A Smiling Young Widow

I was looking for a picture of Tom on a trip to Hawaii we took the month before he died. I clicked for my phone to search by his face and was ready to scroll. Then the realization hit, of course the last photo I have of Tom will always be from April 10th, 2023. I don’t need to scroll way back when looking for a memory, like I do for other people in my life. He is frozen in time, there are no new moments with Tom getting added. 

This week brought us to three years since Tom died. Wild. It feels both like no time has passed at all, and like a lifetime since I saw him last. I wish I had some insightful advice on how best to support yourself or someone else getting through tough dates, but I sure don’t have the answers. What I’ve found helpful for me is to sort of pre-plan flexibility for myself, not committing to any plans. I typically don’t really want to be around other people – the loneliness of this grief hits when really the only person I want to be with isn’t a choice –  then I’m also not sure I should be alone either. There can be pressure to honour your person, the questions come of what are you doing for the day? Sometimes it really is just about surviving, while other times it does feel right to make a batch of Nanaimo bars Tom loved, do a favourite hike, or have supper with friends. I guess if I were to offer any advice it would be to try to take the pressure off, whether it is for yourself or when wanting to support someone grieving. These hard dates suck, nothing is going to take that away.

There is a bit of bracing, not knowing what a date will bring and feeling the build-up as it nears. I don’t think that can actually be avoided – even if rationally I tell myself I’m doing ok, the body remembers and the nervous system flares (I’d written about that after the first anniversary of Tom’s death). Just how the anticipation can send my system into adrenaline pumping stress mode, I wouldn’t have seen that coming before experiencing this loss. 

Dates are just dates, and numbers are just numbers. Until they’re not. Death has a sneaky way of rearranging time. I’ve collected a few partially written blog posts from the past couple of years on this idea of time. 

The Chasm of Before and After

There’s no clear-cut hardest anniversary date for me to get through. I sometimes wonder what day my body is supposed to hold the most trauma from – the day I got the call Tom was being admitted to the ICU? or the day the doctor told me his brain would never recover? is it the day he was declared legally dead? or the day I walked away from that body I had loved for the last time, leaving it to be wheeled away for an organ and tissue recovery surgery?

Despite not being sure on exactly what day my world fell apart, I can’t deny that Tom dying very much split my world into a before and after. Nothing can be the same. I listened to something awhile back that talked about a chasm in grief (sorry I can’t remember at all where it came from). Painting a picture of a high cliff on either side, but also this desolate desert wilderness spanning between. After a big loss you must spend time in that vastness. 

Of course loving Tom also changed me, but that was gradual. Little-by-little letting him in, building our life together. Almost like a slow evolution, happening without any real start or finish. You don’t stop to realize or appreciate those, life just keeps moving along. Then boom Tom was dead. That one felt like tectonic plates suddenly shifting, leaving behind a distinct divide.

Sometimes I think I’ve settled into this new reality enough that I forget how much has shifted, how much work I’ve done and the unchartered territory I’ve had to navigate. I do feel myself scaling that cliff on the other side of the chasm at times, though it’s interesting to reflect on all that has changed and how much I now carry. This poem from Donna Ashworth is beautiful, and pulls out memories of very misty hiking Tom and I did in Iceland. 

Love, Loss, and the Days That Mark Them

My first wedding anniversary alone hit a few months after Tom died. I choose the word hit intentionally, as that really is how it felt. I spent that day in survival mode, knowing I had to just get through the day. I had a desire to totally dissociate, as it wasn’t right to be here alone. I couldn’t look at any pictures. The day was totally wrong without him here.  

Then our second anniversary rolled through in a much kinder way. I could actually look at pictures, knowing all the love that was captured there. I wanted to re-watch videos from our day and feel how amazing it all had been. It still hurt, of course, but in a much more balanced, breathable way. 

The third anniversary again brought totally different feelings, with an awareness of a strange parallel reality of what our lives should look like. And honestly? Seeing other people get to celebrate anniversaries seems to be more painful than my own anniversary date right now.  A tiny spark of jealousy flickers through me. Sometimes I wonder if I am at risk of running after people shaking my fist, do you know how lucky you are? Are you making every moment count? Don’t you be stressing about the little things or wasting time on things that don’t matter.

It’s all part of the grief I’m in where I feel the loss not only of Tom, but the loss of the anniversaries that should have been ours too. Before Tom died, I would say anniversary dates weren’t a big deal to us. He was the thoughtful one who rewrote dates into his agenda each year, I honestly could have forgotten about them. It’s crazy how much death changes things. The physicalness of grief comes through, as if your body is screaming out yeah actually you will be remembering this. 

Regular Ol’ Days Too

Ordinary days can become grief landmines – days that pass without anyone else noticing, however they still very much hold the reality of “before and after”. Regular ol Thursdays were ones that were hitting hard for me in the early days.

Thursday night was our reunion night. Tom’s typical schedule had him working away Monday to Thursday. I was able to do a job that matched that. With our new house in the mountains we almost always had something planned for the weekend, maybe we were doing something ourselves or often had guests coming to stay. We loved having our Fridays off together, time for us to get outside to do something fun or just to have time around home.  

After Tom died, Thursday nights were alarm bells. My body knew Tom should be coming back through the door. He should be starting his laundry and filling the dishwasher with his week’s worth of dishes. Making a tea or cracking a beer. Frank should be shadowing Tom’s every move, excited to have his buddy back and treating me like old news, perhaps ending up on their matching recliner chairs. The herd back together again.

Sometimes I wonder if it’s easier or harder to enter widow life with a husband that worked on the road versus a husband that was home each night. Have I been maybe a bit protected – like my brain and body slowly tackle the gaps, as I was used to some aloneness around the house. Of course, it wasn’t like this, there were always check-ins and good nights. I knew at any moment I was still the top priority Tom would drop anything for if I needed him. I knew he would be coming back through the door. As I weather more Thursdays, the harshness fades. Slowly the brain and body learn they need to adjust.

A West Coast Trail Sip

Time continues, whether we’d like it to or not. The split between that day and the present grows. I’m recently back from a really wonderful trip to Portugal. One day I had been drinking a small glass of wine, really savouring it. Just before I returned the glass I finished the last little sip and was hit with a dejavú-esque moment. For just a second I paused and thought someone is missing here, there’s something that would be said. It was a Tom saying!

That pleasant surprise filled me with so much warm joy. It’s been awhile since a forgotten little moment of our shared life has come back to visit me. These become rarer as the sharpness of memories is forced to fade, but they are there. Moments of what was and what I expected would continue, like our shared language. This tiny bit of wine left in my glass was a “west coast trail sip” – a phrase Tom first used to jokingly refer to me savouring precious (heavy) wine that had been backpacked in while hiking the West Coast Trail. He had offered to rinse out what appeared to be my empty cup as we sat around the campfire, but I had told him no way I have one last tiny sip waiting for me first and I was going to enjoy that. This phrase got adopted into our regular lives afterwards, whenever there was just a little bit of something left behind in a glass waiting to be enjoyed.

I think this grief journey over the past three years has taken me to a place of learning to savour the preciousness of both what is in the present, along with what I hold dearly from the past.