My You Tube Interview with Celebrating Act 2
Debbie2021-10-14T15:47:09+00:00The lovely fellows at Celebrating Act 2, a Youtube Vlog, interviewed me for their channel. Here’s the video:
Thanks for watching, and please share if you enjoyed. đź’•
The lovely fellows at Celebrating Act 2, a Youtube Vlog, interviewed me for their channel. Here’s the video:
Thanks for watching, and please share if you enjoyed. đź’•
When my husband died in April of 2013, I didn’t think I deserved to have a future. And that led me to fall into emotional abuse.
By the time he was diagnosed with male breast cancer, it was already at Stage Four. At least, that’s what I believe. He never told me about having any symptoms until he announced one day that he was going to the hospital for “tests.” But by then, it was too late.
He rejected care, wouldn’t let me get involved in his treatment, and demanded that we conceal his condition from his parents. Over time, I dressed the weeping wounds the cancer had carved into his back and hoped I wasn’t killing him. I gave him his nebulizer several times a night and begged him to let me get the hospital bed and skilled nursing care he needed.
But he always refused. Finally, sleep-deprived, and covered in stress-related hives, I yelled at him, trying desperately to get him to see reality, screaming that I just couldn’t take it anymore.
Except he was the one who was dying.
When he was gone, it was as though I’d lost him twice, first to the denial that took away my husband and best friend of 32 years, and second to the cancer that claimed his body. And somehow I felt it was my fault. It would always be my fault. To this day, I don’t much care for Sundays.
After he died, I had a major case of caregiver guilt. And a bunch of memories I didn’t want to be alone with, especially after dark.
A year and a half later, after dating online for a few months, I wound up in an emotionally abusive relationshipI wound up in an emotionally abusive relationship. But back then, I didn’t see the correlation.
Initially — in fact way too early — my new boyfriend told me that he loved me. But six months later, he was whining that I sucked, was supremely selfish and never considered what he wanted. Outwardly, I railed against it. But deep down, I felt he was right. So I hung out with a guy who drove with a coffee cup of whiskey beside him, and balked when it was his turn to pay for dinner but gambled away thousands of his savings, and who threatened to kill himself because he was just that miserable.
Like so many who have been in abusive relationships, I rationalized that I could help him to change. He needed me. Having failed to save my husband, I wanted to save someone, even someone who wasn’t very nice to me.
We wind up with someone enmeshed in their own drama who isn’t good for us, and we think, I guess that’s all I get to have in this life.
It’s not that you consciously decide that you deserve a schmuck, it’s that you settle for one. They’re a distraction from yourself. You don’t have to work on your own pain when you’re constantly mopping up after someone else’s.
And that can be a relief.
Unable to live alone with my memories, I lacked the wherewithal to get out. Nothing was that great, but being with him was somewhat better than being alone.Until it wasn’t.
I see now they weren’t unique or even special. Many of us feel guilt over providing flawed care to our loved ones and being overwhelmed and frightened, and even losing our tempers and saying things we regret. Which we regret even more after they’re gone.
One day while leaving a writing class, a fellow classmate asked about my weekend plans. I answered that I was going to try a walking group on meetup, but surprised myself by adding, “Whenever I meet anyone new I feel like I’m hiding something.” Isn’t it often that way, the thing we’re hiding is also the thing we want to shout out loud?
“The best way to get over shame is to talk about it, ” he said. “It’s when we hide our secrets that they fester.” I’d happened, perhaps not so unconsciously, to share my feelings with an older man who’d spent much of his life working on his own foibles.
So I started writing about it. From the responses I received, I learned I was not alone in my guilt. But I still didn’t get rid of my poisonous boyfriend.
My memories made it hard to be by myself for long periods of time. And that inability to be alone was its own kind of beast, feral and immediate, craving warmth, the feel of skin, the solidity of someone lying next to me in the dark, numbing out my shame.
I finally broke up with my boyfriend when he insisted on picking me up after a writing workshop in the city. From the start, he was restless, strung out on pain medication and whiskey. He insisted on crossing a busy intersection just as the light was changing, grabbing my wrist to drag me along with him when I refused. A speeding car almost hit us. By the time that car had screeched to a halt, other cars were coming at us too.
When we finally made it across the street, he blamed me for not trusting him. The ride home wasn’t any better. That day I finally recognized him as an abuser who wanted to take me down with him.
By the time I was done with it all, I was bitter. A different person. No longer the quiet widow who was looking for love. But an angry woman who’d been abused. Yet that was better because now I cared about having a future.
If you’ve ever felt this kind of shame, you are not alone. But I also want you to know in the future you’ll be different. It might not be for months or even years, but there is a different you who wants to be alive. And the you that emerges from the crucible may very well not be the person who you were before. But that person is worth waiting for.
