What's in a word?

My spousal loss bereavement support group met this week and I hosted it at my house.  I love these people.  They are all so courageous and kind and, well, supportive.  I realize that I do love entertaining and I plan on doing it more often.  On that evening we noted that it had been 52 weeks to the day since we met at our first meeting at Hospice. So we felt we should each share about the last year.  I shared with the group how the home equity line of credit that Tom and I had taken out 15 years ago came due and I was given no notice, just 21 days to pay off the balance.  I then applied for another line with a different bank and had signed the paperwork the day before.  What I found so distressing was twofold.  First, I had to have Tom's name removed from the title.  Our home meant so much to us and it almost felt like I was erasing him.  But more disturbing was seeing myself described as "an unmarried woman".  I wanted to cross it out and write in widow.  The members of the group then discussed the meaning of the word and how each felt about it.

Some stated they did not like the word, feeling that it was dated.  And truly, it does give off some connotations that may be considered less than flattering.  I, however, prefer the label of widow.  In reality I would rather be married, but even the IRS doesn't consider me married any longer--that ended on the last day of the year that Tom died in 2015.  The term single (or even unmarried) implies that one has never married and for a woman, spinsterhood.  Now I really dislike that term.  We married in our 30s, I was already considered a spinster by the legal definition and it felt like a personal failure.  I am not divorced. A divorce is a decision to end a marriage.  We did not decide to end our marriage.  It ended because Tom died.  The term widow tells a lot of my story in one word.  To me, wrapped in that word is the 20 years of a happy marriage and the devastating loss that will forever be a part of me.  Wrapped in that one word is the courage and fortitude to keep living despite the pain, to try to build a new life without my beloved.  To move forward, I must let go a little at a time.  Not the love.  I will never let go of the love, for it transcends death.  If my genes are any prediction of the length of my life, then I have several more decades to live and I intend to live life to its fullest.

But I still struggle.  I still feel a lot of pain.  I am still experiencing the body and mind numbing exhaustion.  I still can't force myself to power through things like I used to and it frustrates me to no end.  I am finding it difficult not to berate myself for my lack of action.  I am not depressed.  I am mourning, those are different things.  I was prepared for the emotional symptoms of grief and some of the mental one.  But the physicality of the process I was not expecting.  It continues to surprise me. 

Now that I am in the second year, I have found that what other widows(ers) have told me is true.  The second year is just as hard, perhaps even harder, but in a different way.  It is all so real now.  I am having a harder time being positive as I realize that I now am living a life that I did not want to have.  And while I know that it is up to me, and only me, to build a new life, I have no idea what that is, or how to do it.  And I have no energy at all to do it.  And I'm tired of whining but I also know that not dealing with it leads to isolation.  And that is not good for me.  I have been doing a good job of isolating the last few months.  Work and rainy weather have made that easy. 

Today is the first day of spring, my favorite season.  It is the season of new beginnings and growth.  I can only hope that is also true for me.

Rain and Tears and Memories

It has been a rainy few weeks and I've been hunkered down inside with no energy except to watch TV.  I've found reruns of NYPD Blue and have been binge watching them.  I find it interesting the ones that have been aired recently.  NYPD Blue is close to my heart for a few reasons.  First, it was one of the programs that was popular during our early years together.  The second is that Dennis Franz (Andy Sipowicz character) is Tom's doppleganger.  They look so much alike that people would yell out of cars when we were walking down the street. 

The first episode that I caught was where Andy is hiding the fact that he has prostate cancer from his wife.  She confronts him and he breaks down, saying that the thought of not being with her and their son was too much to bear.  Right after Tom was diagnosed he said to me that he didn't want to leave me and Zora.  That particular episode touched my heart.  The next episode I caught is when Andy's partner Bobby is in the hospital after a raging infection caused his heart to fail which necessitate a heart transplant.  He then acquires another infection from which he cannot recover.  The feel of being in the hospital room, the look of fear and desperation on his wife's face as each hope is dashed and she has to face the fact that he is dying was like watching myself, trying to be strong and present while crumbling inside, wanting to do the best by him.  The last episode that I watched was when Andy had a bad reaction to the dye necessary for a CT scan and they had to give him some medication.  He then became very goofy.  It reminded me of when Tom had a severe GI bleed and they had to do an endoscopy to find out what was bleeding.  I walked into his room right after he got back to his room and he still had some of the anesthesia in his system and he said to me "I feel like the guy in the Jack-in-the-Box commercial".  It made us both laugh.  He didn't remember saying it later. 

