About Me

My wonderful husband died when I was 44 years old. Being widowed this young happens to less than 3% of married people. Writing through this loss one word at time helps me understand what I've lost and helps me continue to grow. It is how I have gradually recovered from such a severe loss. Research shows that you can benefit from taking just 15 minutes a day to write out your deepest feelings as a way of healing. On the right side of this blog, you'll see a tag for Exercises to Try. If you need some help knowing how to use writing to help heal yourself, I suggest you start there.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

Moving Beyond Grief: The Final Hurdle

Yes folks, it's true. When you finally feel as though you've recovered from losing your spouse, you might just have one last hurdle to jump.

You can tell yourself that you feel better, that you're no longer drowning in grief, in fact, you just might feel, like I do, more fully aware of life's gifts than ever before, but still, at the base of it all lies your dead husband, the one whose death sucked all the air from your body and left you flapping in the wind like a dry husk. He's always there, always there. He's always dead. He's always never coming back.

I don't know how long it's been for you since your spouse died. For me it's been five and a half years. What I want to say is: "I feel better now."  Or "I don't wake up everyday feeling like crap anymore." Or "Some days I don't think sad thoughts about Ken at all anymore." Or "I'm thrilled to be alive and to see what happens next." Or "Fear has finally left the building."

It's really amazing when you get to this point, but it's kind of hard to fully embrace it sometimes. I'm wondering if this is the final hurdle to completely overcoming the loss of your spouse -- when you can admit you're OK without him or her, you've made it, you're happy again, life is good --and you don't feel guilty about it anymore. I'm not sure I'm there yet, but I'm closing in on it. Perhaps another sign of vaulting over the final hurdle is when you can say "I feel happy again" and you don't feel like you have to add something like: "but, of course, I'll miss him forever and it will always be terrible that he died."

I'm wondering if when we allow ourselves to fully grieve, to take the time it takes you as an individual to do what you need to do to process your loss, perhaps then it is easier to cross the final hurdle. Can you picture yourself leaping over it, arms raised high in a victory leap? I can see myself there now, or almost nearly there.

I fell so many times along the way. I was filled with fear, anxiety and pain. I was envious, sad, jealous, bitter, confused and misguided. I wrote about it. I talked about it. I got help. I figured out how I needed to live through it.

I couldn't envision reaching this final hurdle five and a half years ago. I thought I would never want to be in a place where I could be happy without Ken. In fact, I believed that getting to this point would be impossibly difficult and impossibly sad and horribly dismissive of Ken's life and what he meant to me. I also felt, way back then, that I didn't want to experience and feel and process all the grief that his death would bring my way. I knew it would take a long time, and I wasn't sure I wanted to spend years doing it.

But now, years of grieving later, I get it. Grieving fully brings your life back to you. That's why you do it no matter how long it takes. Eventually, you see the last hurdle approaching. Then you get ready to jump.

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What does it feel like to imagine being at a place where you are happy again? Take 5 minutes to write about it. If you can't even imagine it, write about that.

9 comments:

Debbie said...

Great post. I'm not at the last hurdle but I can see it down the road and I appreciate your insight.

Jill Schacter said...

Thanks Debbie. It's good to hear from you. I miss your blog.

Have Myelin? said...

I'm glad you are moving towards that final hurdle. =) =) =)

For me it's not attainable. I lost my daughter and that's a different sort of loss.

Have a wonderful day and hope you keep blogging.

Jill Schacter said...

I know enough about grief to know that I know nothing about the pain of losing a child. I can't imagine it. A child about to start high school just drowned yesterday in our community. I was talking to another mother and she was saying it was too hard to even think about. Thank you for reading and responding to my post. I appreciate it.

Have Myelin? said...

Thanks Jill. It's like they say - a man who has lost his wife can call himself a widower, a wife who has lost her husband can call herself a widower. But what do you call a mom who lost a child?

There is no name...it's too painful to envision. They left that word out of the dictionary on purpose.

Jill Schacter said...

Wow. That is quite amazing that there is no word for a parent whose child has died.

Greg said...

I lost my wife 2 yrs ago this month. I thought I was moving on like you're supposed to. This past Aug I lost my Son a wk before his 24 Bday. It seems like I'm back at square one.

Unknown said...

As you know, my husband has Parkinson's. It's basically a long drawn out dying. I feel I'm grieving all the time. This is compounded by the long term re-visitation of my historical clinical depression. The combination seems impossible to process. Can't even imagine how much worse it will be when he actually dies.

Jill Schacter said...

Very very hard. I am sorry for your pain.