Today is another anniversary of my husband’s death — and of my widowhood.
Six years is neither a long time nor a short time to survive a death. But I can’t believe more years will still pass. Every year is a different flavor but one thing always stays the same: the gut punch of his deathiversary.
It’s like this. I go along, doing my life, enjoying summer, being a mom, seeing my clients. Out of nowhere this lead blanket falls over me and I drop, struck by grief. Always during the week of August 25. I don’t consciously prepare for this date. It is not one I want to celebrate or remember. I actually have to put it in my calendar.
Sean died August 25, 2016 of a rare cancer called synovial sarcoma, leaving me with our two young kids. They are now teenagers. He battled it for six years when most people die within the first.
He was a badass. He was the love of my life. We were together for 20 years in a happy marriage.
***
It happened again a few nights ago. I was cooking dinner and my kids were chatting about their day. I found myself getting more and more tired and quiet and inward.
When I sat down to eat, my appetite left. The conversation was amusing, but I couldn’t laugh. My partner of four years was there and looked at me funny. He knew something was off, though my kids didn’t.
I was too tired to watch TV so I laid in bed and stared at the wall. My partner, concerned, lay quietly next to me. I felt dissociated and depressed and looked for things to blame. Maybe the kids were too loud. Maybe it was too hot.
Maybe I was a failure and imposter in every aspect of my life.
When I told my partner to go home because I was bad company that night, my eyes filled up. Crushed, I remembered.
Sean died this week.
The old grief overcame me like a tidal wave and tears I forgot about spilled over. My partner hugged me in his big generous arms and left. He knew the drill.
I have to go there alone.
***
It’s like there’s an alarm clock in my nervous system set to the time of death. I don’t want to remember it, but it remembers me. I don’t want to track it, but it tracks me. When it goes off, I’m always caught by surprise.
The grief cuts a hole in the ground below me and I fall and fall through the chasm for days, reliving the week before he died.
The drive to the hospital…the doctor saying he won’t be going home again…unconsciousness…family leaving for the night…startling paroxysms…him taking his last breath in my arms…then me telling nobody. Just laying with him in his hospital bed until all the warmth disappeared.
There’s more. But only he knows the rest.
***
Grief must occur in me the way birds know to migrate at the same time every year. A code of some sort.
But my animal instincts are not so sharp. My denial instincts are sharper.
I suppose if grief didn’t program itself into my cells, I would never choose to feel it. But death has stronger ideas. It carved a story in my heart and reads it to me this time every year, like it or not.
I don’t claim the word widow. An existence defined by loss. It feels so unfeminist. But this week, that is what I am. Cocooned in the shroud of widowhood, I am the most private and most real I ever get to feel.
There is an odd privilege to it, a badge of honor, a transformation to something greater and brighter than myself — if I can bear all the feelings. Look them straight in the eye.
It is almost too much. As I fall through the days, through layer upon layer of hurt, feeling it is all I can do. Falling, feeling and flying.
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