Someone You Love Has Died; Start the Conversation
Losing a Love and Finding Yourself, Again
I couldn’t stand being there another night; not after eight months of COVID and hospice and soggy masks and empty needles and used catheters catching my socks, nodding to another caring stranger by the bed.
My wife had just died after 12 years with incurable cancer, ending our forty-years together. Death may not end a relationship, but it surely changes how you think about yourself and the person you’ve just lost.
I moved into a small cottage on a pond on Cape Cod to think and write — to try to make sense of what had happened, what our life and her death had been about, and where I’d go from here.
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How do you survive the loss of someone you love and find a life for yourself in what remains?
You can’t go forward by looking backward, but you can’t start until you know where you are. The problem is that you don’t know where you are.
Grief has taken away time and place and purpose.
Look around; start with where you really are, not with where you want to be.
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Find a place — an actual place — that lets you breathe. It can be as small as the corner of a room, a spot in the backyard, a chair you carry into the woods and unfold beneath a tree.
Let the immense intelligence of the place wrap itself around you.
Let it teach you how to start a conversation with the person you’ve loved and lost. That person isn’t the one who has died; it’s the you that died along with them.
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This place I’m in now: Lovely and fragile; many edges of water and sky, sand and surf, light and shadow that make you aware, every day, that nature nurtures change, and, so, survives: She demands adaptation.
Here was the spot where Katharine Lee Bates made America beautiful from sea to shining sea. As the incandescent sun out my window sets each night, the clouds burn down into the water.
What comes of this smoldering fire, the loons will find in the morning.
I watch and learn.
Loons always seem half-deranged, driving swift-deep, into the ocean, then skyward in the searching wind, plummeting back, bound to earth with mud and broken bits in tow, packing themselves in and lifting themselves up from the rising water.
But they know what to do to survive. This is ancestral choreography; the movement of the place; a purposeful locomotion.
They know that life will not do for them what they cannot do for themselves.
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Let me help you find yourself, find where you are right now, by letting you listen in on the quiet conversation I’m having with my wife, as the loons call out in the snow.
Two, parallel lives rose up; met, came closer, and joined together; then, separated. There was me and you; then there was us; then, finally, there is me, alone, again.
There was a fourth part of the falling action: you became sick before leaving me. The us changed from and to or.
You and me, became you or me.
Of necessity, one life allowed itself to be subsumed into, maybe even consumed by, the other. This happened out of not love, not obligation.
Now that you are gone, the me that disappeared into you, has reemerged.
I am on my own again. But I’m not really the me I’d known before or during our time together. The after me isn’t like anything anyone has ever seen before.
I am much, much more. You are now part of me. I have been enlarged by the circumstances of your leaving and must build a boat that can carry two, as your favorite song goes.
I am trying, Love.
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Life has great intelligence, but it cannot read our minds. We have to give it some help. If, in our grief, we wait for circumstance or serendipity to tell us what we want to know, what we should do, we will wait a long, long time.
You may be crazy with grief just now. Pray, if you wish; cry, as you must. But begin a conversation.
Start by letting life know that you’re lost and need help finding yourself again; it will help you measure for that boat you need to build.
The great poet, David Whyte, says that to be alive is to be visible. This is surely one sense of what he means: make your presence known, so others can affirm you.
You need this to know that you are still you, even in this unchosen solitude.
Resist every damn instinct: Do not pull the covers over your head.
Find a pond; go for a swim; go down beneath the waves and dig up some rocks and mud, then break the waters, come ashore, and start building a new nest for the flood you know will come.
Invite a few other masked mallards in for a party.
People will see you; they will help you.
However imperfectly, even perfect strangers, will help you. I know this; I’ve seen this. They’ve done it for me. They’ve kept me alive.
Find a way to be visible again — to them and to you.
Grief is a portal, but you have to walk through it.
I have a friend who plants a perennial flower (and not just Forget me Nots) each time she recalls something about her late mother that she wants to remember across the seasons.
I know a colleague who, wearing the dragonfly pin her husband gave her on their 25th anniversary, sits on her porch on warm summer nights and talks with him, sure that the acrobatics around her are him answering her back.
I’m close to someone who volunteers at the Salvation Army shelter, where she feeds the homeless, finding, in the faces across the table, her late daughter’s smile.
These are life-affirming acts.
In grief, we begin finding ourselves in what surrounds us.
As we look around, we repeat aloud an oath to the boatman, I am here — the password to carry you both to the place you want now to live.
