Loss is Timeless

Loss is timeless. Ken's brother got an email the other day from someone who just found out that Ken died. He wrote to express his sympathy, six and a half years later. Good for him. Loss is timeless. You can be moving along rather nicely, whistling, enjoying the view, and then it can root you like quicksand. It holds you. You may want to escape its grip, but it's strong. When it gets you, it can be hard to move forward.

My nephew got married this month -- another timeless moment. This is the very type of occasion that sends you reeling back in time, just as it moves you even more quickly into the future. All those turning points your loved one misses: the weddings, graduations, birthdays, college tours, vacations, road trips. How ironic then that your dead husband or brother or son or father or uncle is more present at these events than usual. The dead do show up at weddings. You can't stop thinking about them, imagining how they would react, how they would enjoy, how different things would be if time hadn't moved on without them, if they hadn't stepped out of time. They show up anyway.

I have to admit that I still, at times, find it hard to accept my current reality wholeheartedly. I still shake my head. Is this just the way I am? Do I find it particularly hard to move along? Or is this what loss does?

Loss is timeless. It can still be hard to embrace the bounty of life with full on unadulterated joy. It is marred by absence. A wedding full of happiness and a sense of life being as it should be is a powerful reminder of life's darker side when we think about those who couldn't be there. Loss attaches itself to our beating pulse like a wrist watch ticking off the hours and minutes.

Loss is timeless and it reminds us that we are not. Today is my 51st birthday. Ken died at 52. I plan to enjoy all my minutes today. I am so grateful to my kids, my family, my friends, and my Mark. And I am especially grateful to those of you who let me feel my loss and let me talk about it without judgement. I never knew that loss had infinite dimensions, too hard (for me) to comprehend alone.

Widow Birthday #5; Regular Birthday #49

My birthday was Monday, the fifth birthday I've had as a widow. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, milestones of all kinds present opportunities to check out what kind of progress I'm making on the path through grief.

This was the first birthday I've had since Ken died where I feel more good than bad, more happiness than pain, more deep appreciation for my life than that feeling that what is missing is so vital to my being that without it my life is less.

Sitting out on the deck in my backyard on a beautiful June evening, the wind presented a sweet, warm and active breeze. My birthday candle, immersed in a gorgeous homemade chocolate cake made by my daughter and her friend, flickered wildly.

"Ken," I thought to myself. "Is that you? Do you want to blow this out with me?"

But the wind died down, the flame straightened, and I blew it out on my own.