Suffering

I am starting to find myself at a loss for words.  How does one explain the not-even-entirely conscious need to suffer?  I only just realized while talking to a friend last week that I am not ready to be done suffering.  Not even for a little minute.  Not even for the respite of yoga nidra (yogic sleep).  Not even for guided imagery meditation.  Not even to let God carry the hurt for a small portion of my day.  Not even to let a friend try to hold space for it with me.  Not even for the sedated promise offered by antidepressants or opiates or alcohol or anything pharmaceutical.  Nope.  It is my suffering.  I claim it.  I am not able to set it down at this time.  And why should I?  It is my right to suffer.

This is not to say that I want to suffer.  I don’t.  Not consciously anyway.  Who does?  I am in incredible pain.  Unspeakable pain.  Again, I lose the words I would need to convey this to anyone.  There is no human description.  No one would choose this suffering.  And yet, I cannot put it down or give it away. 

My pain estranges me.  Pushes me away from anyone who has not experienced the death of the love of their life at an early age and in the beginning phases of the relationship, like, just a few years in.  And let’s face it, there are not that many of us who have walked this road.  There are no real-life support groups for people like me.  We are rare.  This doesn’t just happen everyday (‘thank goodness for every one else,’ I think).  I try to be as open as I can to those with even remotely similar experiences who try to share, but really, I hear their stories and can only pick apart the dissimilarities.  I think, “You don’t know.”  I have heard of a few who have had a similar experience and, through hearing about their stories, I cling to the concept that there exists someone who has somehow lived through this . . . even if I never meet them or get to talk to them.  They made it.  Maybe I will, too.  They are the stuff of legends. 

Occasionally I hear about the ones who didn’t survive this.  They are also legends.  That is always an option.  If I don’t live through this, I shall join their ranks.  There is nothing logically noble in being one of the ones who cannot live without their partner.  In fact, my former self would have snorted at this ridiculously shallow and romantic notion.  ‘Romeo and Juliet.  Star-crossed lovers.  Snort.  Pathetic.’  But I get it now.  I feel it in a way my former, rebellious, independent, women’s studies, feminist self would never comprehend.  It is not that I cannot live without a man.  It is that I don’t want to live without Ron Clark also living in the same world.  Even if he had chosen someone else to be with or we’d just broken-up . . . shoot, that would be awfully hard, but I could at least live with that.  The suffering I experience knowing that Ron does not exist on this earth anymore sometimes (admittedly daily) makes me not want to be.  Just not to exist.  I don’t want to suffer, but I cannot stop . . . at least not while I am breathing.

I was so naïve to think, as I was starting to become burned out in my caregiver duties a few months ago, that perhaps the relief I would experience at the whole thing just being over would somehow outweigh my grief at the loss of him.  I actually worried about this . . . felt guilt that I would be a terrible widow, and would just be relieved for Ron and for me not to have to go through the burdens of cancer anymore.  How foolish of me.  I now see that such a belief could never be true.  Never.  My grief is mountainous and cavernous.  It is vast.  It is deep.  It is bigger than my body . . . bigger than this planet.  It is dense and thick.  It is dark.  It is unknowable, even to me, even as I feel and carry it, so heavy, inside my heart and soul and mind.  There is no relief.  Whatever was burdening me as a caregiver, I would gladly take it all back, and then some, and endure it for years to come, just for another week or day or hour or even just a back-and-forth conversation with Ron for a few minutes.

As I said, I do not want to suffer.  Someone wondered if my suffering is somehow for Ron.  Do I believe that Ron wants me to suffer?  No.  Absolutely not.  I am certain he would want me to live on and live fully and experience happiness again, no holds barred on however I may achieve that.  Do I think that the degree of my mourning somehow honors him or is a measure of my love for him?  No, I do not.  No one can understand the depth or breadth of my love for Ron, just as I am only now realizing the full gravity of it myself.  I have not stopped loving Ron.  I am in love . . . at times crazily so . . . with a dead guy.  In love with a person who is unable to reciprocate with me anymore.  And I see no signs of that waning.  So, I will just stay in love with him.  It is the only future I can imagine myself living in.  But, no, this vast, deep, wide, tall, heavy expanse of grief that I feel . . . it does not mirror the amount of love I have for Ron.  They are two separate feelings.  Or at least they seem that way to me right now. 

I don’t suffer for Ron.  I suffer for me.  I suffer because it is what I need to be doing right now.  I suffer because it is where I am at in this grief process.

