’s sake if not for your heart’s. But a diet regular in diversion, I fear, can leave a person bound up, if you get my drift.

I’m not discounting the differences in personalities. I’m validating the necessity to feel the feels. My counselor told me the week after Rob died that the only way through grief is through it. There are no shortcuts, even though my worn-out heart really longs for a shortcut. Suffice it to say it wasn’t good news. But it was honest, and it gave me permission to be authentic and to let grief happen. If shortcuts lead to nowhere, I’d rather go through this thing I never wanted and make it through to the other side without wasting time or risking a heart abscess somewhere down the road.

I just didn’t realize what a long journey this would be. I’ve read that when you love deeply, you will also grieve deeply. But I'm telling the truth when I say that I would not wish this pain on my worst enemy. We want so much to be in control. All my insecure life, I’ve desperately grasped for the elusive safety of control, only to discover that it is an illusion. I’m not alone in this. We are all, at our core, control freaks. But life is a risk. And we cannot control all the risk factors inherent in living and loving. If I’d figured this out forty-five years ago, would it have made any difference? Who knows. I’ve always done a pretty good ostrich imitation, and it’s hard to see with your head stuck in the sand.

I see it now, though. I have no other option. That’s become my standard reply when people remind me that I’m strong. “What choice do I have?” I ask. Today I read of extreme losses suffered by another woman, and when she was asked how on earth she survived, her reply was, “I didn’t mean to. I just kept waking up every morning.” I wish I’d thought of that.

Some days I feel more like a widow than others. Other days, though I recognize that I am on my own now without Rob, the tide is out and I can feel the warmth of the sun on my skin. I can breathe without thinking about it. Maybe two years isn’t long enough to bring healing to a broken heart which was loved by a great man for forty-four years. Chonda Pierce, who lost her lifelong sweetheart in 2014, said it was nearly three years afterward before she felt like she could take a deep breath.

That seems about right to me from where I still stand most days, struggling for air like the widow I am. Feeling the waves crash as the earth beneath my feet washes away. Waiting for the tide to go back out and solid ground to reappear. Again.

Some days.