Let\’s start a much needed conversation about grief
When my husband died to me there were no casseroles or candles.
I can’t recall the exact moment when the man I knew and had been married to for 20 years, died. It happened slowly, over time. The erosion occurred in millimeter increments, invisible mostly to the naked eye, making the grief pierce more sharply.
We are the ghost widows
We are the thousands of women who have lost our husbands to war, to abandonment. We are the women who can’t grieve like widows, because our husbands didn’t die. Instead, our husbands went to war and then returned to us, totally different men.
Like the husband in “Man Walks into a Room,” by Nicole Krauss, war altered our husband’s personalities so drastically; it is as if they have amnesia and they are no longer here. They don’t love us anymore. They have left. And, they have tried to destroy us.
Let’s Talk About Grief
This past week, I was sitting at my doctor’s office waiting for a routine follow up exam when I saw the cover of Time magazine with Sheryl Sandberg on the cover. The headline read: “Let’s Talk About Grief. An unlikely new mission for Sheryl Sandberg,” by Belinda Luscombe.
As I read the article I started to cry. I had to contain myself because I was in public and I didn’t want to look like a freak. I cried for Sandberg who had lost the love of her life, her husband who suddenly and without explanation died while on a trip at 47. And I cried because the way she talked about her loss is the way I feel about my loss, and how others like me feel, and how we have had to contain our grief because in our culture there is a hierarchy to grief. It’s as if you can only grieve your loss if your husband has been buried.
Grief shatters our sense of confidence
Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and a billionaire, a woman who has written a bestselling book called Lean In and launched an entire movement. If you know anything about Sandberg, you would know that losing her bearings wouldn’t seem possible. And yet, “In short order…(Sandberg) was thrust against something unfamiliar: an outcome she couldn’t change,” and, as Luscombe states, in her grief, Sandberg lost her confidence to the extent she even felt she couldn’t do her job. “It just kind of crumbled in every area,” she states.
I\’m a dying fish
As I have coped with the fall-out from my divorce, I have felt like flailing like a dying fish, with nowhere to go with my grief, and so I hide it, because the only thing I know how to do is to put on a good face to the world. I have to be strong. I can’t lose it, after all, because there isn’t any reason to, I didn\’t actually lose my husband the way Sandberg did. And yet, I feel just as lost and lacking confidence as Sandberg did. There have been days where doing my work has been difficult, where making it through just one more day seemed nearly impossible.
When we lose someone, we often go into denial because the grief can be so searing we fear it will destroy us. It\’s a coping mechanism. We want to bargain, think of how it could have been different. Our grief can restrain us like a straight-jacket, making it difficult to get out of bed each day. We try to hide how we feel because it’s just too much for others, for us. Sandberg says that people at her work were awkward around her in the days following her husband’s death, and it seemed others said things that were hurtful. She knows they didn’t mean to.
In her article, Luscombe explains this happens because our culture avoids really dealing with the whole complicated mess of the bereaved. “The bereaved are often treated like those to whom something unnatural or disgraceful has happened,” she states, when, as she so bluntly states, death is inevitable and natural.
And when a spouse leaves, and the marriage dies, we feel even more disgraced, and we feel we have even less reason to show our grief because we haven’t lost our spouse to death. It’s hard to be around other people when you feel like your insides are torn up and you don’t have the energy to engage in conversation or even a smile. And when those around us often try to put a positive spin on our loss. This divorce was good for you, they might say.
There is no going back
Losing a spouse to war, one that returns a husband in a nearly ruined form, causes radical changes in lives and families too. There is no going back.
We are war wives and we aren’t whiners. We are tough and resilient and most of us have spent years helping our husbands deal with their war related issues, things like post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatic brain injury or lost limbs. We have spent countless hours helping our veteran husband navigate the veterans’ administration for medical care and claims processing. And we are tired to the bone. We don’t seek sympathy and it’s hard for us to ask for help. So we go it alone. There is no time for grief. If we are lucky, some of us find a support group of other women. But most of us suffer in silence, while the war and soul wounds demolish our husbands, our families and our lives.
And then, this is what war does.
It drops down on you like a thousand ton bomb, and your husband leaves and your world crumbles.
So I started out to write about new beginnings.
I know I can write this.
I can write this because I’ve never done this before.
I’ve never lost everything‑‑‑my home, my income, everything of value, before.
So I qualify as a beginner.
As I write this, my home is pending short sale, and the home inspection is set for tomorrow at 1 p.m. It’s supposed to take 2-3 hours, so I will need to pack up my dogs again to leave the house. When the house closes by July 10, I may not have a new place to live because the only people making money on my house sale are the realtors.
