The men and women who fought in Viet Nam had an expression: “There’s no use talking about Viet Nam because if you weren’t there, you could never understand; and if you were there, there’s no need to talk about it.” When I heard that said recently, the thought struck me that what was being said about Viet Nam could also be said about losing one’s life partner. Only those who have suffered the loss can come close to understanding, Robert Frost’s narrator in “Home Burial says: “The nearest friends can go/ With anyone to death, comes so far short /They might as well not try to go at all.”
Living after such a loss is like a trip to a foreign country from which you will never return. Odd as it seems, it’s as if one has wandered into this country with no fore planning, no knowledge of the geography, the morals, the customs and yet everyone and everything there is familiar and the expectation is that you will just make your way.
One’s memory is vastly affected too. I had an acute recall of the time directly following Carl’s passing — I remember precisely who did and did not come to his services; But there are giant white-out times when I recall nothing of the days and weeks which followed. Just a year later, I had to ask my sister-in-law whether I’d gone to the family reunion that September, some two-and-a -half months after Carl died. I still have no recall of most of that summer although I know I went back to our remote cabin by myself only because I wrote about it in the cabin diary.
Another aspect of what I call the Rotten Onion of Awful Realization (ROAR for short) is the tectonic slipping of friendships. Friends with whom we’d enjoyed the closest of times slipped through my fingers like fish in a pond— I was no longer the entity that we had been, I was half now — and being with them caused me anguish beyond telling because Carl wasn’t there and should have been. Frost’s narrator says it this way: “Friends make pretense of following to the grave,/But before one is in it, their minds are turned/And making the best of their way back to life /And living people, and things they understand.” And that is how it should be; one cannot expect others (no matter how close) to accompany one down that road into the foreign country.
Bless the family and friends who try though. I had a dear friend who called me every day for a year; another who sent me a heart-felt card at least once a month to let me know that I was in her thoughts. In the end, however, there is a feeling among even the closest of friends that it’s either just plain time to get over it or at least not talk about it anymore. One acquaintance called and told me I had a year before I was to get on with my life. If I’d had a loud guffaw in me, I’d have delivered it to her.
Another layer involved dealing with other people’s discomfort at death. They do say the most ridiculous things to a griever — one colleague met me in a department store about six months after I’d lost Carl. She struggled with what to say and then finally burst out with, “I didn’t send you a card.” When I told her that it was all right, she then said, “But I liked your son, so I think I’ll send him a card.” I said, “Well, I’m sure he’d enjoy that,” and I turned and walked away. I’’m sure she shudders to this day at that conversation. Another person, a nurse even, told me just weeks after Carl’s death from a massive stroke that often the people who seem unconscious really aren’t, and that they know everything that is going on. That comment almost drove me over the edge. My daughter called several hours later and was able to talk me away from the turmoil that filled my head and heart at the thought of having condemned Carl to death while he lay and listened.
I was near the middle of the Rotten Onion of Awful Realization with many more layers to go when it came to me that I would never get over Carl’s death. I knew that I would be able to go on; I knew that I had people in my life who cared for me. But I would never get past the nearly 50 years of shared memories, nor did I want to. He is and was my inner geography, the person who knew me best. We were married so young that we often joked about having raised one another. Gratefully, I let him take care of spiders and leaky faucets and flooded basements. He was the one who often stayed home with our kids when they were sick because I thought they were going to die, and I couldn’t stand it. Really though in most ways we were a team; we could do chores together like a couple of dancers, each knowing his/her own parts and accomplishing the task at the end as if it were simple. We knew each other’s every thought and most of each other’s deepest worries, he could make me laugh like no one ever has. He had my back; I had his — that was another level of the rotten onion — the realization that I had no one in that position. When you’ve always been part of a team, the thought of being alone freezes you to the heart. I described myself as feeling as if someone had hewn off my right side with a rusty ax and then had expected me to conduct myself normally. I also learned about solitude; I’d never really had much of that since I left my parents’ and grandmother’s arms to go to college where I had two close roommates, and then I married Carl. We were constant companions having chosen the same career where we enjoyed the same vacations and days of work. I learned this about solitude: I can do it, but I don’t like it. On the other hand, I am not a kind of person who can gain solace from so-called grief groups. It’s just not in me to cry or divest myself of my true feelings in front of strangers. Yet here I am doing just that to an anonymous group of listeners. There’s no figuring it out, but there’s honor in trying to gain perspective on such a life-altering event and then attempting to share that experience.
It was at about that same time that it came to me that though I thought I was a brave woman, I’d only been brave because of him. He supported me in everything, Of course I was brave, I had the Swedish Foreign Legion behind me. I knew I loved Carl from the day in high school where I was enduring another round of teasing by one of my classmates, much to the delight of some bystanders, when Carl rounded the corner. He picked up my tormentor and threw him down a flight of stairs where he became the butt of the joke as he lay at the bottom of the landing looking bewildered. Carl took my hand and we walked off together down the hall — and he had me from that moment on. Of course I was brave.
In the end, when I neared the very core of ROAR, I saw that loss is the price we pay for this wonderful life — and I’ve had a wonderful life; it continues to be good even without Carl because I knew and loved him; because he knew and loved me. That very fact has kept me from going adrift; it has let me venture out after a while, like some scarred survivor, white and shaking, but still moving and still loving life.
This is Pat Rosenleaf who is four years out from the worst day of my life and I guess I’m still standing.