A Smiling Young Widow

I’m writing this from Costa Rica. Obviously it is a beautiful spot to be, and I’m about to start a week long yoga and healing retreat here which I’m sure will be amazing for me. But… It was really hard for me to actually come on this trip. I was dragging my feet on packing, so unlike the old me to be packing minutes before I left for the airport. I wasn’t really that eager to leave, though I’d been super excited when I booked the trip. 

There is just so much resistance in my body these days. To everything. It doesn’t matter what it is really, I just don’t want this as my reality. What looks like “moving forward” to the outside world can be seriously painful.

Some of the resistance to going on a trip makes sense – Here I am revisiting memories of all the travels Tom and I did together, plus confronting the phantom ones we had planned to do. Seeing things he would love and imagining what we would be doing together. But there’s lots swirling around inside me that I can’t rationalize or understand too. And trust me I know how absolutely ridiculous it sounds that I wasn’t excitedly getting ready to go on this trip to a beautiful sunny vacation spot.
It is great, and also it is hard. 

A while ago I was talking about how I felt like grief was turning me into a toddler. This very much applies to my thinking this week. It was so irrational. Just like a toddler can be. The, “I don’t want to go to Costa Rica,” is the privileged equivalent of, “I don’t want to take a nap,” battle with a child. Everyone else wants to do it. The rational adult people can’t understand it. Doing it will be really great and you will feel so much better after you actually do it.

Thinking of the toddlers in my life that I adore, who can have a total breakdown if the banana isn’t peeled right or if you dare try to rush them out the door when they were just in the middle of something. They are looking for control and autonomy. It’s a very normal brain development phase. And I think a normal phase of grief too. I wrote about how death wipes away autonomy – I’ve been taught some real hard lessons about how little control I have in my life. The tantrums are just a bit more internal than the toddler versions.

In the early days of grief, you are grasping for any control. I made myself a “to-do list” the week after Tom’s funeral. I was still just staying in my parent’s basement and couldn’t fathom how I’d possibly make it through this. I needed a few things to be laid out for me of what I should do with a day – like spending time outside, doing one thing that felt productive, taking a nap, journaling, doing a bit of yoga. The one day I was home alone and decided I’d deep clean all the baseboards on the main floor of my parents house. I remember them coming home and being like ok well yeah that looks nice, um but maybe like that’s enough for now?!

Cleaning was certainly a crutch in those early months. A therapist talked to me about how desperately we want some semblance of order in our lives, so doing more cleaning and organizing makes a lot of sense. Control can look like organizing a linen closet. 

As time goes on, this changes. Like toddlers, we really aren’t getting the control we actually want. There’s limits. When your husband dies unexpectedly there’s no autonomy there. I think I’m really sick of looking for control in stupid places (can I just revert to kid language too?) What I wanted, and still do want, was Tom back … not perfectly symmetric folded towels. There’s a feeling like I can’t actually do what I want in this life and that’s officially put me into the toddler phase of my grief. 

I was in an appointment where someone said to me, “And you’re a dietitian so you know what to eat to help yourself” … absolutely I do know a lot, but that doesn’t mean I want to do it or am actually doing it for myself… That night I had leftover cake from the freezer for supper, maybe a part of me was rebelling against that comment? I found it insulting. It came across as a dismissal of just how much my life has been turned upside down and how much of a struggle the day-to-day can be. The failure to understand how little of the old me is showing up right now. Having the knowledge doesn’t mean this can be fixed and it also doesn’t mean I want to do it. 

Another appointment story – I had to meet with a psychiatrist as part of my leave from work. I think it was about 6 months after Tom died that she had me going through a bunch of scaling questions. One of them was The Irritability Scale. I can’t remember the exact questions or numbers that I gave, but she responded that I’d given “return to work numbers so might want to change the answers”.  Ok that was irritating. 

Over the past few months I’ve been thinking back on that scale and wanting to be given it again. I am SO much more irritable now. I’m on edge. And guess what? Now I’ve learnt that actually is quite typical and there’s explanations for why this change might happen in the nervous system after a big death. 

I’d done a ton of learning about the nervous system pre-Tom’s death, but it’s a whole different game now. I’ve been on a quest to learn more about what is happening with me and to see what I can do to help myself at a deeper level. 

