A Smiling Young Widow

I watched one yellow leaf slowly fall from a tree as a slight breeze ruffled, and I was hit by a huge wave of missing Tom. I wished we could be out hand-in-hand on a fall walk together. Doing nothing really, but doing it together. This desire flares to just go back to normal life before my world imploded. 

As time goes on it’s not necessarily overwhelming grief that visits or anything specific that I need or miss. Grief certainly can still hit me like a ton of bricks, but other times it is a bit softer. Not explosive anger, piercing guilt, or tsunami waves of sadness. It’s maybe more like a dejected groan or a dull ache? Just there. A feeling of ugh I sure miss doing life with that amazing man that was mine and now isn’t. The disbelief that this is my reality, for the rest of my life. 

Time heals? Maybe, but it also can hurt.

Time can feel both molasses slow and lightning fast at the same time, or like it has stopped all together. Yet time marches on, and sometimes that frankly feels quite rude.

Other people’s lives go back to normal. Sure I’m moving forward too, but it also feels to me like I’ve hit a big pause button on my life. Basically everything I thought about what my life would look like now was wiped away. I’ve been focused on healing and just starting to look at the deeper levels of who I am coming out of this loss. It’s a process our grief-adverse society thinks should wrap-up in the first year or two so support for how long this takes dwindles too – it’s not intentional, but time marches on. I expected this big ol pause to be done much earlier too. I couldn’t have understood how long this takes – perhaps by year three I am starting to comprehend just how slow and winding this journey of young widowhood is. How changed everything is.

The distortion of time that comes with grief is exacerbated by moments where I can’t pretend time hasn’t passed. Things like seeing kids grow-up. Hearing stories about a change in someone’s life that I should have heard about through Tom. Relationships that started at a similar time to ours, or weddings celebrated the same year as us getting the chance to grow another year older. Swapping stories of summer and hearing plans wrapped up in “we”.  Shared decisions that have been made. Moments where I am hit with just how different my reality has become. I miss being able to relate to what should be typical for other 30-40 something year olds. I can be both truly happy for other people and simultaneously feel pain in how familiar their life is, because that reality used to be mine too. I can still very much imagine what my life also should look like.

I was thinking back on the letter from the recipient of Tom’s liver. It was beautiful, an example of what organ donation can do, but it was also excruciatingly painful for me to read. The recipient celebrated how his life had returned to normal, doing little things like having tea in the evening with his wife with a whole new level of appreciation. I imagine the recipient to be very similar to Tom – a younger guy who works hard and was all of a sudden hit by a health crisis. Except the endings were very different. I am so glad something good could come out of this, that someone could be saved from death’s door and return to doing normal things with new perspective. Yet here I am, so far from normal and never able to sit down for a tea with Tom again. That was such a regular thing for us, a night when we were both home would often mean a cup of tea and maybe a game of crib or rummy. I can still very much picture Tom making us both a tea, most likely Bengal Spice, knowing which mugs I liked and which teas I’d want a splash of milk in. Poking fun at how many cups of tea my family will stretch from a tea bag.

I spent a Friday night cozy in front of our fireplace with a glass of wine and instrumental jazz playing in the background. Frank laying in front of the fireplace (it was honestly one of Tom’s main dreams with building a mountain house for Frank to have a cozy spot to nap – he loved to see his little buddy curled up in that spot by the fire). I was overcome by how much this still feels like something I should get to do with Tom, even if I haven’t got to do that in well over two years now. Sometimes it’s the quietest moments that can bulldoze me with that feeling of just how much I miss our life. Normal mundane life stuff. 

Times of Transition

The magnitude of who Tom was for me won’t fade. How much the experience of his death shaped a new version of me can’t be ignored.  There are all the analogies about grief never going away, pick your favourite – like grief doesn’t get smaller but we grow around it, or grief doesn’t get lighter but we learn to carry it. 

Perhaps the rawness might fade, but still the reminders are always there. This is especially true for out of order deaths – the kind of deaths that are unexpected or premature, defying the chronological order we expect and disrupting our perceived natural progression of life. Losing someone young means there was a life mapped out ahead for that person. There was expectation of them continuing to show up for certain moments in our life. 

For awhile after Tom died I could still somewhat live our combined life but as time continues on it fades. It is a painful part of young widowhood to wrestle with that. Rather than all these memories and amazing life with Tom to look back on, I am left instead facing the expectations of what I thought our life would bring for a long time. Imagining what changes we would have made together, how we would have grown. Sure I’m really grateful for the memories I do have with Tom, but I believed we’d have a lot more of those. If I were to ever have imagined myself as his widow, I would maybe have been in my 80s looking back at the combined life we’d crafted and enjoyed together, whatever that might have brought. There’s parts of that half-imagined life I need to say goodbye to. Versions of me that existed only with Tom, ideals that are now shattered. There’s a lot I’ll go through without the person I expected would be at my side for it. Big and little moments will have me missing Tom something fierce. 

Transitions tend to bring swells of grief – whether changes for me or for others who were a part of our combined life, or even transitions in the seasons. I’ve been reflecting on how there’s been a fair bit of that happening lately. My trying out different work and a different schedule. Meeting new people. Even trying a different hobby. These all become part of moving slowly away from living our familiar combined life. Then there’s the arrival of the cooler fall season again. Time is moving. My grief is demanding I give it more attention again, go back inwards. Tis the season.

“Moments of transition have a way of reactivating grief. It’s as if they remind the body of another great transition. The one where everything changed. The moment where life was split into before & after.”

– Empowered Through Grief