Face to face and online, people keep telling me that I am bearing my wife’s death well. The truth is, what I am really doing is maintaining the appearance of normalcy. I have just enough sense remaining to realize that people don’t want to hear the details and that what I am enduring is unimaginable to most people who have not gone through it themselves. Certainly, it would have been unimaginable to me before this summer.
I tell myself that I have learned from the parrots in my living room not to show vulnerability. Scream, puff yourself up, or cause a disturbance, but don’t let anyone know that you’re tired or ill: That’s their credo, and I can understand it. Grief is a private thing, and I don’t generally care to share it, except with those who already feel it.
I’m here to say, though, that surviving a spouse of thirty years is like nothing I’ve ever experienced – and I’m not exactly a stranger to trauma. It’s not even like other griefs, except maybe in general outline.
To start with, my situation means endless details. Quite aside from funeral arrangements and telling friends and relatives what happened, my life has been full of canceling subscriptions, changing the name on assets, dragging through probate, arranging new medical coverage, talking to my accountants to my lawyer, and to my financial advisor, and dealing with government agencies and officials of all sorts. Just when you are least able to handle bureaucracy, an avalanche of it is waiting to overwhelm you and suffocate you.
Yet these distractions are the least of surviving a spouse. My situation is also about noting a joke or a situation, only to remember that you no longer have anyone with whom to share it. It’s having thoughts that you no longer have anyone to confide to. It’s learning to cook for one person instead of two. It’s realizing that there is no division of labor – if you don’t do something, it doesn’t get done. It’s breaking down half a dozen times a day over trivia like an old photo or shoe, or watching a video and remembering that your partner never got to watch it, or thinking of a trip that she’ll never take now. It’s a sudden pain in your abdomen that has you worrying about appendicitis but is really just a new manifestation of anxiety. It’s waking up with your hair and your sheets cold with sweat, and getting up in the morning feeling like a hand is pushing against your chest whenever you do anything.
Then, just as you are getting some distraction from a video or book, so that you could almost belief that your spouse is out shopping or in the next room, it’s realizing that the respite is an illusion – that in dozens of tiny ways, your everyday assumptions no longer work.
And that’s just the common themes. Stay home, and you are alone with the thoughts that you have come to dread. Go out, and not only are you surprised to see people going about their ordinary business, but that business seems trivial and unimportant.
In fact, your whole relation to people change. You have less patience with people. Euphemisms like “passed away” or cliches like “I’m sure it’s all for the best” set your teeth on edge. You may find, as I did, that you have no longer have patience with other people’s foibles. You may even pick a fight, so viciously that, even when you apologize, the other person doesn’t forgive you, and you feel like an idiot for making the world a nastier place.
You discover, too, that the way people treat you changes. For one thing, relative strangers feel they can now give you meaningless advice on how you should live.
Also, you are no longer half a couple, but a lone individual for the first time in years. Many acquaintances and friends no longer know how to treat you. You are no longer married – and therefore, provisionally safe – to women. Things you could do or say as a married man now take on new implications, and are suddenly best avoided.
This change in the expectations placed on you is especially ironic, because the last thing you are thinking of is a new relationship. If your relationship with your spouse was as good as mine, you wonder if you will ever have a relationship to match. You seriously doubt that you will, and, anyway, the steps that are usually necessary to develop even a potential relationship seem so ludicrous that you are seriously thinking of avoiding the whole subject for the rest of your life.
In short, surviving a spouse means that the future, which for years you thought you knew in broad outline, is suddenly as indefinite as it was when you were fourteen. You discover, too, that you don’t really care.
In theory, you could start staggering down a new life path, but that would require giving a damn – and you don’t, not really. Taking a course or joining a meetup would just be a new way to pass time, and travel a lot of effort just so you can go somewhere else to be alone.
And if you say all this sounds like self-dramatization, like I’m only going through what billions have gone through before me, all I have to say is, “See? I told you that you wouldn’t understand. You don’t want to, either, because, if you did, you would comprehend just how fragile your life really is.”
Far less effort for me to show the facade they prefer. That way, everyone else can keep their illusions intact.
Off the Wall 
I hope never to fully comprehend what you’re going through, Bruce. I might even say that I’m actively avoiding imagining what it must be like for you. That doesn’t stop me from offering sympathy, though, for what it’s worth. I feel it so I give it freely.
Grief is such a personal thing. To be on the outside looking in is a helpless feeling. We are not schooled in ways in which to offer comfort to a grieving friend. We fear what the bereaved is feeling so we leave them on the inside looking out and try to offer comfort (as though that were possible) in our ham-handed ways. We offer you our lame sentiments only to indicate that we care, but, in truth, we fear being let in.
