Over the years I’ve had plenty of opportunities to ruminate on grief, happiness, the “woulda, coulda, shouldas” of regrets and even the concept of the multiverse where, in some other world on another plane, this particular instant in time may have a different result. Better maybe.
Street art in Lisbon Portugal. Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz
If my husband hadn’t died 25 years ago, leaving me to raise our 2-year-old alone, would I be the same person? Would I have gone on to get a PhD, as I did? Would he have? Would our son be the person he is today? Would we still have a farm, still be married, have more children? Would we be happy?
I am not the person I was then. At all. At the time I was freelance writing and editing full time. But it was many years before I’d have time again to even think about creative writing. Was that maybe a good thing? It didn’t feel like it.
It’s the curse of getting older that people we love die. I was still in elementary school when I lost a half-sister and grandparent, watching my parents negotiate that kind of grief (badly) was traumatizing in itself. I didn’t want to be the kind of parent whose children discover their sibling has died while attending the funeral. But there are no books navigating grief with very young children. I wrote one. It made an editor cry and it wasn’t right for that house. I stopped trying to place it. I wasn’t ready.
It’s hard to get beyond the negativity of grief. It’s hard to move out of the place of feeling like you have somehow failed, even when there is nothing you did wrong. I didn’t cause the accident that killed my husband. But I still felt like somehow I could have thwarted fate.
What is it about anniversaries that bring it home? It’s been 25 years, but I am still processing this grief.
Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz
25 years ago, I wrote:
“Every time my son hears the phone ring and shouts for Daddy, every time I open the medicine cabinet, or turn some corner to see something so ordinary as laundry, or his tooth brush, or his shoes waiting by the door … all the mundane details from unfinished books to unfinished projects scream for a life gone too soon.
He was my best friend. Everything we did we did together: Everything I loved I loved with him. Every dream and plan we had we had together.
I’ve searched everywhere and I can’t seem to find that sense of him that surely must remain somewhere.
He was my first reader, and my muse. And I lost him.”
I wrote about how my then two-year-old desperately wanted me to not be sad, imploring me to “be happy, Mommy,” as he crashed his cars together, and over and over again replayed his father’s fatal car crash before my eyes.
According to researchers, not being “happy” is a feature, not a bug in the way that we’re designed. In rejecting the “happiness industry,” that takes the inalienable right to “the pursuit of happiness” from the U.S. Constitution to possible extremes, Rafael Eubra writes that “[a] state of contentment is discouraged by nature because it would lower our guard against possible threats to our survival.”
Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz
He notes that nature’s failure to weed out depression, despite its negatives, is because it’s a useful evolutionary feature: it encourages us to avoid risk and can help with problem solving.
The struggle is how and why we survive. It’s that pursuit of happiness and contentment, failed, that keeps us moving. It’s kind of depressing to think about it that way. But a little bit of a relief to understand the why of it. Unfortunately, as campaign advertisers have learned, negative sells: it gets our attention because we’re wired to look at the worst-case scenario.
We dwell on the negative because our brains have a negativity bias.
Thus, circling grief that should have been processed long ago isn’t a failure, it’s a feature. I’ve been grieving for 25 years, not just for the husband no longer with me, but for the son who wouldn’t know or remember him, for the plans that wouldn’t happen, the dreams that died on the vine, the things we didn’t do because we were too busy worrying about the things we would never get to do.
Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz
Some people talk about needing to disconnect the guilt of the things lost from the grieving we must do. Silencing those “woulda coulda shouldas.” Perhaps the lesson, if there is one, is to recognize that death is certain and the vast majority of us will be unprepared for it when it happens. We aren’t going to achieve our ultimate “happiness” before that time and we shouldn’t plan everything for the future pending on that magic moment when it all falls in place because, guess what, it probably won’t. We will always be striving, always be wondering, always be dreaming because if we don’t, we cease to function.
On the one-year anniversary of my husband’s death, I think I started to grasp that. But it’s a long learning process. I wrote then:
“January 19, 2000 was an ordinary day that felt as if it would be something else. And it was. I can recall bits and pieces of that day in ways you can’t recall many days in your life, even the most special (though parts of child birth come close). I see it in video. I relive pieces of it every single day. Maybe it’s a kiss goodbye in the morning, or a conversation I had. I see me answering the phone and talking, in that flurry of activity that comes with being on the phone, getting a child’s snack, having the fixings ready for the supper to come, making frantic phone calls as minutes become hours, answering the door, holding my husband’s wallet, riding off into the night with the coroner. There isn’t a single day in the last year that I haven’t seen my husband in a body bag, only his head revealed, and that with a towel across the top to hide a bloody gash. He was still warm. I stroked his cheek. Moisture came out of his eyes. I see myself calling his mother, his sisters, his brother, and the clumsy words I had to tear apart their lives.
