Collision

A shooting star is nothing more than a small meteor, burning up in the Earth's atmosphere on entry.  These little heavenly bodies never make it to the surface, but instead are absorbed into the sky, as if nothing ever happened.  They just burst into a beautiful spectacle of light, and streak across the sky.  The ones that actually collide with the Earth's surface are much bigger, and come along much less frequently.  But oh, do they leave their mark.  On collision, a larger meteor drives deep down into the bedrock, displaces rock and soil, and creates a crater.  The ground is forever changed, the terrain destroyed and turned into something completely different.  While it is still composed of the same elements that existed there before, there is now something else there too.  The collision has left a hole.  It has also left a part of the meteorite, melted into the ground, an inextricable part of the land.  Over days, years, and centuries after such a strike, the land will change again and again as it is weathered into something new.  Flora and fauna may change, climate may change, and after it all, the land will look nothing like it did before the meteoroid set its collision course.  It is something new.

Perhaps it is a labored metaphor, but I was hit with such a meteor.  I can see it vividly in my mind's eye.  Tragedy came swiftly, collided with my happy life, and turned it into something unrecognizable.  It left a deep, wide hole.  And the grief is still there, melted into me, a part of me that will never really go away.  It is something that I have begun to learn to live with, a thing that I will get better at carrying as time goes on, but a thing which will always be there.  It lives deep inside, and has changed my surface and my core.  I feel it every moment.  I am forever changed, and the change extends into every facet of my life.

Two days ago, I left my house for the final time.  On the last day that the house was mine, I went in alone, and walked through every room, remembering a life that seems so far distant now.  In the kitchen, I stood at the stove and imagined stirring the risotto in my red Martha Stewart pan.  I stood at the island and thought of taking cookies off the cookie tray.  In the basement I sat where the sofa used to be and thought of eating popcorn, watching a movie with Ryan on a Saturday night.  In the master bathroom I thought of doing my makeup every morning, while Ryan sat on the bed in his button down shirt and slacks, drinking coffee and making fun of The Today Show.  I thought of the spot on the counter where I'd set the pregnancy test that turned out to be positive, and how lightheaded I was when I saw the word "Pregnant" appear on the stick.  In Ryan's office, I imagined the expression on his face when I ran in that same morning and told him the news.  And in the bedroom, I sat where my spot on the bed used to be, and yet again, begged for Ryan to just come home, so that I wouldn't have to leave the house alone.  Then, I said goodbye to the place, knowing that I will never see it again.  The collision in my life happened a year and a half ago, and in the moment that I left our home for good, it felt strangely as though my transformation were complete.

It's not, though.  Perhaps the destruction finally is - I don't know.  But I still haven't changed into whatever it is that I am going to become.  I don't even know what that is yet, or how long it will take.  How do I become a new person, and yet keep the parts of me that make up my core?  Because there are parts of me that I want to keep - while I was forced to change, there are parts of who I am that remain,  and yet they are often entirely incompatible with this new life.  While I go through the motions of my life, being a Mom, going to work every day, I still wake up every morning and think, "now what?"  In which direction should I turn my feet?  And how, while carrying the heavy weight of grief and loss, do I begin a new life?

I pose these questions because I truly don't have the answers.  I don't expect anyone else to either, and I don't know how long it will take until I find them for myself.  But I do know that I will find them.  I'll probably find many of them without realizing it, gradually, over time, bit by bit.  I'll learn to carry the weight, to live with the hole and yet live a full new life.  I'm already so, so much better at it than I was six months ago.  While the hurt hasn't gone away, and won't ever, it has become somewhat more bearable, and I have become stronger.  I will learn how the new circumstances of my life fit in with the old person that I was, the person that I want to keep.  I'll learn how to make the two compatible, how to blend them into something tolerable.  I think I've used the word "insurmountable" in a post before, and I'll use it again here.  It seems insurmountable - the thought of starting again.  But it can't be.  The only option is to find a way, let a new life take form, and hope that one day it might be as beautiful as the old one was.

