I Am a Ten-Month Grief Survivor

January 27, 2011 — Pat Bertram

I mentioned to someone the other day that it’s been ten weeks since the death of my life mate and that I didn’t know how I managed to survive that long, then it hit me. It hasn’t been ten weeks. It’s been ten months. How is it possible to live almost a year with half your heart ripped out? I still don’t know, but I do the only thing I can: live.

After the nine-month mark, I had a respite from grief. I liked the symmetry of nine months of grief (gestation) before being born into a new life, but as happens with grief, the respite was merely that — a respite. A couple of weeks ago, the need to see my mate one more time grew so great it felt as if the yearning would explode from my body like the creature in Alien. The feeling came and went for a while, and now the creature has gone back into hibernation. But still, the yearning lingers.

I’m learning to live with the remnants of my grief. From others who have also borne such a loss, I’ve come to understand this is the next phase of grief — not soul-destroying pain as at the beginning, but blips of varying intensity and frequency. I know I can deal with this new stage of grief because I have been dealing with my grief all along, but still, a part of me rebels at the necessity.

Planning signifies hope and is supposed to be a sign of healing. Strangely (or perhaps not strangely; perhaps it’s to be expected ) every time I make plans, I have an upsurge of grief. Plans take me further away from him and our life. They remind me of similar things we did together, and they tell me that from now on, he won’t be sharing new experiences with me. Still, I am not holding myself back. I need to fill the hole he left behind, and new experiences are one way of doing that.

In the past four months I’ve gone to various art galleries. I’ve seen Mesoamerican antiquities, aristocratic clothing through the ages, local artists, classic art work. I went to a wild life sanctuary where they take care of captive-bred animals that zoos don’t want. I went to the beach. In May, I’ll be going to a writer’s conference where I’ll be a speaker.

All this shows that I’m moving on, and yet . . .

And yet he’s still gone. That goneness is something I struggle with — how can he be dead? I wanted his suffering to be over, so I was relieved when he died, but somehow I never understood how very gone he would be. I don’t want him to be gone, but he’s not coming back, and there is not a damn thing I can do about it.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . 8 Comments »

Authors Who Reject Publishers

January 25, 2011 — Pat Bertram

There’s been a lot of talk recently about traditionally published novelists rejecting their publishers and releasing their books themselves. I can see that these novelists don’t like making a pittance on their books, but it seems churlish to dump the very people that made them a success. Without the publicity departments of those publishing houses behind them, there is little chance that these authors would have ever attained their current popularity. If you are one among millions of unknown writers trying to sell your book to an unaware reading public, it doesn’t matter if your book is stellar. It cannot shine without readers.

Many authors have the idea that wonderful books will always find a readership. Once that might have been true, but in today’s book world, where anyone with a computer and bit of time on their hands can write a novel (sometimes in only a few weeks, including editing — yikes) the sheer numbers of available books can keep even a great book from rising above the flotsam.

Interestingly enough, only a couple of these once traditionally published authors wrote truly original novels. If the rest had to make their own way in the ocean of ebooks and self-published books, they would have not have found much of a readership. The major publishers want what I call blue-jeans books — books that are made from the same fabric as all the others in a genre but with a slightly different styling. They don’t want anything too original because it is hard to sell. (I had several editors tell me they loved Light Bringer, my latest novel, which will be released by Second Wind Publishing this March, but they turned it down because they didn’t know how to sell it.) The blue jeans quality that makes books acceptable to editors of major publishing houses is the very quality that makes them unremarkable in the self-publishing or independent publishing world.

I don’t have much use for the traditional publishers, so I don’t really care that these authors are shunning them, but it does give new writers a false idea of can be accomplished by going it alone. The very fact that these authors are dumping their publishers is news. Publicity, in other words. And it’s only newsworthy because readers know their names. And readers know their names because the authors had the benefit of a big corporation’s publicity department.

I might have been unaware of the situation, but one of these authors contacted me via Goodreads, asking me to be part of a promotional effort. He wrote that he’d send me (along with hundreds of others) an ebook if I promised to write a review and post it on a given date. I turned him down. I don’t like his books, and I don’t like being told when to post a review. Not that I would — I still have not learned the art of reviewing books. And if I did do reviews, I’d post reviews of books released by small, independent publishers. The point is, he sent me the ebook anyway. A story about vampires. Sheesh. Still doing the old blue-jeans dance.

I purposely did not mention any names in this bloggery since I don’t want to help promote the authors. And anyway, it doesn’t matter who they are. I certainly don’t care, and there’s a chance in the not-too-distant future no one else will either.

Posted in books, culture, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Dear (Deleted) — Conversation With a Marketing Expert

January 24, 2011 — Pat Bertram

One of my blogs is Book Marketing Floozy, a compendium of articles I collected to help authors learn how to market their books. Every time I see good information, I ask the writer for permission to post their article on the blog. (If you’ve written an article about some facet of book marketing, please let me know. I’ll be glad to post it on the site.) The articles all credit the writers and provide whatever links the writers wish. It’s one of my efforts to help promote other authors.

A month ago, a promoter contacted me asking for my help in promotion. This promoter owns a word of mouth marketing company that connects businesses with consumers and consumers with businesses. I thought you might appreciate the irony of our emailed conversation. I’ve deleted names to protect . . . me.

Dec. 27 — Pat, Your website & blog came across my search today — excellent recommendations on here for a niche marketing in the literary world!  How long have you been blogging?

I was curious to know if you might be interested in linking to an online degree program. I work in affiliation with (deleted) College and I wanted to make a recommendation to include the (deleted) College Marketing Management degree in your link list.

***

Dec. 30 — Dear (Deleted): thank you for your interest in Book Marketing Floozy. I’ve been blogging for three years, and Floozy is just one of the blogs I run (though it isn’t a blog so much as a resource — I post articles sporadically, and most are written by other authors.)

If you’d like to write an article for me to post on the site about some facet of marketing, I’ll be glad to include any links you want. The only condition is that the article has to be informative and helpful — a how-to — rather than simply self-promotion. –Pat

***

Jan 5 — Pat, We can certainly provide some content for a post.  If that’s the case, ideally would like to provide a link in the post content as well as have a sidebar text link on your homepage or blogroll.  Is this possible? Let me know your thoughts. When would this post?

***

Jan 5 –Dear (Deleted), I can give you whatever links you want in the content, but I don’t have a blogroll on that site, just a list of my blogs.

If the content is acceptable (helpful rather than self-promoting) I can post it whenever you want me to. –Pat

***

(Jan 20) Pat, Apologies for the delay in responding:

Attached is good solid information about the course program we discussed.  It’s factual, so hopefully this is acceptable for your blog.

(What she sent was a list of courses along with a list of possible careers.)

***

Jan 20 — Dear (Deleted), I’m sorry, I didn’t make myself clear. The article has to be a how-to of some facet of promoting. I will then include links for people to get further information about your program. What you sent me is nothing more than an advertisement. Free promotion for you. Book Marketing Floozy is (at least up front) a compendium of articles to help people learn about promotion. The back end, of course, is promotion for you, but you have to give them something to attract their interest. –Pat

***

Jan 21 — Pat, Below is an informational document about a career in Marketing.  Let me know your thoughts on this – hopefully this is something you can incorporate into your blog!

(This time she sent an expanded version of the course syllabus, explaining the career paths that will be open to students once they have their degree. A very expensive degree, I might add — tens of thousands of dollars in tuition.)

***

Jan 21 — Dear (Deleted), This article is still a promotion for your program. It doesn’t tell the blog readers how to market their books. That is the whole point of Book Marketing Floozy. To tell people how to do some facet of promotion. Once they see the wisdom in your how-to article, they might click on information about your program, but you have to give them something to get something. You of all people should know that.

Please read the articles at book marketing floozy to see what I mean. http://bookmarketingfloozy.wordpress.com. I really would like to help you, but Marketing Floozy is a compendium of how-to articles. –Pat

***

Jan 24 — Pat, Thanks for the opportunity of posting on your website.  However, the whole point of us placing a link is for some type of promotion.  The article was written with the intent of being informational about various marketing careers. We will pass on this opportunity then.  Best wishes to you in the new year!

***

That was the end of the conversation.

So, there you have it: a marketing company trying to promote a marketing program on Book Marketing Floozy, and the marketer hadn’t a clue what I was talking about. But then, maybe I’m the one who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

Posted in blogging, culture, internet. Tags: , , , , , , . 7 Comments »

Building Hopes and Creating Dreams

January 1, 2011 — Pat Bertram

And so ends the worst year of my life.

Last year was a time of soul-shattering loss, grief, and strange blessings. It was a time of despair and self-realization, transition and adjustment. But of course, you know all that — I’ve made no secret of my ordeal, chronicling every painful stage of my journey. Many people endure worse traumas than the death of a soul mate, and they continue living without whimpering, which has made me feel a bit self-indulgent and whiny with my grief bloggeries, yet that was never my intention. The impact of grief after a major loss seems to be one more thing that has been discounted in our discount culture, and I simply wanted to tell the truth.

Oddly, I still don’t know the truth of it. It seems unreal at times. Was I really that woman? That woman who watched a man slowly die, who wanted the suffering to end, yet whose love was so ineffectual she couldn’t make him well or take away a single moment of his pain? That woman so connected to another human being she still feels broken nine months after his death? That woman who screamed the pain of her loss to the winds?

I’ve always considered myself a passionless woman, so how can that woman be me? During periods when I don’t feel the weight of his absence (I never feel his presence, though sometimes his absence feels normal, as if he’s simply in another room), during periods of emotional calm, my stoic side rules, making my grief feel fake, as if it’s something I’m doing to make myself seem important. Yet other times the desperate need to go home to him, to see him one more time, claws at me, tearing me apart.

Making the situation even more unreal, I can barely remember what he looked like — I do not think in images, so it’s understandable (though distressing) that I have no clear image of him in my mind. Even worse, I don’t have a photo that matches what I remember of him. (The only one I have was taken fifteen years ago.)

Nor do I have a clear sense of time. Sometimes it feels as if he died just a couple of months ago. Sometimes it feels like years. The demarcation between our shared life and my solitary life was once so stark it was like the edge of a cliff. All I could see was the past and what I had lost. The living I have done in the past nine months has blurred that edge, adding to the sense of unreality.

I have learned much this year. I learned the importance of importance. If there is nothing of importance in your life, you have to find something and make it important. I learned the importance of goals, even if it’s only the goal of getting through one more day. I learned the importance of hope, though hope for what I still don’t know, but that is part of the journey – building hopes, creating dreams, finding reasons to live.

And so begins a new year.

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I Am a Nine-Month Grief Survivor

December 26, 2010 — Pat Bertram

Thirty-four years ago, I walked into a health food store, and my world was never the same. It wasn’t love at first sight, this first time I saw the man with whom I would share more than three decades of my life. It was a primal recognition. Something deep inside me, something beneath consciousness, wailed, “But I don’t even like men with blond hair and brown eyes.”

I had no expectation of ever spending my life with this radiantly wise and intelligent man. It was enough to know he was alive. The world, which had seemed so inhospitable, became a place of hope and possibilities simply because he lived. Over the months our connection grew, and gradually our lives became entwined.

It confused us at times, our connection. Neither of us were particularly romantic, and we didn’t bring each other fairy-tale happiness. But we were together, and in the end, as at the beginning, being together was all that mattered.

But we aren’t together any more. Nine months ago, he died. And my world will never be the same.

I am doing okay — can even go for a week or two at a time without a major grief attack — but I still feel as if parts of me are missing. Grief shattered me, and I’ve put the pieces back together as best as I can despite those missing pieces. I now get glimpses of hope, of possibilities, of building a new life for myself. I know  there will be times of overwhelming grief and times of peace, times of sorrow and times of gladness. But he isn’t here to share those times. That I cannot comprehend.

Until I became one of the bereft, I thought grief was self-centered and self-pitying, and there is some truth to that. I do feel sorry for myself at times, but mostly I struggle to comprehend the meaning of our connected lives, his dying, and my continued life. I struggle to accept that while (perhaps) there is a second chance of happiness for me in this life, there is none for him. I struggle to understand his goneness. Sometimes the need to go home to him overwhelms me, and I have to learn — again — that his being gone from this life means I can never go home. He was my home. Someday I might learn to find “home” within myself, but until then, I am adrift in a world that once again feels inhospitable.

During those first days and weeks of struggling to survive grief, I kept screaming to myself, “I can’t do this.” I still feel like screaming those words occasionally, but I have learned that yes, I can survive this, because I have. And I will continue to survive.

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The Gift of Possibilities

December 19, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I have been given a very special and unwelcome gift this year — the gift of possibilities.

Thirty-eight weeks ago my life mate — my soulmate — died. During the previous few years, the constraints of his illness bound our lives, and it felt as if we were doomed to an eternity of decreasing possibilities. Every day he became weaker, could do less, had fewer options. We could not plan for our future, knowing each day was all he might have. We could not even spend much time together — it took all his strength and concentration just to make it through another hour.

And so we lived. Waited.

His death brought enormous changes to my life, but during these months of grief, I have focused on the  impossibilities. It is impossible for him to come back to me and it’s impossible for me go home to him. It’s impossible for us ever to have another conversation, watch a movie, play a game, take a trip, start over in a new location as we so often did during our decades together. It’s impossible for me to stop missing him, impossible to conceive of living in a world from which he is absent. It’s been impossible, too, to concede that perhaps my life could be easier without him. What difference does that make when our being together was all that ever mattered to me?

And yet, and yet . . .

I am getting glimmers of myself now, myself alone. I no longer have the financial and emotional burden of his illness. I am no longer weighted down by my own grief, though it is still a part of me, and probably always will be.

I still feel as if I am waiting, but I’m beginning to feel as if I’m waiting for something rather than simply waiting, though I don’t know what I am waiting for. I do know that — slowly — the world of possibility is opening up to me again. I might not be able to do whatever I want — people are so wrong when they say anything is possible — but many things are probable when you’ve been given the gift of possibilities.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , , . 9 Comments »

Letting It Be

December 11, 2010 — Pat Bertram

My previous post chronicled my thought processes as I watched the video “Let It Be” that is making the rounds. As I said in that bloggery, At first I thought that perhaps this was the answer to my confusion over the death of my mate of thirty-four years. Just go on with my life and let it be. Forget my grief. Forget the pain of losing him. Forget trying to make sense of it all. Just . . . let it be.

When I first wrote that a few days ago, something in me let loose, and though I claimed I did not want to let it be (whatever it is) I haven’t been the same since. At least not exactly the same. I still had my usual Saturday upsurge of grief (preceded by a late night — I don’t seem to be able to go to sleep until after 1:40 am on Friday night, the time of his death) but I felt sad rather than soul-broken. I’ve even had a few moments when I could actually feel glimmers of life.

I can’t forget my grief or the pain of losing him, though both are slowly diminishing. And I can’t stop trying to make sense of my life. That’s who I am and always will be — a truth seeker. But I can let go of trying to make sense of his life.

It has haunted me all these months — the dual vision of the young radiant man he was when we met and the skin-covered skeleton he’d become. Were all those years of illness worth living? He was often in pain and wanted to be done with life, yet he kept striving to live until the very end. I remember those last years, months, days, and I still cry for him and his doomed efforts. But he doesn’t need those tears. His ordeal only lives in my memory. And that is what I am letting be. It is not for me to make sense of his life or his death. It is not for me to keep suffering for him now that he is gone.

A fortune cookie I read the other day said, “Cleaning up the past will always clear up the future.” Much of my grief has been about cleaning up the past — coming to terms with small every day betrayals, with dreams that never came true, with leftover worries. I have cleaned up the past, gradually worked through those conundrums. What is left is the habit of dwelling on the past, and that I can let be. It does neither of us any good.

Will it clear up the future for me? Perhaps. At the very least, it will help me face the future. Whatever that might be.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , . 9 Comments »

Let It Be . . . Me

December 6, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I know you’ve seen the video, everyone has. It’s been emailed and remailed, Facebooked and Twittered, blogged and Gathered, clogging cyberspace with the message: Let It Be. At first I thought that perhaps this was the answer to my confusion over the death of my mate of thirty-four years. Just go on with my life and let it be. Forget my grief. Forget the pain of losing him. Forget trying to make sense of it all. Just . . . let it be.

My second thought as I continued watching this very looooong and repetitive song (Sheesh! What was Paul McCartney thinking when he wrote it? Not much, apparently) was how my mate would have enjoyed seeing all those faces as they are today. We have so many of them in his movie collection, and they are always that age, the one they’d reached when they made that particular movie (such as a much younger Sherilyn Fenn in The Don’s Analyst or a very young and fit Steve Guttenberg in Surrender).

My third thought was let what be what? And that’s where the thoughts stalled — in a semantics word jam.

I finished watching the video, thinking nothing, just watching the parade of faces, but now I’m wondering if Let it Be is really a philosophy I want to embrace. It seems too accepting of life’s vagaries and not enough of . . . well, embracing.

The whole purpose of going through grief is to process the pain and the loss, to mend your shattered life and heart so that one day you can embrace life in its entirety once again. I haven’t dealt with all these months of tears, anger, frustration, emptiness, loneliness, pain, just to spend the rest of my life letting it be. I want to let it be me —  the one who’s strong enough not to have to simply let it be.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , . 9 Comments »

Grief: Loose Cannon on Deck

December 2, 2010 — Pat Bertram

A loose cannon conjures images of a weapon wildly firing in all directions, but it actually refers to a cannon on the deck of a ship. Cannons needed to be lashed down, but in turbulent waters, cannons sometimes came loose and rolled around the deck. Their great weight (some weighed as much as 1800 lbs!) made those loose cannons a dangerous liability and they could crush a hapless sailor who got in the way.

That’s exactly the way grief feels. Every time you feel as if you’re getting a solid footing despite the turbulence of your new life, whack! That cannon comes loose and crushes you again.

It would be so much easier if the so-called stages of grief were actually stages that you can check off after you’ve experienced it. Denial. Check. Pain. Check. Anger. Check. Depression. Check. Acceptance. Check.

All done, right?

Wrong!

After you’ve gone through the list, there it comes again, the pain or the anger or the disbelief that he is gone, and you have to do it all over again. Add to that the innumerable stages that aren’t commonly known such as isolation, anxiety, low self-esteem, confusion, panic, frustration, hopelessness, loneliness, bitterness, missing the person, fretfulness, hanging on, waiting for you know not what, and dozens of others. Not everyone who has experienced a significant loss goes through all the stages, but no matter what, we’ve all felt that loose cannon and wish we could just tie the dang thing up and get on with our lives.

So we do.

And then, comes another storm, there’s that loose cannon again.

Can you sense the pettishness of my tone? Must be another stage I’ve never heard of. Well, check this one off, too.

Posted in blogging, culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . 4 Comments »

Owing His Memory?

November 30, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I found this paragraph in a book I read recently, and it’s a graphic example of why I want to write a novel about a grieving woman — so few understand the nature of grief:

Jean-Pierre was gone; nothing could bring him back, and her feelings for him, feelings that had risen suddenly, had been ebbing just as quickly as evidence of his involvement with illegal drugs had surfaced. If Jean really had been running drugs, she owed his memory nothing.

Owed his memory? What does that mean? This example seems to have been written by a person who knows little of grief. In all these months of steeping in the world of grief, I have not heard a single person mention owing the dead person’s memory anything.  Memories are all we have left and we treasure them, but we also know that memory is not a living creature to whom we must pay homage. We might feel obligations to those who are gone, obligations such as honoring their wishes as to funerals and disbursement of treasured possessions, but we fulfill those obligations out of love and because we find comfort and continuity in still being able to do things for our loved ones. But owing the memory we have of the person? Doesn’t even make sense.

We bereft are all struggling to find a way to live with the hole in our lives, with the ongoing sadness, with the reality that grief is an unending (though perhaps diminishing) journey. No griever I have met has said, “Wait! I can’t be happy. I owe too much to his memory.” Grieving is a process, something we do, something that happens to us, but it is seldom the choice that is hinted at in the above example. Quite frankly, we are all sick of grieving, of being sad, but the only way not to be sad is to have our loved ones back with us, and since that is impossible in this world, we continue on as best as we can with our shattered lives. But we owe that to ourselves, not to his memory.

Posted in culture, grief, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . 3 Comments »
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