Feeling Sorry, and Being Strong

In the months following Ryan's death, I read a few books on grief, only one of which I found helpful.  I didn't find a book that was able to speak to me - a young, pregnant widow whose husband died suddenly, but not in a disaster or in the line of any kind of duty.  Recently though, I decided to try again, and simply focus on books relating to young widows.  In doing so, I came across a memoir, the title of which I don't remember, by a woman in a situation very much like my own.  I rely on the reviews of these books, as I find that most reviewers are grievers themselves, and give honest opinions about what books have helped them and why.  In the case of this book, the top reviewer said that what he most admired about the writer was that she "never once felt sorry for herself".  This line, probably unfairly, made my blood boil.

First off, it's very likely simply not true.  To think that a woman in her twenties or thirties lost her husband months before the birth of their first child, and then never felt sorry for herself, is pretty much inconceivable.  I don't know this woman, and I'm making assumptions.  Perhaps she truly is that remarkable of a person, but I seriously doubt it.  I'm awfully cynical, and I bet that a more "positive" telling of the story probably sold more books.  The self-pity was probably edited out.

What bothered me more though, is that this reviewer's single favorite thing about the story was that the writer didn't pity herself.  This, to me, represents a fundamental point about how this society views grief.  We respect a person who is able to get knocked down and get back up like nothing happened.  Preferably quickly, and with a smile.

For the record, I feel sorry for myself.  Regularly.  Not every minute, not every day, but regularly.  And what's more, I'm not ashamed of it.  I think it's normal, and that most people who have been through a deep loss would go through some period of self-pity.  I hate that I lost my husband, I hate that my daughter will never know him, and I hate that our future together was taken away.  I hate that I have no answers for why it happened.  Why should I not be entitled to feel sorry for myself?  I feel sorry for the other people in Ryan's life who have lost a son, a brother, a friend.  I believe I'm entitled to feel a little sorry for myself too.  Maybe not forever, and not so much that it takes over my entire existence, but probably for a long time.  I'm not done grieving yet, and I don't know when I will be.

Grief takes time.  It take a lot more time than this society is prepared to give it.  We applaud people who are able to heal quickly.  We call them "strong".  It's not a perfect example, but I think of the Boston Marathon bombing.  The anniversary was last month, and I can't tell you the number of stories that I saw about someone who lost a limb or was otherwise injured or traumatized, and is up walking or running again a year later.  News anchors want to run these stories because they're inspirational - they show that after tragedy, these strong people were able to work hard, overcome their losses, and move on with a promising new life, like a happy ending of a movie.  The loss of a limb is, of course, different than the loss of a loved one, but I doubt that anyone who lost a limb or was otherwise the victim of terrorism would have completely overcome their grief and trauma after a year.  I'm sure they still struggle.  I'm sure they still have hard days and times when they wonder why this had to happen to them, and times when they wish it hadn't.  This is not to say that their stories shouldn't be inspiring to others, it's not to say that they're not remarkable people.  They are.  They are remarkable, and to be admired for their resilience.  But, perhaps we owe them, and other victims of tragedy, a bit more time before expecting them to be healed.  There is something symbolic about the one year anniversary of an event - it seems to be a statute of limitations, after which a person should be ready to get up and move on.  It's nowhere near that simple.  Often, the second year of grief can be just as bad or even worse.  At least a part of this comes from the fact that people feel you should be over the hard part.   It's hard to continue to grieve when people think you should be done.  

In the year after Ryan died, a lot of people called me "strong".  I got "brave" too.  Most of the time, I feel that I am neither.  In fact, the antonyms of those words, "weak" and "cowardly" seem often to apply more aptly.  I want to lay down and quit often.  And, as mentioned before, I feel sorry for myself a lot. I'm tired, and often bitter and angry.  I didn't just get back up and brush myself off - I wallowed.  Sometimes, I still do, and I think I will for a long time.  I'm not "better".

But, I think maybe that's what actually makes a person strong.  It's not the ability to get over it and move on quickly, it's not the ability to resist self-pity.  Those things, if you truly have them, are admirable, but I think strength comes from somewhere else too.  Strength can be the ability to get up and go on with your life, even knowing that it's not better, knowing that you'll never get back what you lost, knowing that you have many more hard times ahead of you, pining for your old life, living with crushing hurt all of the time, but going on anyway.  No matter how tired I am, no matter how many times I've completely freaked out, and no matter how much I still feel like there's no reward at the end of all of this work, I do get up every morning.  I get up carrying my grief all of the time, and do the best I can, even though I often don't feel much like it.  If I'm strong, that's why.  The same, I'm sure, can be said of countless other people out there who are suffering through deep grief.  Their strength lies not in their ability to heal quickly, but in their ability to live with their loss, despite how difficult it is to do so.  