Ryan and the Movies

My Mom has been trying to get me to go to the movies for months.  Probably close to a year, really.  She doesn't care what I see, or who I go with, or when I go, she just wants me to go.  Like, yesterday.  But I don't really want to.

The truth is that I have been completely unwilling to go to the movies to see anything because what I really want is to go see a movie with Ryan.  And obviously, I can't do that.  So anytime my Mom brings it up, I fight with myself about it in my head for a while, and always come out on the side of just not going.  No movie has been worth the emotional rollercoaster I would go on if I actually went.  And I haven't been too interested in taking the time to watch any at home, either.  I'm missing my movie watching partner.

Ryan LOVED movies.  He loved movies of nearly every genre, and he was prolific in his movie knowledge.  He wasn't just your typical action movie guy (though Die Hard was an all time favorite), he liked war movies, period pieces, children's films, comedies, science fiction, and the very occasional chick-flick.  It says a lot of my husband that he offered to take me to see both Sex and the City and Les Miserables.  While he went to both happily, I know he would have rather been watching Iron Man and Lincoln.  He didn't need to worry though - we went to see both of those movies too.

My experience with Ryan and film started when we were dating.  We went to see King Kong in the theater, the 2005 version with Jack Black and Naomi Watts (terrible date movie), and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in the first few months that we knew each other.  If there was nothing playing at the movies, or we otherwise found ourselves bored in those first months of dating, we'd watch something on DVD.  I remember the first time Ryan suggested this - it was late at night and I didn't think the video store was open.  He told me that we could just pick something from his DVD library.  I expected that to include maybe twenty movies, and didn't expect to find one to watch.  Instead, when I got to his parents' house , he pulled out two giant boxes filled with DVDs and told me to find one I wanted to watch.  I think it took me ten minutes just to sift through them.  I think we watched Legends of the Fall that night - and old movie that Ryan had seen many times before, and I never had.  This is a ritual we would repeat often, both there, and in our own home once we moved in together.  He introduced me to so many great movies that I had just never taken the time to watch before.  He made me brave enough to finally watch Silence of the Lambs and the Kill Bill movies.  He introduced me to classic action movies like Die Hard (all three original movies).  He tried repeatedly to get me to watch Predator- though this is where I drew the line.  No Predator for me.

But back to the theater experience, which is what I started this post about.  I learned quickly that Ryan took his movie-going seriously.  He would want to go see a movie on opening night, which I usually discouraged because, as I constantly reminded him, neither of us were fond of the crowds.  He had no issues putting out the money for the tickets (although he did complain about the rising ticket prices), but found it to be extortion to be forced to pay $8 for popcorn.  He also was pretty sure that movie theater popcorn butter was a carcinogen or something.  So, we usually skipped the snacks.  We'd just sit there, hold hands, and watch the movie.  Very little talking.  Then, we'd discuss the movie for the rest of the night.  I vividly remember many movie nights, sitting in his Audi, driving home from the Regal theater in Oaks and talking about something we'd just seen.  More often than not I'd learn something- from the way that Batman had his back broken in the comic books to how the real plot to kill Hitler differed from the version in Valkyrie.  We'd talk about the previews too, and often have a list of upcoming movies that we wanted to see next.

Over the time we were together, Ryan and I must have gone to the movies fifty times or more.  Since he died, I have been there exactly once.  I went with a close friend to see The Great Gatsby, and had a good time.  But I can't tell you the number of times I wanted to reach over next to me and grab Ryan's hand, lean my head on his shoulder - it was almost a reflex.  Despite enjoying the movie and the time out, I was very sad that day, and I missed Ryan intensely.  One of the worst parts was the drive home alone, with no one to talk to about the movie.  That was over a year ago I think, and I haven't been back since.  As much as I wanted to see American Hustle and a handful of other films this year, I just couldn't bring myself to go through the movie ritual without Ryan.  And I still have a hard time thinking about doing it.

