Grief

My first memory of grief was when I was 14 yrs old and my sister died suddenly in 1971. My recollection of it was primarily silence and zero family discussions about it. We just went on. Moving along through the next several decades, a young cousin, grandparents, aunts, uncles, friends, brother-in-law, and then my parents died. My most recent and most deeply personal grief is the death of my husband after 56 years of knowing him, meeting in grade school, dating throughout high school, and being married for almost 47 years (he went to Heaven shockingly and suddenly 3 days before our 47th anniversary). I wanted this process to be much different, more shared, and interactive with those dear to me than that as a child of 14. And it has been.

With a rich, deep reservoir like the Hoover Dam of family & friends, I embarked upon a journey that has forever changed me. There will never be a going back to normal; sudden loss changes everything. Forever. As we all know, there is no owner’s manual about grief. There is some good info out there but none of it prepares you for the actual, personal event. Realize there can be a temporary season of short-term memory lapses and there can be some temporary lethargy; these are normal responses to the processing of this overwhelming new information. And the waves of tearful emotion or a memory that give no warning to their arrival that demand all your attention as you are carried away to some event or precious remembrance, sometimes at the most inopportune moments. With graciousness I have gladly learned to just roll with it, take note of it, feel it all in the moment, let it pass as it does, and be grateful that deep sadness is in my opinion linked with deep love.

Two years of “firsts” coming up here May 14th. There are fewer & fewer of them and they can take you off guard and get stuck like a fish bone in your throat! First anniversaries, first holidays, first travels alone, first realizations we will never hold hands again or laugh together, first hours & days of complete silence and the absence of Doug in my immediate world, first time in my entire life of living alone (I went from my parents home, married at 18, and lived with Doug for 47 years so I never had the experience of being on my own), first days & nights without Doug, first gaping missing the personality of someone you know so well & the quiet companionship forged over 50 years, first times hearing myself say out loud that Doug was dead when having to communicate with people or businesses and the echo that I heard when speaking those words, first time asking for a table for one, first time deciding completely what I wanted to do and realizing the buck now stopped with me, making all adult decisions first time without negotiating, compromising, or having to edit thoughts or plans…… a mountain of firsts in my life for so many routine things in my days. I am so grateful for God’s gift of mental & emotional shock because it enables you to function in the immediate things without completely melting in the reality of the event. God is so gracious to insulate us and cocoon us in His Love & loving people to continue living & doing what needs done because Life does not slow down or stop, even though it feels like your life has stopped with the sudden news, the ultimate oxymoron. It’s like your cognition is altered and you hear in a vacuum and you’re trying to think it or will it back to normal hearing; there’s an echo to it. It’s a straining kind of disbelief with a delayed ability to process things you’re thinking and hearing.

Yes, there was complete shock, disbelief & surreal-ness, but there was a strong parallel train track of overwhelming Peace & Comfort as well. There was such gigantic hope & gratitude within me that I knew where Doug was and the joy that he no longer lived in pain or had a prolonged illness. That tenant of my faith & beliefs was daily massaging my raw pain and always outpacing it. God so, so, so swaddled me with my kids & their immediate, constant assistance, my friends, my Faith, His overwhelming Presence that I did not lack for complete support beyond my wildest imaginations. I had Bethel or Hillsong playing round the clock in my home for months. I rarely felt alone. I rarely felt the sting of what was staring me in the face. So much strength, so much caring, so much fullness in relationships. I’ll be forever grateful to my kids & their families who adjusted their lives in faraway cities to drop everything and make me and my welfare their top priority, while experiencing their own devastating loss themselves, and doing their own grieving & processing. Also to my work team and bosses that rallied to pick up my slack when I needed immediate time off. And to friends close & far who gently & seamlessly slipped in to be present, to share silent moments, to envelop me in a secure hug, to just do some kind things instead of asking me what I needed. There are already too many decisions crowding one’s head when sudden loss busts through the front door like a battering ram and catches you off guard, so to be asked what do you need is fundamentally too much to even think about how to answer sometimes, but to just decide to bring me lunch or come sit for a bit was a huge blessing.