I’ve often heard people say they avoid a bereaved friend because “I never know what to say at times like this.” That’s only because there are no magic words that will help ease the suffering. Saying nothing at all is far worse than saying something stupid. Stupid can ultimately be forgiven; nothing cannot.
I wish you the strength you’ll need to keep breathing in and out, to keep putting one foot in front of the other until time eases your pain.
As usual, your shared insights have touched my heart and has challenged my thoughts of death and reminds me to appreciate the important people in my life…in this case, my spouse, Mitch. He was the one that asked me to read your blog, “Surviving a Spouse” because it moved him to tears. Now I understand why…
Thank you, Bruce, for sharing your raw pain (internal and external) so openly and eloquently. Dealing with death and all that is associated with it, is not, at its best, that straight forward nor a”simple” affair. And I find that the issue of death is often dealt with great discomfort by many. Hence the awkward words when someone is trying to comfort a person who is grieving because they don’t understand exactly what you are truly experiencing or people will avoid the surviving individual. Death is such a large part of the human life cycle and yet, as humans, we aren’t educated or discuss it as we do about other aspects of living. I think if we were taught to understand death then it wouldn’t be such an awkward experience and people would know how (or at least have a better idea of how) to better support their friends or family members.
I know for myself, even though I have had some training with grief and loss, and have personal losses of loved ones, I still wade through my own struggles to try and support my friends and family with the deaths of their beloved. Some times, not intentionally, I may unknowingly say the “wrong words” or support in a manner that may be construed as a hindrance or unkind because I was unsure of how to help at that moment. So, yes, asking the surviving spouse or individual about how you can help makes a difference as long as the individual even knows what his or her needs are in the moment. I think even knowing that someone is available to provide some support is a source of comfort.
I have only known you for a short time, Bruce, but you are someone that both Mitch and I have come to care about dearly. I send you much love and wishes for wellness from Terrace in your time of sorrow and pain.
Bruce, even though we have never met I care about you and what you’re going through. And yet I have not offered much in the way of support or comments for a couple of reasons: one, I’m not very good at it, and two, there is an undertone of anger that I’m not all that eager to risk tripping over, like nothing anyone can say or do will be appropriate, and will only piss you off. About the only thing I know to do is hang out with a friend when they’re grieving, do some chores, and shut up and give them space for their feelings.
There isn’t anything that will ease the pain. You’re stuck with it. I totally agree with your comments about the inappropriateness of the death-denying Christian-everything approach to death and bereavement, and the lack of a decent cultural foundation for dealing with loss. And yet it seems a bit churlish to complain about the efforts of friends and family who reach out to you, doing their best to help and trying in their fumbling ways to ease your pain. So they have bad taste in poetry, or have no magic words — they’re there and they’re doing their best. Which in most cases isn’t very good, and is as much about their own discomfort and grief as trying to help you. But they’re trying.
And even when you are capable of saying “Look, this is what I need from you” you’re not always going to get it. When Dawn Marie passed away it blew a lot of fuses. OMG, one of “those” has feelings? A right to love or grieve? Then what’s the right terminology? “Widow” doesn’t feel right, and I sure got tired of all the old biddies sitting around reminiscing fondly about their dead husbands, a lot of whom were wastes of space and their dying was a favor to the world, and then looking at me like I was contagious when I said anything about Dawn. I told them if they didn’t want to hear about mine, I didn’t want to hear about theirs. Even the dratted government doesn’t get it right– Social Security pays a whopping $255 death benefit, but that only goes to a surviving spouse, so your own SS benefits won’t even pay for your own cremation or burial.
I’m not saying you’re having wrong feelings, and I love everything you’ve written so far and hope you write more. Just my $0.02 that It’s messy and painful, and plenty of people do understand, but that doesn’t make them any better at giving comfort. If you’re even in a space to receive any.
Carla:
I started to write you a private reply, but it quickly turned into another post. But thank you for taking the time,not just to talk, but also be honest. Having been in the same position, your comments have authority.
And you’re right — it does seem a bit churlish to be angry. But that’s part of the territory I’m passing through, so I’m going to express it, even though it makes me look less than ideal. That’s part of the obligation I assume when I start to write. If I’m not going to do my best to tell the truth from where I stand, then there’s no point writing.
That said, I can’t help noticing that, after taking me to task about my anger, you express some of your own. If anything it is even more justified than mine, but I can dimly imagine it because of the few people around me who would like to pretend that Trish never existed. But I mention this not to score cheap points, but because your reaction suggests to me that anger is natural to grief. It may sometimes be unfair — and mine definitely has been at least once — but it’s very real.
I dunno. Maybe I’m hoplessly utopian. Yet I can’t help thinking that if we had cultural mechanisms to handle mourning better than we do, then some of that anger might not emerge. (And maybe a little more social justice wouldn’t hurt either).
Thanks again,
Bruce