The closest I've come have been a couple of times I've thought about going alone.  Like many things in my life, I get temporarily very excited about it.  I think about going to see a movie, and I think "yeah, I want to do that!"  I think that I'll go get popcorn and a soda for a change, and take myself out to dinner first.I have fond memories of doing exactly that one time when Ryan was out of town.  I start to think of how I could manage it, how my Mom could watch Sophie, I could do it right after work some night, it would be a lot of fun.  And then all at once my body and heart reject the idea.  Nope, I don't want to do that.  I don't want to go without Ryan.  The reward of going to the movies just isn't the same as it used to be.  It should be a place to relax, have fun, and unwind.  I think, for the past year, that it would have been more of a source of stress than relaxation.

Since Ryan died, I've done many of the things that we used to do together - I've gone to many restaurants we used to frequent, I've gone on a few trips, but everything is difficult.  Movies seem especially tough, partly because they were our default date night, and partly because he loved them so much.  I've spent a lot of time being sad that I can't go to see certain movies with him - movies that I know he would have wanted to see.  The Book Thief, Iron Man 3, Captain America 2, The Monument Men, and X-Men: Days of Future Past all come to mind.  How can I go see those without him?  Honestly, I probably wouldn't even want to see a lot of them if it weren't for him.  But he opened me up to a lot of things I hadn't been interested in before.  

I know I won't feel this way forever.  Just like everything else, there simply has been an adjustment period, and eventually things will get back.  Not to normal, but to something tolerable.  It's just another thing that hurts, a wound that needs to heal.  I'm certain to break the moratorium soon, but just as certain to leave whatever movie I see thinking about what Ryan's review would have been, what previews he would have been excited about, and how nice it would be to drive home with him and plan our next movie night.

The Stages: Denial

Everyone knows the five stages of grief.  They are steeped in pop-culture, often as the punchline of a psychological joke (See:  Frasier, Scrubs, The Colbert Report, and countless other TV comedies).  More seriously, they frame our understanding of grief, particularly of another person's grief.  Before I was a widow, I admit that I'd hear of a grieving person who was exhibiting symptoms of one of the stages, and I, as though I were some kind of expert, would say to myself, "of course.  They're in denial.  That's normal."  What did I know of normal?  I think this is how many people understand the stages of grief- they make a grieving person's actions and emotions understandable to those on the outside.

Sometime after Ryan died, a fellow widow sent me a book in the mail- the definitive text on the stages, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross's On Grief and Grieving:  Finding the Meaning of Grief Through the Five Stages of Loss.  I was put off at first, thinking that, again, someone was trying to fit me into a simple formula.  My grief was personal, and no one else could possibly understand it.  But, considering the gifter, I decided to give the book a chance.

Upon reading, I began to see myself in many of Kubler-Ross's descriptions of the effects of grief.  It was gratifying, to know that what I was feeling truly was normal.  And not only that - it was still extremely, undeniably, personal.  The book, along with grief counselling, taught me that the five stages of grief are real, but not as pop-culture has taught us to understand them.  They are not things that grievers travel through in a defined order, in a defined time period, or in a defined way.  People in grief may go through all of them, none of them, or only a few.  They can cycle back again, you can feel multiple of them at the same time, you can have rapid switches from anger to bargaining and back again, for instance, or sit in denial for several weeks before moving straight to acceptance.  It's different for each person.  In fact, I would say that they are not so much "stages" of grief (which implies a certain formulaic progression) as "reactions" to grief.  To me, they have been almost symptoms of a condition, ways that my body and brain responded and learned to cope with what I was going through, and continue to go through, in my life.

I'm not done, and  I don't know if I ever will be.  I can say though that learning to accept the normalcy of my own grief has helped me to deal with it, and helped me to go through it each and every day.  I thought I'd write a bit of a "blog within a blog" and share, one at a time, a bit of how each of the stages have affected me personally.  I've been through them all, to some extent, some more than others.  It's my hope that in sharing some of these stories, it may help others to understand some of the the emotional process involved in grieving, and how deeply personal and individual each person's experience of deep grief can be.