When My House Is Not My Home

It was an agonizing decision, but in October, just before Sophie was born, I decided to put my house on the market.  There were a lot of reasons.  The house is a bit far from where my parents and Ryan's parents live, and they were planning to help me watch the baby.  In the months following Ryan's death, I tried many times to get back to living there, but couldn't bring myself to sleep in the bed where I watched him die.  The two times I actually stayed the night, I was filled with anxiety.  The bottom line is that under the distress of a drastically changed life and a baby who needed a home, I had to make a choice, and I couldn't make the choice to stay.

I was fortunate enough to get an offer right away, but the sale fell through because of the buyer's difficulty selling his own home.  Then came the dry real estate spell over the holidays.  I was hopeful that in January, the market would pick up again and the house would sell quickly.  As emotionally attached as I was to the place, I looked forward to having a huge item checked off of my "difficult things to do" list.  And then one day, while I wasn't there, the flex tube on my kitchen sink burst.  The kitchen flooded.  The water soaked the linoleum, and much of the dining room carpet.  Then it flowed  down into the finished basement, where it soaked through the ceiling tiles, caused the ceiling to cave in, then flooded the basement itself.  While it hasn't really been my home for a long time, seeing my house in ruins was devastating, and depressingly symbolic.  My house, in ruins, looked an awful lot like my life- a shell of its former self.  Dealing with the insurance, the contractors,  putting all of the pieces back together, is exhausting.  It's also crushingly sad.  Ryan and I lived the happiest years of our lives together, in that house.  Now, it's a place that, for all intents and purposes, no longer exists.  When I'm done putting it back together, it won't look like it did before.  When I look back on my life with Ryan, our house was the centerpiece of that life.  I want to remember it like it was then; a place where our life together was just beginning.

Ryan and I bought the house in 2007.  He had just been appointed to his full-time position at Montgomery County Community College's Pottstown campus, and wanted a place nearer to work.  I had been trying to scrape together enough money to move out of my parents' house for years.  As big of a decision as it was, I remember making it almost casually. We were vacationing in South Carolina, and we had a sort of hypothetical conversation about living together.  At the end of the conversation, Ryan asked, "So, you think you would want to do that?"  I said I would, and it was decided.  Next thing I knew, we were looking for homes, shopping for furniture, making a list of who owned what and what we would have to buy at IKEA.  It seemed quick, but I don't remember doubting the decision for a second.

Ryan and I on our deck, shortly after we were engaged.
  This was our Save the Date picture.

In not too long, we found a place in Collegeville.  It was a townhouse with a deck, three bedrooms, and a finished basement with a bar.  Ryan turned one bedroom into a library, and we had our first fight when he told me that I couldn't keep my books in there with his.  There wouldn't be enough room, he'd said.  Turns out he was right - the man had more books than I've ever seen.  The basement became our main living area, and we planned on having people over all of the time.  In reality, we did so rarely.  I remember lying on the floor down there before we had a couch, watching a movie together before all of the boxes were unpacked.  It was, strangely, Short Circuit (let's all remember that this was 2007, not 1988 like you might think).

Guest bartender at the bar.

Ryan relaxes in his spot on the basement couch.

The last Christmas in our living room.

When I think of it now, I'm transported to a life that's gone but that I desperately wish I could recapture.  On a night like tonight, Ryan would play video games in the basement on an XBox 360 that I bought for his birthday one year.  I'd sit at my computer in the living room, watching old episodes of The Office, and having a glass of wine, rolling my eyes whenever I heard Ryan get mad at the game.  He'd come upstairs to get his crumpled bag of Spicy Nacho Doritos from the kitchen (he refused to use a chip clip to seal the bag), and I'd make him stop in the dining room and dance with me to no music.  He thought that was ridiculous but rolled his eyes and did it anyway, whenever I asked.  Later at night, we'd go to sleep in our bed with the nice soft sheets, cuddled up against one another, and wake up that way the next day.  What wouldn't I give to have more nights like that?  More mornings having coffee together in our kitchen?  More summer evenings on our deck?  More Friday nights playing Trivial Pursuit?  I loved that house, and our life in it.  