http://ispot.tv/a/7Npt

I don't want to be the widow who is lost in the past, not living in the present, and not looking forward to the future.  But I am at that point where it can seem that happy memories are in the past, the present is very painful and the future is unknown and it is difficult to imagine happiness.  I can believe it to be true and hope for it.  I am right in the middle of a different kind of "hard part", the 18th mile of the marathon, far from the start line but the finish line isn't in sight.  It is a tortuous place to be.  The raw grief of the early days are gone. Some people think that since its been a year I should be all better (actually I used to think that too), but this is still really difficult. My ability to power through things is not what it used to be.  The last few days I've had the thought that if I am still going to be here, then I want to live life, not just exist.  Every day that I can't get out of the chair, do the things that I want and need to do to move forward, is a day in my life that I can't get back.  And yet I feel unable to change that. 

How to Start Over?

The tune and lyrics of the song by the BeeGees--How Do You Mend a Broken Heart--have been running through my head today.  My heart was shattered the day that Tom died.  In actuality, my life was turned upside down on June 30, 2014, the day that Tom was diagnosed.  I have been thinking lately about how to rebuild my life, a life without Tom in it.  He was an integral part of my daily life for about half of my life.  How do I start over?  The last thirteen months I have been processing his loss, I have been dealing with death duties (although there are still many to finish). 

Recently it occurred to me that I have to start over--that a major part of grieving the loss of my husband is also in grieving who I was, what our life was, the future we had planned.  I know this is not news to many, but it seemed like an epiphany.  Dealing with the sadness of Tom's death has been the focus of the last year.  Now I have to figure out where to go from here.  I'm not a wife anymore.  When my parents died, I was still a daughter, but I am no longer a wife.  I loved being a wife, Tom's wife.  I've just started to try out the words "late husband" when talking to people who do not know the story.  I'm not sure I like it much.  Tom was never late, so it seems rather ironic that the "correct" description for him is "late".  I never considered this part of the story.  I wish I didn't have to.

Lessons Learned

Today is Valentine's Day.  It is the second one since Tom died.  Last year, a mere 18 days had passed and I was well ensconced in numbness.  Valentine's Day (or VD as we would call it), was not our holiday.  We didn't usually make a big deal of it, although we would always mark the occasion with cards and generally flowers or some other trinket.  It wasn't over the top for us.  We always said being married to each other was like Valentine's Day every day.  So for me, this isn't a heart wrenching day of remembrance.  What I am feeling is not the sadness of it being such a supposedly romantic holiday and Tom's not here.  What I am feeling is the absence of him (the physical Tom) in my life everyday, as well as on this day.  His spirit, however, is safely held in my heart, my soul and my life.

When I was young, in the years before Tom, during all those "dating" years or dead-end relationship years, this holiday held a lot of expectation, what grand romantic gesture would be made, what declarations of love and devotion would I receive.  blah blah blah . . .   And the very early years of our relationship did hold some of those expectations as we navigated the beginnings of a friendship that turned to romance that turned to love that turned to commitment that became a strong and loving marriage.  This holiday sometimes felt like an obligation to be romantic, when in reality there was romance in our lives on a daily basis.  In 2009 I made a photo book to serve as a Valentine's Day card.  It was titled "100 Reasons Why I Love You Tom". I included photos of our life to illustrate each quality.  I read it this morning and remembered how true each of those reasons are/were.