About 9 months before Doug’s Homegoing we began having conversations about death & dying and what we wanted that to look like. It is a lot of information & detail to gather and put in one place. It can feel overwhelming and you don’t want to do it. We had to take it in small bites and not expect ourselves to finish it in one session of discussions. We chose humor, joking about who would go first and advice we had for each other, suggesting possible scenarios, and bantering about the limited scope of death in general. We had to really think about questions like: do I want a DNR in place, do I want to be an organ donor, how extreme of life-saving measures do we want to allow, for instance, long term care, what about hospice, power of attorney, to name a few. We both agreed on the wish to die quickly if we had a vote. (Doug got his wish.). We had to encourage each other a lot during this process; check in, ask where we were with our list, and set some loose deadlines for completion. I could not be more thankful that we followed those nudges to purposely plan dying details well, as we tried to plan living details well. If you have not had these kind of conversations I highly highly recommend it. There’s already such an avalanche of tasks & details to attend to, that having at least this giant one in place greatly reduces the tsunami waters that crash upon you with your back turned. At least start somewhere and build your completed lists, credit card names, retail accounts, passwords, company names, apps, online billing, etc. etc. This piece of advice became one of my largest take-aways when chatting with friends & fam to do yourself a big, fat favor and be proactive, systematic & intentional with the hard topics. There are online options for living trusts or wills or hire a lawyer, just do it, it’s important! I can’t stress it enough.

Kudos to you if you already have healthy, daily life habits, that is such a bonus in being cold-plunged into sudden loss & grief. If you don’t, start today with something beneficial to better your physical/emotional/mental health. Regular exercise, eating well, staying hydrated, faith practices, scheduled massages, walking, stretching, meditating, purposeful breathing; any and all self-care (which is not selfish! it’s an investment in your best self) habits that benefit you happen to become even more important with suddenly being plunked down onto the loss/trauma/grief highway. Much harder to catch your breath with a sudden crisis, than to continue on in some established safeties when the wind is knocked out of you. That’s not the time to “get ready”…. It’s best to “be ready!”

There was one thing I had to ask for from my kids in those early days of loss: when calling no matter what time of day or night, please start your voice message or the beginning of the call with, “Mom, everything’s ok, nothing is wrong.” That request minimized some additional trauma moments, brought me a layer of peace, lasted several months and is no longer a heart-stabbing, hesitant reaction to the phone ringing.

I decided this early on:  we’ve lived and loved well and I wanted to grieve well too.  Not waste my sorrows.  

I’m so thankful Doug and I were current; we weren’t at odds. He had travelled to California to do a project build for his nephew and planned to return in a few weeks. There weren’t unkind words spoken and not resolved; there were no “let’s talk about that when you’re back here in 3 weeks”, etc, etc.  We had written notes on the bathroom mirror in the steam.  I had written him sticky notes of “love you a latte” and “drink up and count your blessings,” and left them by the coffee maker for him, as well as one about “May the Lord bless and keep you and make his face to shine upon you” in the month or so before he left;  he usually crumpled them up and tossed them after a few days, but those he left up and were still on the microwave door and coffee maker when the late night call came…….I find that interesting now looking back.  I also noticed later that he had put things away he usually left out ready to use. He had packed up some things into the garage attic area that should have just been stored inside as they had always been. It was unusual. In a way, it was like he was cleaning up, he was prepping in a way, he had an unspoken sense that wasn’t coming back to Montana, but neither he nor I yet knew that quite.

None of us is promised another day and I know it can sound kinda cliche-ish but I do think there’s wisdom in adopting a mindset about living today to the fullest, as if it’s your last. What would you do differently if you knew you only had 24 hours, how would you be more intentional about making the most of the time you have? Who would you forgive right now to make sure it was completed before your days were up? How would you streamline your life in such a way to prioritize the really important, eternal matters at hand to be able to give your most and your all to living in the moment, more attuned to God’s purposes for us and people who need our love & care instead of putting off a connection or a word of encouragement or a visit with another human. Who or what would you give more time to because there’s value there, instead of the incidentals that can distract us or take us down a road that is a dead end? So much of the dum stuff we can get bogged down by can somehow be eliminated in the face of the important stuff regarding people & relationships. For me it’s been very worth it in the past few years to adopt more of that kind of thinking.

A friend gave me the book, “Imagine Heaven” a few months after Doug’s Graduation. It is an amazing book full of stories and scientific evidence and personal encounters with people from all over the world who have had a glimpse of heaven and lived to tell about it. It expanded my small box of the ideas I had about the hereafter and has brought me so much more joy than the joy I already had for Doug, being a smidge jealous that he got to go first. I highly recommend reading it.

I want to honor Doug’s life by incorporating some of his attributes that I admired: laughing more, being more adventurous and taking more risks, and his big faith to pray big prayers (he was a quiet man a lot of the time but had the courage to boldly ask God for big things); I learned those from him and want to get better at it with the time I have left.

The “in-betweens” were part of my new days alone. Heading one way, abruptly stopped by a detour; a new workaround, a new fork in the road. Learning to embrace those with gratitude instead of only feeling the sharp, obvious curve in the road took time to navigate. Not yet arrived at the “new” but certainly no longer in the “was.”