My paycheck was late this month, so my bank accounts are gasping as much as my gas tank. For the past week I have been putting $4 worth of gas into my gas tank, all the cash I can manage to scrounge up, so I can get down the hill to work. It feels pretty disgraceful.
Joy from the ashes
Yesterday, I stopped by my church where my pastors were having a noon discussion. They were sitting outside on the patio on little chairs, glowing in the sun. Something about the scene beckoned to me as I drove by on my way to work. So I turned around the block to come back. I had planned to just say hello and then leave, but the discussion was compelling so I stayed. We talked about joy.
Someone asked about my house. I said my life was in chaos, but it had been that way for so long it was normal. So I could handle it. I laughed.
Then it occurred to me that I had actually laughed. That was called humor, one of the points on the pastor’s list about what leads towards joy.
It’s been a few years since my husband left us. So I’ve gained some perspective now (another word on his list). My life is still in chaos, but there are now a few days when I can smile, when I do laugh, even if it’s just for a few moments. Many days, I wake up with anxiety churning in my throat like a tsunami waiting to burst forth to engulf me. These are scary panic attacks because it literally feels like I am going to die.
But I won’t die.
Not because of my anxiety anyway. I will survive. I am too much like a weed, or the Banksia Seed to shrivel and die in that manner.
But back to joy. The list my pastor and the others were discussing contained eight words, and the discussion was about how developing these traits led to joy. Words like: perspective, humility, humor, acceptance, forgiveness, gratitude, compassion and generosity. I had told someone earlier how I felt like someone had taken a jack hammer to my life, and I was living in the rubble. Is that acceptance? I don’t know, but I am learning humility.
What scares me the most about losing my home is this:
I am a very insecure person.
I have spent a lifetime building an image of myself that is one of resilience. This experience has shaken me to the core. I have never felt as if I fit in, I often instead feel overlooked, invisible, passed over, tolerated instead of accepted. I have experienced major losses before; and I have survived. My mother died of breast cancer at just 51, a loss I have yet to fully grieve, even more than 20 years later. That year I turned thirty and I also lost my marriage, my business, my home and my dignity. I was younger then and energetic and just plugged on forward.
This time, it’s different.
Or maybe my perspective is different. I have a fear of being homeless. It sounds irrational. But in the dark moments of the night, it’s a fear that is as real as the wind slapping the branches against the window.
I feel like a failure in a world that only accepts success that only applauds success. A world where it seems like everyone is moving forward, living great lives where they go on vacations and have no worries. Of course I know this is only true for a small percentage of the planet. More than ¾ of the more than 7 billion people on the planet live in abject poverty. I wish that weren’t the case. And it causes me grief. I have no reason to complain when I read about people in Syria, Uganda, Iraq or so many other places ravished by war and greed and poverty. And I could write entire essays about that.
So back to the beginning.
Where do I start?
I guess I will start with where I am at.
It’s hard to be honest about where I am at. In debt, unable to pay a mortgage for a house I worked hard for and contributed monetarily towards. And I tried everything I could think of to keep the house, Airbnb, renting a room, short platting.
It’s hard to admit that I don’t have good credit, so I fear I won’t be able to rent a home. So what does one do? We live in such a world of tangled webs that it feels like I am walking on a woven stringed canopy, where the threads have broken and now the whole entire thing is unraveling, right before my eyes. As one things goes under, it leads to another, and another, until I’m falling into a hole, buried.
And I wonder about others who are experiencing this. I wonder how you dig your way back out of the rubble.
There is so much I want to say. About how common this is. About how many other women are being left in terrible financial ruin, some with many children and after being married for many years.
I want to decry the divorce industry, which seems to churn out attorneys who feed on families like vultures at the side of a kill, stirring up emotions and jacking up their bills, and bankrupting men and women. They don’t seem to advocate for solutions, but rather cause absolute disruption. They make mistakes, they manipulate with their requests for interrogatories and implications and outright lies, they show disregard and people’s lives are left in shambles.
I want to grieve the loss the way a widow does, but I am not allowed to grieve that way. I have other friends who have been abandoned by their spouses too. And we talk about it. I said it’s like a death, such a huge loss it crushes your chest in. You feel invisible, not seen, not understood because no one says anything. No one takes your suffering seriously, no one brings casseroles or helps you clean your home like they do if your husband has died.
But he has died. Many of us have lost our husbands to war. They never came back.
We are the ghost widows. The women who have lost our husbands to war, to abandonment, women who can’t grieve like widows. And it hurts.
I would love to hear about how you have navigated loss and grief, especially divorce. Comment in the comments below. Let\’s start a much needed conversation.
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