I joined an online group focused on somatic tools for healing (Mira is really amazing and in my experience offers such different resources for grief that are so needed). In one session we discussed the window of tolerance. I’ve learnt about this before, but it was so interesting to revisit it again and in the context of losing a spouse. It offered another huge a-ha moment.

If you’re not familiar with the window of tolerance, essentially it’s looking at an optimal zone where a person can effectively manage and cope with their emotions. It’s a space where you can manage your regular day and think pretty rationally. You can be at varying levels above or below the window depending on whether your system is hyper or hypo aroused. 

How wide each person’s window of tolerance is can be constantly changing. Here’s a couple graphics to illustrate it (just from google): 

It’s our ability to roll with things – something old Leslie was pretty darn good at. Of course I’d still lose it sometimes, but I had a wide window of tolerance and could get myself back there with tools I had decently easy. I think that’s partially why the irritability scale questions frustrated me so much – I’m not interested in what the averages are, I want to get back to where I was. Tom would often tell me, “Les you have a very high tolerance for annoying people” (though poor Tom would get hit the most when I wobbled out of my window). 

For sure I acknowledge that everything is different, how I see the world has been overhauled and some of my tools are gone. I can think about how regulating an enveloping hug from Tom was for my system or how a conversation with Tom working through things bothering me was much more helpful than any session with a therapist can hit.

I knew I’d been through hell and my nervous system will feel that for a long time. I could totally understand that. That wasn’t new. But my big epiphany – Mira shared how it was common, especially in women and especially after the death of a spouse, to fall down into the hypoarousal side. You’re in a fog and just doing what you need to. So that would make perfect sense that I wasn’t particularly angry or irritable; I was numb and shut down. (I want to go back to the psychiatrist and pull up a graphic of the window of tolerance, to show how far away I was from the fight response of anger to prove the irritability scale absolutely useless!)

As time goes on, it actually is part of healing that our body starts to feel things a bit more. You come up for air, and then you may also swing to spend time in hyperarousal. Mira talked about how this is actually a good thing, even if it doesn’t always feel that way, as your system is starting to come back online. 

Interestingly, this summer I noticed a change. Whenever people talk about Tom to me I am so grateful and I absolutely love it when it’s someone else who brings up a story. But what has been the weird change? I have felt tears welling up in my eyes when someone starts to talk about how they’re missing Tom at an event too or the weirdness of what we should all be doing together. I just might cry right then and there. That probably doesn’t sound weird – you’re thinking yeah your husband is dead, pretty reasonable to cry. But last year at this time I was so disconnected from everything, that it was honestly rare for me to feel that level of emotion and especially for it to come out in a public place like that. I was so dissociated. The fresh experience of Tom’s death was too much. 

Revisiting the window of tolerance helped to make sense of all of this – I was back to feeling emotions, they weren’t taking over but rather were there in a very normal way, I was actually in a comfortable level of activation at times. 

In another counseling appointment I brought up my new found appreciation for the window of tolerance model. We talked about how now it can be more like a volcano of tolerance now. There’s not much extra pressure needed before the blast – I talked about that same idea with The Bravery Scale, little unexpected things can totally derail my day. I have times where I’m truly ok, and then all of a sudden I’m off to these really intense angry and overwhelmed emotions. 

So I guess I’m not a total toddler. I’m learning more about these big emotions and what to do with them, though that sure is difficult as it’s always in flux. Sometimes things are just too overwhelming to sit back, analyze and do what it is that might help me. I can still very much be in survival mode. This can show up as resistance to everything. 

To finish with maybe a hopeful? helpful? spin – in her book Grief is a Sneaky Bitch, Lisa Keefauver suggests checking-in with “what do I need today”. She says the answer of “my person” stays, but if you can do the hard work to identify even one thing you need today it allows you to feel some agency that you are making something happen. Of course, everyday there are things we have to do. This is however consciously choosing to do one thing. I’ve found for me it can be choosing to say go to yoga, or sit outside for a slow coffee, or often it’s doing one thing that feels a bit productive each day – some days it can still be cleaning something small like just wiping the counters down, or it can be putting up some boundaries, or it can be writing down a list of decisions that I can’t think about now but will shelf for later. 

I’m also back to being very thankful that I can be on this trip to Costa Rica – Finishing writing this post between dips in the pool and drinking a coffee on my little shaded balcony. Somewhat nervously looking forward to meeting my fellow retreaters later this afternoon and for all that the week ahead holds.