Photo by Luis Galvez on Upsplash
I often hear from the newly widowed asking how to get through their losses. The short answer: I don’t really have an answer. I lost my George eight years ago this April. I still see his face when I close my eyes.Â
But time passes and we do get through this. This article from The Guardian was helpful in writing this post. While it’s about finding joy–which may feel impossible at the beginning–it suggests that small actions can help, including acknowledging there are times we are going to be unhappy.
Which I know sounds odd having lost the man who was my life. This sometimes appeared strange, like weeding the garden at 5:00 a.m., but I needed to connect to the dirt. I replaced dead plants, which led to a short trip to the nursery, which led to a little project that kept the pain at bay for at least a few seconds at a time.
I walked a lot. Saying hello to the people I saw and being in the fresh air, maybe noticing the different shades of green of the trees on the path, or the blooming poppies, helped me to see beauty, and from there, a sliver of hope. The world was too beautiful to want to leave it.Â
I couldn’t control George’s death, but I could turn my space from cancer-colored to nurturing. Almost the first thing I did after he died was to clear out the paraphernalia of illness, the oxygen tanks that he wheeled from room to room, the nebulizer I had to help him with several times a night, the medications that ultimately failed to heal.
Removing these things allowed me to remember there were better times, with other Georges who were still vibrant. I could see he did have a good life in total, just not at the end.
From there I moved on to dealing with the deferred maintenance of having had a spouse dying of cancer. I might not have wanted to remodel the bathroom soon after he died, but the shower was leaking into the bedroom closet, providing its own imperative. The project turned out to be a savior by providing me with a sense of purpose. Suddenly I had new things to do, picking out fixtures, conferring with contractors, checking out model bathrooms online.
I’d never before done a home project without George, and with each decision, I felt more competent. At the most basic, looking at colors and textures was lovely. Did I want soft pink tile the color of shells or shaded gray tile the color of fog? And I knew, the world still had shells, and oceans, and fog…and I would see them again, and I could bring them into my home.
Some of us, myself included, have an ingrained need for order that keeps us functioning and going through our to-do lists, even if we are dealing with the stuff of grief. I’d go through my chores, credit card companies to call here, banks to contact there, and find some relief from my thoughts.
I learned I could put a few things to right, even if I was miserable. And from there a few more, from collecting the life insurance to re-doing bathroom, to fixing the broken garden lights, and from there to venturing out of the house for the first yoga class in many months. Each thing accomplished led to something else. Having come up against mortality, these simple tasks felt life-affirming.Â
I could create my environment, even if I couldn’t control death.
Sometimes what helped was just to allow myself to feel terrible. Our society so often construes grieving as an ailment to be gotten over as quickly as possible. But that isn’t how it works. The loss becomes its own entity, with its own needs, its own timetable. Sometimes we just have to bend to it, and care for it, like a fragile new seedling. Tamping down our pain just makes it pulse with more intensity as it demands to be heard.
They don’t mean to be cruel when they say “everything happens for a reason,” but they can’t accept that sometimes fate is random. Sometimes things happen because they just do.
Perhaps that viewpoint will change in these times of the pandemic when so many of us are mourning. There is something very right about taking the time to grieve our losses without rushing. These are the people we loved. They return to us in our grief, and we honor them.
Our best friend at this point is the passage of time. At the beginning when each day felt like walking on a knife blade, little things helped me still feel human. It took about two years for my fragmented widow’s brain to have ideas and another year to be able to think in the abstract. I always wrote, but it took a few years to eke out coherent paragraphs.
Consider not getting romantically involved for awhile, until you feel stronger. I got involved with someone a few months after my loss. At first I felt as though I was coming back to life, but I failed to see that the guy was trying to control my life and make me dependent on him. I would have done better to wait until my critical thinking had come back to me.
Another thing I wish I’d known is that there are many dips on the road to recovery. I’d feel better one day, satisfied that I had something new for class and made it to evening yoga, but then the agony would hit the next day, a chilly loneliness enshrouding my morning walk. The cloud might abate later that day, but return in the dark. And there was nothing I could do about it. My loss had its own feelings even as I was working on gratitude and light.
You are no less you because your spouse died, even if it doesn’t feel like it. And you can get through this by believing in yourself, again, even it doesn’t feel like it. The worst thing I did was to beat myself up–for being a poor caregiver, and having led such an isolated life, and being so alone. Which led, in part, to my diving into a bad relationship so soon after my loss.
Finally, despite the people who ask “Are you over if yet?,” being widowed isn’t something to get over. For me, it’s been a journey that changes over time. I am always a widow. But since being widowed in 2013, I have had new experiences involving travel and friends and hiking and going back to school and even finding a second love.
And I still miss George sometimes and wonder what the rest of his life might have held.Â