It has only been two months since Ron stopped breathing.  I am allowed to carry this suffering for as long as I need to.  No one can take it away from me.  No one can make me stop feeling it.  No one can force relief on me.  Not even myself.  It will subside only when I am ready.  Even if I am suffering two or three or ten or twenty or fifty years from now, there can be no intervention.  For how would you, dear reader, intervene?  What method would you even use?  How can you take this away from me?  You cannot.  You simply cannot.  There is nothing you can do to make me suffer less.  Not for as long as I need to feel this very real, bloody, intense, searing, heart-stopping, gut-wrenching, agonizing, pain.  And, for whatever the reason, I do seem to need it.

I might put it away from time to time.  Hide it, so as to fit in with what is as close to social grace as I can muster.  I might be able to have, as I am now in my writing, a very real, logical coherent conversation with you about how I am feeling.  I might put on the face of “functional” and go to my job where, ironically, I talk to people who think they need help from their struggles with (let’s just be honest) far less debilitating thoughts and feelings than those I am experiencing.  I may be able to step outside of myself to celebrate a holiday or a family event and I can usually plaster a smile on my face and maintain conversation for most of it.  The suffering is still there, fiery hot in my belly, trying to burn its way to the surface.  You may not see it, but I can feel it, as I gulp for a cool breath of air, acknowledge it, thank it (for I am sure it is serving some purpose), and tell it to please wait until I can find some alone time in a bathroom or some corner of darkness where I can let my face fall apart and my tears flow momentarily before pulling back into a state of composure.  I may be able to exist in some utilitarian version of me, just long enough to get through whatever meeting we have planned, only to later feel the pain tenfold after having kept it under wraps.  This is a skill I learned early on in my life, though practiced then with much less intense feelings.  It serves me well now, so that I do not lose what little social support I have maintained over these past couple years. 

To those of you who remain my social supports, thank you.  I saw four different women from Friday through Sunday, each of whom listened so patiently and provided me some comfort in their presence and their words and their hope for me (even when I have no hope for myself) that it is not always going to hurt this bad.  Whether you come out to my house or call to check on me or send an email or a text or a card or a letter, please do not stop.  The nights are lonely (and yet I need to be alone) and it helps to know I am not forgotten about. 

One resource I must share is the book Companion Through The Darkness – Inner Dialogues on Grief by Stephanie Ericsson.  Ericsson’s husband died unexpectedly when she was 35 years old and two and a half months pregnant with their child.  Although there are some obvious distinctions to our stories and I do not resonate with everything she writes about, she comes the closest to describing my experience.  As I wade my way through grief handouts and books about living without your loved one, most of the stuff I read sounds like it was written to be helpful to someone else.  In contrast, Ericsson describes my experience in all its grimy, excruciating detail . . . and helps to make sense of it by writing about her initial feelings years later.  I am grateful to my therapist friend, Cathy, for giving me this book (one of the perks of working in the world of mental health is that your friends get mental health and sometimes know what can be healing).  I cannot recommend it enough to anyone who is struggling with grief . . . especially any other widows out there.

Below, I am including an excerpt from Ericsson’s chapter “The Light Goes Out.”  Hopefully, if she ever finds out I have used this here, she will be pleased.  J

DWELLING IN DARKNESS:

The moments when I am healing

by succumbing to the depression.

Few people who have not experienced deep loss can understand the bereaved’s need to suffer.  Suffering is cleansing.  It is necessary.  The isolation is mysteriously helpful and healthy.  How long you must suffer depends on your own internal pain barometer.  There is no prescribed time limit, no recommended allotment of angst.

Our grief is intensely private.  There are no words to describe it, because words dwarf the experience.  The things I said to my late husband in the months and even years after his death were between him and me.  Sometimes, telling someone else is helpful, because talking into darkness is tiring.

Living on after the death of someone you loved is much more difficult than dying.  This is not to shame those who let go and die soon after their spouse.  Proving your strength by living on without fulfillment gives no one a badge of courage.  But some of us have reasons to go on, even though we don’t want to. . . .

For Ericsson, her reason was her unborn daughter.  I am not sure what my reason is.  I wonder about it every day.  I don’t want to exist, and yet I still get up and take a shower and get dressed and walk the dogs and go to work and water Ron’s vegetable gardens and do all the things I have to do in a given day.  I find myself at the end of each day amazed and wondering how I made it through and whether I will make it through another. 

For now, this will have to be enough.  No matter how close I come or how perilously narrow this knife’s edge is that I balance upon, at least I am here . . . still . . . writing again.  This has to be enough, dear readers, for now.  I don’t know what my reason is, but I can say that there must be some innate, survival instinct of a force that lives inside me.  I cannot name it.  A few friends have tried and all the names seem to fit just as much as they don’t fit.  I don’t try to name it, I just know it exists because I experience it, pushing me forward.  I don’t know whether to be grateful for it or to try to smother it out.  For now, I just let it be and wait to see what it does the next day.