I look back on the twenty years since Rich died and I realize one thing is absolutely true: you can experience losses of family members and friends and go to lots of funerals. None of it prepares you for the almost paralyzing agony of losing your soulmate, your spouse, your life’s partner.
I had one really tough year as a kid. I lost two grandparents and my favorite uncle. What was especially hard was that I had to break the news to my parents. They are deaf. We’d moved from the family in Long Island all the way down to Baltimore, MD. It was a necessary move; my father was laid off in NY and there was just no other printing work for him. Anyway, for the longest time we didn’t have a telephone because we couldn’t afford it. Telegrams always meant bad news.
My mother’s father passed first. We went to Long Island, and I was happier about seeing my grandmother, aunt, uncle, and cousins than I was sad about my grandfather. I hate to say this, but I really didn’t feel much of anything about my grandfather’s passing. My mother cried and that upset me. My grandfather was a stern cold man and I was always afraid of him. I stayed out of his way and I don’t think I ever talked to him without my grandmother being there.
This was the first time I’d been to a wake. I was 10. I hung out in the lobby with my cousins and brother. They were around the same age, and we probably got to fooling around too much. My grandmother came out and asked if I wanted to see my grandfather. I didn’t, not really, but I didn’t want to tell her no so I held her hand and walked into the viewing room.
We walked up to the casket and I looked at my grandfather. He didn’t look real. My grandmother touched his hand but I drew back. It was more than not wanting to touch him. As I stood there, looking at his face, I thought I saw his chest rise and then fall. I nearly jumped right out of my skin. Could he be alive and just in a deep sleep? I was scared.
I went back out into the lobby and pulled my cousin Anne aside. She was older than me, 12, and I told her what I’d seen. Anne shook her head and explained all dead bodies do that when you stare at them long enough. It was an “optical delusion” or something. I still worried about it. What if my grandfather got up and came home?
I think I must have shared some of my worry with my parents because they didn’t let me go to the next two wakes. My father’s mother died. She’d had a series of strokes that practically incapacitated her but she kept fighting back. The last one killed her, though. Once again, we got the dreaded telegram and had to go to a pay phone. It really sucked because we had only enough change for 3 minutes of time … just enough time for me to get the details from my Aunt Bea (Dad’s sister).
Again, the most distressing part was having to tell my father that his mother died. I didn’t remember her well because we didn’t see her as often. All I remembered of her was that she’d sit and rock in her chair all day. When I would go to hug or kiss her I was frightened by a thin black moustache. Grandmas weren’t supposed to have moustaches. That was for Grandpas.
My brother and I were the youngest of the cousins and so we waited out in a comfortably furnished room alone. It was boring. My father’s family was very typically Irish. There were lots of aunts and uncles and hundreds of cousins. The trouble was that they were all a generation older than us. My first cousins on my dad’s side of the family are the same age he is and the cousins-once-removed were either having their own kids or were of an age that they didn’t come to the wake. Maybe they were in school.
When we gathered back at my grandparents’ apartment in the Bronx, one of my aunts gave me a beautiful doll and told me that Grandma Molly (that’s what we called her) wanted me to have it because she’d loved me so much. I was really surprised and I felt guilty. Here this grandma had been loving me and I didn’t know it. I probably didn’t love her enough back! I named the doll “Molly” but I didn’t play with her because I felt bad when I did. I tried to miss her more than I did.
Except for being the bearer of bad tidings, I wasn’t too traumatized. Then came the third telegram. I’m not quite sure what happened to my Uncle John, the uncle I loved best. Some members of the family said he had a heart attack. My father said he died of a broken heart. Other members of the family said he killed himself because he couldn’t handle the loss of my grandmother. I just remember that this time, when Aunt Bea gave me the news I went right into hysterics.
He couldn’t be dead. But he was.
My parents managed to calm me down enough so that I could tell them what happened. When we went to NY, I told them I wanted to see Uncle John. They wouldn’t let me. I was furious. My dad explained they didn’t want me to see my uncle dead. They were afraid it would upset me and they’d rather I remember my uncle alive.