Observation: April 2024……recent travel felt different; I didn’t feel so semi-lost, overstimulated by airport noise, people and overhead announcements and having to severely focus on my gate, my next step, my surroundings, etc on this trip. I had gotten used to traveling with Doug and having him be so aware of our gate, timing and directions, that I easily deferred to his strong, excellent leadership in getting us where we were always going with ease. I felt a new confidence this trip in my own leadership. I felt some growth that hadn’t been blatantly on my radar screen until being in the moment of these plans, flights, connections, personal safety and situational awareness. Seeing older men in plaid colorful shirts (some of you may or may not know that Doug loved plaid shirts and literally had 50+ of them in his closet when he died! That inventory has provided material for 7 beautiful quilts and some aprons with the wonderful memory of Doug & his horde of shirts!!) that always remind me of Doug didn’t catch like a chicken bone in my throat this time; seeing older couples travel together or share a laugh or eat together felt more peaceful than bittersweet this time; the longing to relive those times we had shared doing those things is no longer like when you poke yourself slicing a tomato; some of the sting is gone of doing this alone; I have had another year of doing “firsts” and not really paying attention to them as life plods or speeds along, but then I come upon the fact that I say, “Table for One” to a hostess and it doesn’t carry the bite of my missing spouse, or the bittersweet anymore, as it did a year or two ago.  I feel gently stronger and more gradually independent which feels surprisingly good and helps me realize I’ve grown, I’m doing this, I don’t hate it, it’s not as bittersweet with mostly sad moments anymore, but it has much more natural, sweet gratitude instead of the choosing of the gratitude; it feels so very good.  I still at times wish it were different and my lifelong companion was right there with me, but it isn’t and I am more okay with it today than I was or that I imagined I would be.  

I’m definitely on the downhill side of my years. The sand in my hourglass is funneling through quite quickly toward the end of my allotment…….Build a Legacy. Live life intentionally.  Have no regrets. This sentiment can also perhaps become “cliche-ish” as well. But it’s taken on renewed meaning for me, like the phrase I mentioned earlier about none of us being promised another day. In the passing of years, when I’ve heard of a death, not even necessarily of someone close to me, it always has served as a reminder to make that call, keep short accounts & not hold grudges, take time to give that hug or kiss to a loved one, not leave the house without acknowledging family, and just be more mindful of taking the opportunities to love our loved ones in meaningful & tangible ways, right? I still think that way, but even more so now. It’s so much more personal and real. Sure does instantly put things into perspective about the stuff that matters, even though it feels like there’s some mental confusion or overload to swim through. It’s like the stupid stuff that maybe mattered a month ago is so dum and insignificant now, who cares!! Life is so short and precious. Sudden loss clarifies things instantly in some ways regarding the lasting things like people & relationships, not gee I wish I would’ve worked more or had a bigger bank account. I’m super thankful Doug & I were purposing to be more aware of our days, our texts, calls or emails with our kids, or deciding to take a trip and say yes to gatherings and meet ups as much as possible. No regrets. I will always cherish that united pursuit as a gift from God to us. That would feel awful to be battered mentally & emotionally by things left unsaid, opportunities not seized upon, and easy forgivenesses for offenses. As much as I feel the importance of death planning is, having no regrets is right up there at the top of the list. We are not guaranteed another day. Make the most of this one.

Those first few days after Doug’s departure to Heaven, I needed the quiet to sort my thoughts and maybe to feel I had one tiny bit of control over what was unfolding, whether that was true or not. The temporary layer of stillness was restorative to my soul. But at the same time, the comfort of the daily flow with my “person” had now been forever interrupted; there was a learned rhythm to the companionship of another with so many shared years & experiences and the comfort that it brought, that to which I had become so accustomed. Now there was no extra tv noise when I didn’t have it on; no extra people-noises of walking, movements, opening drawers, cupboards and fridge and just living done by another; with life so busy, so constant and we have to adjust to so much unavoidable noise and bustle that it was nice to be the only author of noise for a bit in my little world.  And yet so equally, I did miss Doug’s quiet routines with giant awareness that it had forever been quashed in an instant. My soul was momentarily soaking in the quiet for navigating the crisis all the while realizing moment by moment, hour by hour that I might detest that quiet from time to time; there was fresh reminders around every corner that Doug would not be coming back in this space of my life and filling it with his laughter, his daily movements & rhythms and presence any more.  I was longing for some of that expected, predictable happenings. He was indeed a big presence whether his physical body or his laughter, so the gap is “XXL” like he was. As Kellie says, “our #6 is missing”. My daily routines were reforming and a new path emerging. And all of that takes time to recognize, experience, accept, adjust to, and gain confidence in taking the hand of God, take a deep breath, and choose to move forward with the brand new Companion of these unchartered waters.