To me, the house isn't about one story, or even the multitude of them.  It's about a feeling I get when I think of the place.  Until it flooded, when I walked in there, I felt home.  Even without Ryan being there, even after days or weeks away, I'd come in and sit down at my computer desk, or lie down on my bed, and I'd feel like that's where I was supposed to be.  It makes me think of something Ryan once said when he was away.  In 2009, right after we'd gotten engaged, Ryan spent the summer in Europe doing archival research for his dissertation.  We wrote many emails back and forth during that time, and talked often.  It was obvious to me how much he missed me, and our home.  I remember very specifically a conversation we had close to the end of the summer, when he told me how anxious he was to get home.  "I'm done with this" he told me "I miss you.  I miss our house.  I want to get back to our life, you know?"  I do know, Ryan.  I feel the same way.  

The Dreams That You Dare To Dream

Nearly every night when I put her to sleep, I sing Somewhere Over the Rainbow to Sophie.  I've been doing it since before she was born.  When I was pregnant and in a deep, deep grief, I decided that it was important to spend five minutes every night focusing just on her and nothing else, and showing her that despite my sadness, I loved her.  I don't know what exactly made me choose that song at first - in the beginning I sang a variety of songs, but that one just stuck.  I remember that I liked it because after Ryan died, I thought of "Over the Rainbow" as being a place that I could see him again, and a place that Sophie could meet him.  It was somehow a comfort.  I sang it to her on the morning she was born, and she looked at me in awe, as if to say, "I know that song".  It was our first moment of real bonding.

Over time, she's learned the song well enough to have a favorite part.  I watch her face every night, and I can see that no matter what she's doing, the song gets to a certain point, and she'll stop and watch me, waiting.  Then, her favorite part comes, and she smiles.  Her favorite line?

"And, the dreams, that you dare to dream, really do come true".

You may think I'm imagining it, but I'm not enough of an optimist to make that up.  When I noticed it, several nights in a row, I thought to myself that perhaps in her little child's mind, she is excited that her dreams may come true.  More likely she just likes the sounds of the words.  But, it got me to thinking how great it is that Sophie can have dreams, she can dream anything she dares, and maybe those dreams will come true.

And then today I had an unexpected thought.  I have dreams.

It's the first time in many months that I've realized this.  It may be the first time in over a year since it's been true.  When Ryan died, my dreams were destroyed.  My entire future, wiped away in the course of an hour.  In fact, because of the ridiculous shock I was going through, it took me a long time to even realize how many of my dreams wouldn't be a reality.  I kept trying to cling to something- some shred of the future I thought I was going to have.  But over time I realized that it was all gone, and that I couldn't hope and dream for the same things anymore.  Ryan was at the center of every one of my dreams, and without him, how could I have those things?  I'll never have a family with him.  We'll never move into a bigger house, and have everyone over there for Thanksgiving dinner like I always wanted.  We'll never renew our wedding vows in Europe, or go scuba diving in the Caribbean, or open an Irish pub when we retire.  I'll never get to see the pride on his face if I decide to finally go back to school.  The list goes on and on.

What then?  When your dreams go away, what do you live for?  For me, it was, and still is, my daughter.  But I know that I need to find something to hope for myself as well.  While I've known that for a long time, most of the time, it feels just impossible.  And even if I do manage to hope for something or look forward to something, I'm immediately confronted by the immense mountain that I would have to climb to get it.  When you've lost as I have, optimism is terrifying.  It's been incredibly difficult to try.  What if I climb back up from where I am, and fall again?  What if the universe decides to take from me again?  I'm not sure how I could make it.  

Not only has it been difficult to hope, but I haven't know what to hope for.  Having lost the old dreams, I never replaced them with new ones.  My hopes had been limited to the health of my family, my daughter, and her chance for a good life.  Today though, when I was leaving work, I started thinking about how I'd love to be able to make writing more a part of my life, perhaps even a living one day.  It seems unlikely, but it doesn't mean I couldn't try.  And all at once, I realized that I had a dream.  Then I started to realize that I had a few of them.  Mostly little things, but they still count.  And Sophie's lullaby just popped into my head, out of nowhere.  "The dreams, that you dare to dream...", and the bright smile on her face.  Those of you who know my daughter, or have seen pictures, know the light in that smile.  For just a minute, I thought that maybe when she smiles at that moment in the song every night, it's her daddy, smiling through her at me, letting me know that I can still dream.  Again, more likely she probably just likes the sounds of the words, but that little thought may be the single most optimistic thing I've thought of in over a year.  It's not like me.

I'm still horribly sad, most of the time.  I'm completely devastated that the dreams I had with Ryan won't come true.  Even when I think about having new dreams, and I get excited about them for a moment, the next moment is filled with an aching sadness that Ryan can't be in them.  I wanted that future.  Not the one I'm trying to scrape together now.  I'd give up every seed of a dream forming in my heart now if it meant I could have Ryan and those dreams back.  Of course though, I can't.  But maybe, if I try, I might have some of the other things I'm just starting to hope for.