Last night I attended a comedy show with our friends.  I laughed my butt off--it was so much fun.  But when I returned home I remembered Valentine's Day 2006.  We had won a dinner from the grocery delivery service that we used and Tom was going to prepare dinner for us that evening.  I was stuck at working, focused on a deadline for a client.  Everything took longer than expected and I was at the office until after midnight.  Tom was so upset with me.  I didn't really understand why (yes I could be clueless) since me working late was not unusual and my client and work commitments often took priority.  Truth be told, they always took priority until the last year of Tom's life.  I felt nauseous when I remembered that night, how I had let him down.  Because the reality is that the client didn't care about the extra effort and my firm sure as hell didn't care that I gave up an evening with my husband to make money for them.  I was more focused on trying to get approval and do a good job than I was on what my love wanted.  This was a gut wrenching realization and I am quite ashamed of it.  Should I ever have the privilege of having another love in my life, I will not make this mistake again.  Hindsight is 20/20 and I have learned that nothing, NOTHING, is more important than love.  If you don't have your priorities straight, get them straight.  Money is just a tool.  Love is life.

So today I am having dinner with the members of my spousal loss bereavement group.  We meet on a monthly basis.  I am bringing cupcakes and have handmade toppers--hearts with the names of our spouses.

 Spending the evening with  these people who I have had the honor to share this journey with is going to be wonderful.  We each know the heartache, we have bared our souls to each other and born witness to each other's process.  We get it.  I am certain that we will not be alone, but joined by the spirit of those we each hold most dear.

Letting Go, Inch by Inch

This week I removed my wedding and engagement ring.  Well, full disclosure, I moved my wedding band to my right hand.  We will see how long this lasts, but I think it may stick, except for an occasional "relapse".  I tried to do it once before, at about six months or so, but I just couldn't do it. Having a naked ring finger just seems too, well, naked.  I plan on wearing the ring that Tom bought me for our 20th wedding anniversary on my left hand.  He had ordered it one month to the day before he died, and I didn't receive it until after his death.

When we became engaged we were so broke that we had little money for rings and decided to  use stones that we already had for my wedding set.  My engagement ring holds the diamond that was in my mom's engagement ring (she had lost the diamond out of the setting while digging in the garden and found it about a week later) and the side stones are my birthstone (garnets) given to me in a ring by my childhood babysitter when I was very young.  The diamonds in my wedding band are also from my mom's wedding set and one is from a ring that my grandmother wore and later gave to me.  There is a lot of history in the rings and therefore I will continue to wear them on my right hand since there is so much of my life and story in them.

Since removing my ring, I have fiddled with my left ring finger almost as much as I did when I first began to wear my engagement ring.  I remember being so enamored with it that I constantly was looking at it.  When I would get in the elevator at work, the lights made it sparkle like the sun and I would be mesmerized by it.  It wasn't the first engagement ring I ever had, but it was the perfect one.

Since moving past the one year anniversary of Tom's death, I feel like a weight has started to lift.  I am ready to let go of some of the heaviness of the grief.  I am not done mourning, not by any means, but I am willing to move forward.  I know this next year will be equally hard, albeit in another way, as I come to terms with the reality that my heart is learning what my head already knows.  I do not know what to expect.  I feel his presence in my life and in my heart.  It is true that love never dies.  I thought that was just a saying, but it isn't.  I still have many death duties to complete, and I will do them this year, as I am ready.  There are some things that still seem way too overwhelming to consider, like changing my FB status from married to Tom Radovanovich to widowed.  Or removing some of the many pictures of us together from the walls.  Nope.  Not ready. 

I seem to have fallen off a cliff at about nine months after Tom's death.  There were three months of the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas, the first New Year's Eve, the first anniversary.  And then my milestone birthday.  It all took so much energy and was so incredibly hard.  There were some beautiful moments during those three months, but it was probably some of my hardest months.  I let myself feel and experience all of it.  Other things fell by the wayside during that time.  But now it is time to focus forward while remembering back and enjoying today.  For the next three months I am going to focus on the things that I couldn't focus on before--work and self care.  Head down, focus.  I know there will be moments and perhaps days that I will be swept away by a grief burst.  It will be OK.  To borrow a phrase from the Best Marigold Hotel "Everything will be all right in the end... if it's not all right then it's not yet the end."