This whole year, and likely the rest of my life has been part of an astounding journey that I never imagined. It’s one of those things the grief support people talk about, that makes no sense, sounds almost stupid the way they seem excited for the journey you’re about to take as they nod at you in those first days and give you their sad smiles. I’ve been kicked in the gut, the teeth, the head, the groin, I’m lying here just shattered and broken and you talk to me about some sort of journey I’m embarking on, “grieve well?!”
Well, I’ve been on that journey, and after the initial shock, I think I understand now what they meant. Part of grieving is accepting that you must grieve. If you don’t explore each memory you’ve had, deal with it, grieve for it, then you will never be able to recall that memory without resurrecting a small piece of grief for it. The grief will always assault you when you’re least prepared. If you don’t explore all the losses that come with the death, then you never realize what it is that you lost, though you feel it.
The thing about the journey is, in exploring those memories you remember them now in a more poignant way, and come away with deeper meaning. The thing about loss is, it isn’t simply “your husband.” Not even just your confidante, lover, companion, friend. It’s also every dream you had. All the goals you hoped to achieve. In our case, it was the farm we were about to close on. It was the home business we hoped to launch there. It was our hopes to expand our family. It was our goals for travel, and our son’s future, and things we wanted to do. But that isn’t all. You lose friends, people who can’t handle knowing you now, people who don’t like being reminded of their own mortality or fear, often groundlessly, that you’ll be a “downer” or for whatever reasons, they drop you from their social circle. It alters your relationship with your spouse’s family. It’s a loss of your personal identity. You’re no longer a spouse, a couple, but a widow, a single. There is no one there to bounce ideas off, or to catch you when you fall, to kiss at midnight New Year’s Eve. If you die who will find your body and will they know what you want done? There is the loss of continuity, of intuitive and intimate understanding.
There’s also a profound change in how you view yourself in the world in a spiritual way. You have to ask yourself questions, many questions, about what you believe and why you
Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz
believe it. If I believe it, do I believe it because it’s easy? Because I have no proof? Because I must believe something? Why do I believe these things? Can I live with believing nothing? You ask yourself questions about whether there is such a thing as fate. If he were one second slower or faster, it would not have been a fatal crash. There were no cars in front of or behind her car. What placed them in that spot at that time? Was it fate? If chance, why did the chance happen the way it did, when it did? You go over the questions. You reconstruct all the little things, going back years and years, that brought you to that juncture. If you’d taken this job opportunity or that, bought this house instead of that one, if you hadn’t changed shifts, had stayed in school, etc. You never really find the answers, but the journey is enlightening.
It’s all part of the journey. It’s part of going over what things mean, and don’t mean. But also, it’s an affirmation. This is my trip report, my travelogue. These are the sights I saw. I’m learning from it. I know myself better. I know my husband better. And when I recall some memory, even if it makes me misty-eyed, each time I see it in the context of all I’ve learned. Even if that image is the coroner at my door, or my husband in a body bag. Even if it’s my imagination coupled with all too much information from autopsy and forensic reports that places me in the car, at that moment.
It’s the kind of journey that makes you do things without regard for how others may perceive them, accepting that this is the way that I must grieve and if it makes you uncomfortable, I’m sorry, but it’s my trip and I’ll see the sights I need to see.
So last night, in bitter cold, with stars incredibly crystalline in the sky, my son and I bundled up so we could be at the crash site by 6 p.m. I had dug the snow off the old wreath and the other flowers there earlier in the week, and replaced a Christmas-style wreath with a honeysuckle wreath with black roses and birds of paradise on it. (It took me years to figure out why he often gave me birds of paradise in flower arrangements. It was the design on the shirt I wore the day we met.)
Last night, I took luminaries made out of plastic milk jugs and set them by the wreath. This is a heavily traveled state highway. We sat on a sled that barely sank into ice-coated snow and held a vigil, talking about the stars, about Daddy, to the rush of headlights and taillights going by.
For the first time instead of how, and what, and all those other questions, for the first time he asked why did Daddy die. It’s harder to follow a child’s journey; it goes in fits and starts. Sometimes it stalls in anger. Sometimes it erupts in unexplained tears and flinging fists. Sometimes you just can’t tell where they are.
At 6:19 I had no trouble picturing, among the dozens of cars flying by in each direction, how his car looked coming on. And I have no trouble imagining what followed. At 6:25, by which time he had died, my son said, can we go now. We packed up and went home, and as we drove by, my son said, “goodbye Daddy, I miss you.” It’s something he hasn’t been able to say. “I miss you.”
If I must grieve, and if I must write, then it only makes sense that I must write about it, and affirm it. It’s my soul talking. If I could shut it up, I’d point it to different images, perhaps, than the ones it shows me. But they are there for a reason. It’s all part of the journey. So, there’s my trip report so far.
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Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz