How I survived - finding me!

How I survived – Finding me!

I’m the first to admit it – Even almost ten years after he left my sight, I’m still a train wreck.  Not to take away from anyone that lost someone in a train wreck, but I am still a mess.  I’m not saying there aren’t good days.  I do have a few, now and again.  But for the whole of it – I still have moments where I feel utterly lost! 

I go thru my days on auto pilot, forcing myself without question to push thru another second of life.  I always feel like better days are just around the bend.  Trust me – if I didn’t believe that with all my heart, I would have given up long ago. 

I loved being “in love”! I loved everything about it.  I cherished being able to care for my husband, to cook, clean, make his sweet tea, and just love him.  He was my best friend!  So how do you go on after the person you love best, leaves you? 

Well since everyone’s grief is different, there is no tried and true method for me to share with you, as much as I would like to!  But I can tell you a few tricks I learned along this rocky path. 

The first is to laugh!  Life is way to important to be taken seriously.  The bottom line is the same for all of us.  We are here one day and then gone the next.  There is no magical pill you can take that will allow you to hang around in your pjs forever, there just isn’t! So, find something – anything to laugh about!  I know people thought our family was strange, even during the worse of the cancer battle, we found laughter in the strangest of places.  We laughed at my husband’s antics when he was losing his memory, once the cancer had spread to his brain.  We laughed at the color of his chemo they put in his IV.  The kids and I even laughed moments after he passed about something silly he had said in the past few months.  Why?  Not because we were heartless, but because we chose to find the happy thru the sad.  A lot of people misunderstand it, and I feel sad for them. 

The second is to let it be whatever it is!  Try not to make this one harder than it is.  It isn’t a riddle!  We decided early in the diagnosis that we were going to do things this way.  Instead of pretending we were fine or trying to act tough, we agreed to just BE!  In simpler terms – if we were pissed off that day, we were allowed.  If we were sad that day – it was okay.  If we needed to fall apart – then by all means, we fell apart!  It was so freeing to not have to be something we weren’t, to not have to make excuses for tears or broken dishes (yep, I threw a few).  My husband allowed me to be scared that he was leaving, and he did this while he was still around to make me stronger.  So, just for the sake of argument, give it a try!  Just take one day and just be!  

The third may not be as enlightening to everyone as it was for me.  When you trying to get your bearings after a sizeable loss of someone you love, just remember you are not out there looking for that person, as some people might think you are.  I know people use the words “I lost a spouse,” but you didn’t really lose them.  It’s not like you were at the mall and they went to a store you didn’t know about.   They aren’t out there somewhere waiting for you to find them. 

I had a close friend of my husbands tell me that I needed to wait to date until, as he put it “the memories quiet down,”.  Really? Why?  This man who had never really “lost” anyone was going to tell me to wait till the memories quiet down.  I was married for twenty-three years – over half my life at that point.  I didn’t want the memories to quiet down, I didn’t want them to fade, however I didn’t want to be lonely either.  But I think what hurt worse was that he told me he was worried about me because I seemed to be out there looking for my late husband. 

Here I thought I had been doing good.  I had even ventured to be proud of myself!  Now, I felt devasted.  Was that really what I had been doing?  Was I looking for my deceased husband? 

After weeks of these words haunting me day and night, a light dawned!  I realized, in a flash of a moment, that he was wrong.  He was very wrong!  I wasn’t looking for him – I was looking for me, without him!  It was a revelation that I won’t soon forget, and it is one of those moments that I still look back on and find comfort in.   Even though finding myself is probably an even larger task than finding my late husband, it was still reassuring to me to know that I was, at least, out in the world trying to find me! 

The fourth is to not swallow the whole pill in one gulp.  Okay, this one is sort of a riddle.  In a nutshell, this one means, you do not have to handle everything in one second – you only “have to” handle one second!  I’ve never been told anything in life more profound than this one thing!  My oldest daughter and I were driving to town to go to the funeral home the day after my husband passed away.  I had gotten up early to go in because I had promised him, I wouldn’t let them keep him in the frig any longer than I had to.  Funny part here – he died late at night so there was no way to transport him to the place he was to be cremated – so they had to put him the frig till morning.  Yep, I’m sure, if it was possible, he was bugged by that.  So, while she was driving me to town, we started talking.  Actually, I started crying! I didn’t know how to do any of this.  I didn’t know how to live without him.  I didn’t know how to take care of things without him.  I was frantic and petrified.  She calmly pulled the car over, took my hand and said “momma, you don’t have to do it all right this second!”  “You don’t even have to know how to do it all right this second.”  “All you have to do “this second”, is take a breath!”  She asked me if I could do that? I shook my head yes as the tears streamed down my face. 

All I had to do was handle one second – just one second!  It got me thru the next few hours with the funeral home and it even got me thru the last ten years without him.  When things get hard, or scary, or confusing, I stop and take a breath and ask myself, “am I okay in this one second of time?” 

Trust me, I’ve had to take a bunch of seconds – one second at a time!  However, the point – my friend- is this….. it got me thru time!  It helped me to survive something I never dreamed I could survive.   I’d like to think he is up there somewhere and he is proud of all I have done since he left us, but I think the bigger point is, I’m proud of me!