Another inch of letting go.

Milestones--Part Two

The second major milestone last week was my birthday.  It was a big birthday.  The kind of birthday that when my parents turned that age I thought they were really old.  I don't feel really old.  I feel really beaten up by the last year and a half.  Several months ago I started to wonder what I would do to mark this milestone, coming three days after the first anniversary of Tom's death.  There was no one to throw a party for me, so if I thought I wanted one, then it was going to be up to me.  But that sort of thing isn't done, is it?  And really, I'm not one to put myself out there for that kind of attention, just not my style.  But I did know that I wanted to honor Tom's first angelversary.  And I really wanted to show my gratitude to those people who have been there for me over the last year.  So with those three reasons for a party, I asked for Tom's guidance.  And all I kept "hearing" from him was, "Do it.  You deserve it."  So I planned an elegant celebration.

Of course, I asked Tom's band to play.  How could I have a party without my RuMoRs family?  I learned a few weeks beforehand that the regular drummer would not be available and the band had asked Tom's friend, mentor and drum teacher to sit in.  I was thrilled.  And then the thought popped into my head, perhaps he would consider playing Tom's favorite drum kit that night.  I hadn't heard it in over a year and it would be the last time I would be able to hear it before it moved to its new home. Tracy agreed to play them, and I had one last chance to be the roadie and hump equipment to a gig.  It was so wonderful to have them there, to hear them.  It meant a lot to the band. It was a wonderful way to honor Tom.

I invited a range of people to the event.  Those invited were those who were particularly supportive over the last year.  My family.  My friends.  Many had known Tom.  But there were also people who have only come to know Tom through my memories of him.  I wanted to be able to thank them all for their support, let them know how grateful I am and to remind them all that the job was not yet done.  The second year can be harder than the first.  Or so I've been told.  And so I believe.

And finally, if I have to get older, why not have a party? A party at the end of January is always a welcome distraction.  The big night arrived, and there was no rain in sight.  The guests arrived, the food was eaten, the toasts were made, the band played and those with rhythm (or suspected rhythm) danced.  And danced.  And you know what?  I had a fabulous time.  It was the best birthday EVER! I even wore a tiara (my bestie wanted me to wear one and I refused, but then another friend brought one as a gift and insisted--it was quite lovely.)

The theme for the evening was Remember, Appreciate, Celebrate.  Words that we should all live by every day.

Milestones--Part One

A week ago tomorrow was the one year anniversary of Tom's passing.  It was a date I both dreaded and anticipated.  It is one of those milestones.  "Can I make it through the first year?"  And on the other hand, "Has it already been a year?"  I feel like I was holding my breath throughout the last year.  Enduring, waiting for it to get better, living through the worst year of my life, most of it numb from deep feelings.  I have said before that it felt like the first year was all about mourning losing Tom.  And this next year about beginning to rebuild my life.  Not sure exactly what that will be. It feels strange to say that I feel a sense of relief, of having a weight lifted off of my shoulders.  On the other hand, I feel incredibly sad.  A year has gone by without him physically by my side.  His spirit is always close, but I miss him.  I've come so far, but I have so far to go.  I really don't like this new life, at all. But I must move forward.  That is what he would want.

To honor the day, I did two things.  In the afternoon, at the exact moment of his transition, I was at the beach, the last one that we visited together.  I spread his ashes in the sand, along with some flowers, and waited for the surf to carry him to sea.  I wrote his name in the sand and saw the waves smooth it out.  Zora, her second visit to the beach ever (the first about three months before Tom died), had a great time running in the sand.  Something about the ocean energy, so soothing and healing!

I have survived the year and all of the "firsts", this major milestone.  I am not done mourning.  I am not done with dispersing his worldly goods.  There are more, and probably difficult times ahead.  That is what I've been told by others who have walked this path.  I look forward to the time when my life is not totally defined by the loss of my husband, but I am not yet ready to make that declaration.  Perhaps at some point.  I can not yet let totally go. 

The adventure continues.