Nowadays, there is talk of needing “closure”. You see the body and you know without a doubt the loved one is gone. I didn’t get to say a final goodbye to my uncle. For a long time, I was angry about it. Now, at my age, I am glad my parents protected me from that. My very last memory of my grandparents are of their dead bodies lying unnaturally stiff in boxes. Sometimes, though, you can’t be protected.
I have never seen a body that looked real. In a way, that has helped me deal with the wake and the service itself. I can always kid myself. That’s not him. That’s not her. It’s a very strange kind of detachment or dissociation. In this case, it’s as if none of this is happening. It can’t be because that person in the box is not him, not her. I’d been to the wakes of friends and I found it wasn’t so difficult to deal with it.
I met Rich in 1983 and we began dating in October. He asked me over to his house to meet his parents a month later, the middle of November. One week later, his mother was killed in a car accident. Rich had never been to a funeral before. He couldn’t handle it. We went in one time to view his mother’s body and he dissolved in tears. Afterwards, he couldn’t go back into the room. “That’s not my mother,” he kept saying.
I comforted him was supportive – even while I was emotionally distancing myself from all the grief and emotion the other family members were experiencing. I did that to help me cope with it all. I don’t know that I ever went back and processed it thoroughly. That’s a drawback to disengaging from your feelings. If you don’t go back to figure out what happened you can set yourself up for a real crash and burn later.
None of these experiences really touched me … not until Rich died. Even then, I detached from my feelings and went on auto-pilot right from the time Rich said he was having atrial fibrillation again to just hours later, acting as if I was giving him CPR to shield my son from the knowledge that his father was already gone.
I began to write to Rich the day he died. I wrote to help me sort things out. It just seemed absolutely incredible that he was really gone. How could he? We were supposed to spend the rest of our lives together! “How can I live without you after I’ve been loving you so long…” (that’s Michael Bolton). Who was I going to confide everything to now? Who was going to read my mind or let me read his so that we’d come out with the exact same thing? Who was going to hold me and love me?
Much of the time, I just felt numb. I joined an online widow support group within a few weeks after Rich died. I told myself it would help me. I posted a couple of times and learned that my numbness was normal. Usually the numbness would “wear off” at about the “three months anniversary”. Anniversary! I was very relieved to have that board. It was almost like a lifeline. I went there everyday, almost round the clock.
My numbness took longer to wear off. Other widow/ers from dysfunctional families confided to me that the invisible shield we put up against hurt insulated us so well that it usually took longer for the numbness to wear off. Once it did wear off, I was in trouble. I was very very angry and had a hard time not showing it. People at work wondered what was the matter with me. “You seemed fine during the summer,” one person said. Well, duh, I was still in shock!
The anger scared me so badly (I would fantasize about wrecking the car, throwing things, breaking things) that I contacted a bereavement counselor for help. I went for individual therapy and joined a bereavement group as well. I signed the kids up for bereavement support.
Things got worse before they got better. I couldn’t work my regular schedule and cut back drastically on my hours. I withdrew from everyone, my family and friends especially. I’d agree to go out and then change my mind. I missed Rich terribly. I didn’t act self destructively because I couldn’t do that to my kids. It was a rough ride, really rough.
I guess the turning point was making a decision to go to Florida with the kids no matter what over the spring break. I’d always been afraid to drive over bridges. I’d get these seriously horrible panic attacks and so Rich always took the bridges for me.
Now Rich wasn’t here anymore. I told myself, what did I have to be afraid of? I’d survived the very worst thing that could happen to me. What was driving over a bridge?
The same was true for just about anything that came up after that. So what? It was nothing compared to Rich’s death.
You get a whole new perspective on things. Worries that seemed a big deal before become insignificant.
I am not afraid of death anymore either. I don’t want to go before my kids are all grown up … but I know that Rich and my other loved ones are there waiting for me.
