The number of people I connect with and interact with on a daily basis has only gone down by one and yet it feels as if I have no connection to anyone at all. I sit alone in this apartment staring at the walls with mindless television or movies droning on to mask the oppressive quiet. I long for the phone to ring, to bring me human contact, and then, when it does ring I can’t wait for the person to go away and leave me alone. I no longer know if I am coming or going. What once made sense now seems insane, and nothing seems normal any more.
On a daily basis I used to send Michele at least one email from work, usually something banal to let her know I’d arrived safely. We always talked on the phone during the day, sometimes several times. Not every evening was filled with conversation but there was always a recounting of our activities apart, a sharing of the other’s life that brought us closer together.
Now I rarely take the phone out of my coat pocket, some days I leave it on silent because I know it will never ring with her on the other end again. And the rule in my mail in box that caused the computer to chime when the mail was from her will be forever unused.
The connection quotient of my life has only changed by one and yet that one was more than all the others combined, more than all the others multiplied. Being alone in this apartment is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Sometimes I can’t stand the silence here and I have to go out, just to be around other people. But then I feel exposed and vulnerable and I have to come back to this place to feel safe. Only I don’t feel safe here anymore. I am totally uprooted and adrift, helpless in the currents of grief and despair.
I am alone.
This morning I screwed up my resolve and went to the credit union to have Michele taken off our joint account. To my surprise the bank officer there counseled me to wait at least six months before proceeding with her removal. As she put it, “Once her name is off the account there is no way to put it back on, and if you get something, like a tax refund, that has both names it will be extremely difficult to sort out.” At the very least she advised me to wait until after this year’s taxes were completed and any refund had been received.
I wasn’t looking forward to dealing with this piece of administrivia anyway. I can wait until May to take another run at it.
The silence in my life is the hardest thing to deal with now. Coming back to the apartment from work or the movies or dinner out is coming back to a place of silence. And in that silence all I can hear are my own fears, thoughts, questions, musings, screams, whispers, and silence.
Running a load of dishes in the washer or doing laundry adds to the mechanical background present in any urban setting. The white noise of a fan or the furnace blower isn’t loud enough to block out the thunderous silence here either. At best I am able to distract myself from the silence by immersing myself in a book or television show, perhaps some music or talking out loud to myself. But I always run out of sounds and lose momentum, coming to a halt on silence again.
For the first few weeks of this prison I kept my sanity by talking out loud to Michele at every turn. Little conversations about what to wear to work or have for dinner, giant conversations about the purpose of death and the futility of life. Over time, however, I have gradually stopped talking out loud so much. I still converse with Michele verbally from time to time, but the pain of not hearing her voice is too much to bear now.
I saw something in a movie or television show recently where one character says she can’t remember someone who is gone. The other character says you have to put a context around the memory or it won’t work. Oddly enough this is true. Every night that we went to bed at that same time we had a ritual around how we said good night. I still say my part out loud in the dark just before I go to sleep. And in my ears I faintly hear Michele respond. Other times when I try to conjure up her voice I can’t hear it any more.
So the context of being alone is preventing me from connecting with my memories of our life together and all I am left with is silence. Life goes on whether we want it to or not. The inexorable forward movement of time is slowly carrying me away from the context of being her husband, of being her best friend, of being with her. A part of me will always be these things and more. A part of her will live on inside of me until I die. But my life continues to move away from our life. It is simultaneously poignant and heart breaking. I know intellectually that this is how life works, but emotionally I don’t want to accept the hand that fate has dealt me.
So I sit in silence that is a raging tempest of sound and fury. And I rage and scream in the middle of a seemingly endless silence.
I’ve picked up the first book of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, Quicksilver for the second time this week, to read. As with his earlier Cryptomonicon I’ve had to take two running starts at the book to get rolling in it. I believe it was more than a year after I purchased Cryptomonicon before I started it the second time and finished it. Now it easily ranks as one of my top ten all time favorite books, and depending on what I’ve read recently, it hovers around the number one spot. The receipt being used as my bookmark indicates that I’ve had this copy of Quicksilver since October 3, 2003; hopefully like fine wine it has aged well on my shelf.
The Baroque Cycle is daunting in just sheer number of pages: 2,618 by my count. And I’m all the way up to 50. A least I have all three volumes here and ready, so that I can continue the story without interruption. Of course more pages is good - this story should last me the rest of the year and maybe beyond.
In my professional life as a software application architect I spend a lot of time looking at and understanding process. How does the client work today? How do they want to work tomorrow? What processes exist to help or hinder them? So it shouldn’t be surprising that I look for processes in my personal life. Obviously the largest process I’m moving through currently is the so-called grief process.
Most of us have heard of the “stages of grief” and can probably name at least two of the stages. However, I suspect that very few know that the currently accepted stages of grief mutated from an article called “The 5 Stages of Receiving Catastrophic News” written by Elsabeth Kubler-Ross in her book, “On Death and Dying”, Macmillan Publishing Company, 1969. She presented the 5 stages terminally ill patients go through upon learning of their terminal illness. Over the years since 1969 health care professionals, nurses, clergy, students, mental heath professionals, and readers of the original work somehow mutated the stages into the 5 Stages of Grief. (source: “Beware the Five Stages of Grief”)
A better title would be The 5 Stages of Coping With Trauma. Better still is an entirely new mantra: TEAR.
T = To accept the reality of loss E = Experience the pain of loss A = Adjust to the new environment without the lost object R = Reinvest in the new reality
TEAR represents the actual grief work that happens once a person has moved through the 5 Stages of Coping with Trauma. To me this process makes sense. The original 5 stages, regardless of what you call them, represent the impact the trauma has on the individual immediately following the event. Once a person has moved sufficiently away from the trauma event then they start to (hopefully) process the grief through TEAR.
I experienced a brief period of denial. Having dealt with Michele’s health issues for some time, and watching her have two near death experiences in her final days prepared me in some perverse way for her death. I am experiencing a longer period of anger. Not continuous anger, but minor eruptions surrounding events removed from her death; places where it feels safe to express anger. For example, I can be anger about slow traffic on the way home because that is a small thing. Trying to express all my anger about losing Michele is a very large thing and too overwhelming to attempt.
I only briefly experience bargaining, usually when I break down emotionally and express the pain I feel through tears. Depression, the fourth stage, is not as constant as you might suspect. I am certainly depressed, and I have periods of time where that depression is almost crushing. But I also have periods of time where I don’t feel crushed, and where I almost feel normal. I don’t think I’ve reached acceptance fully. Intellectually I have accepted what has happened and what is happening, but emotionally I am still reeling from Michele’s death.
In terms of TEAR, I feel I have started to accept the reality of loss, and I am certainly experiencing the pain of that loss. I think that adjusting to my environment without Michele will take a long time to complete. And I can say with certainty that I am not ready to invest in the new reality. Buying into that new reality means letting go of the old one. It means, in a way, letting go of Michele. I know from my grief work about Amy that letting go doesn’t mean losing the person, it merely means unclenching so that you can experience all of your memories and emotions about them and not just those that are figure in the moment.
Reading the Beware the Five Stages of Grief" article has given my intellect a process that makes sense, and a roadmap of sorts to gauge my movement through the aftermath of this trauma. Having a process I understand and agree with gives me a sense of control I didn’t have before. Whether you espouse the 5 stages of grief or TEAR, the feeling of lost control underlies everything you do and, unchecked, that feeling will only exacerbate the anger, depression, fear, et cetera you are already feeling.
Over the weekend I visited the body shop recommended by Lexus and received an estimate to repair the front bumper. As it turns out, the bracket that holds the destroyed fog lamp in place is part of the bumper, and since it was snapped off in the accident, there is no way to replace just the light.
Actually the bumper is only a few dollars more expensive than the light assembly. The lamp is 217.52 and the bumper another 254.98. Toss in some paint (bumpers are white and have to be painted), and labor to disassemble and reassemble the car and you are looking at $984.75. All for one paperback book sized hunk of cement.
The insurance company is picking up the tab for 2-days of car rental, so after I pay my $500 deductable, their total will be $544. Happy happy.
Efficiency is not your friend. At least not when you have an entire day to fill and you are depressed. In the three hours since I’ve been up I have:
Now what? I’ve got 12, maybe 13, hours to kill before I can reasonably go to bed. Maybe a movie, that’d kill 2 or 3 hours. More if I picked a theater that was farther away. I went window shopping at the book store last evening. I could repeat that at the electronics store today.
At least tomorrow I’ve got 9 or 10 hours of work to fill the time.
In order here are the “meals” I had today.
Breakfast Three-egg folded omelet
Lunch Dublin Coddle (Irish potato and sausage soup)
Supper Chips and salsa (following a couple of hours of indecision) bowl of Frosted Flakes
The plan tomorrow is to make chili. Or maybe huddle in the corner, rocking back and forth muttering to myself.
Today has been filled with a hollow rushing noise in the space of my heart that Michele filled. I have felt disconnected and apart from everything going on around me, almost as if it was happening to someone else. Michele and I both loved turkey and the ritual of having roasted turkey for dinner. Not being able to fulfill that ritual this year is very hard. Every day is hard, but some days are more poignant than others.
Even as I struggle to deal with the heightened sense of loss this evening I am painfully aware that her birthday and Christmas are bearing down on me like a run away freight train. There is nothing I can do to prepare myself for those events and no way to stop them from occurring. I thought that spending today with friends and their family would make it better, and while it filled the moments, it served more as a painful reminder that they all had something I could not - a loved one to share the day with.
Looking ahead to Christmas I am now strongly leaning towards spending that weekend by myself. I want to be free to do what ever I need, to express whatever is in my heart in the moment without reservation or fear of judgement. Whether others feel this way towards me or not, I feel stigmatized now. I feel as if I alter the setting for any gathering just by my presence. So I end up trying to fade into the woodwork or join in as if I am not screaming on the inside. I end up taking care of my perception of their needs rather than meeting my own.
So for Christmas I want to be by myself. I want to bake Michele one last birthday cake, and make a casserole of beanie weenies with mustard and brown sugar. I want to sing her happy birthday. And I want to bawl my eyes out. Christmas morning I want to watch our favorite holiday movies and eat too many chocolate cookies with eggnog.
What I have come to realize today is that saying good bye to a beloved partner happens over and over again. The annual touchstones that made up your year together are each cause for fresh sorrow and each deserve their own measure of grief. On this Thanksgiving day I am grateful for having share an incredible love affair with Michele. I am also thankful for coming to a new understand about how I need to care for myself as I make way way around our sun for the first time alone.
The problem with doing laundry at home is that it is a single threaded process, that only moves as fast as the dryer dries. I had four loads to complete this evening: work clothes, sweats and tee-shirts, whites, and towels. I started when I got home at 5:00. It is now 9:25 and the THIRD load (the whites) is still in the dryer. Luckily the towels can stay in the dryer until tomorrow after they finish. At least the rest of my life (such as it is) goes on in the background at home. I can eat dinner, watch Tivo, use the computer, et cetera.
Laundromats, on the other hand let you multi-thread your laundry. Use as many washers or dryers simultaneously as you want/need. Of course there your life is single threaded as you are stuck in a hot, smelly place that you’d rather not visit if you had a choice
At home you get to use the quarters for something else too.