I Am an Eight-Month Grief Survivor

November 27, 2010 — Pat Bertram

When you love someone deeply, their well-being is as important to you as your own, but what do you do with that feeling when your someone is gone? Eight months ago, my life mate died, and now he has no need for stories to amuse or outrage him, no need for tasty meals to tempt his appetite, no need for comfort or caring or kindness, and yet my habit of thinking of him remains. Eventually, I imagine, the habit will wear itself out, but for now I still find myself thinking of ways to make his life a bit easier or a bit more enjoyable.

After eight months, I am still in . . . not shock, exactly, but a state of non-comprehension. I can’t comprehend his death, his sheer goneness. I can’t comprehend his life, though perhaps that is not for me to bother about. Most of all, I can’t comprehend my sorrow. I never saw much reason for grief. Someone died, you moved on. Period. I thought I was too stoic, too practical to mourn, and yet, here I am, still grieving for someone who has no need for my sorrow.

Despite my continued grief, I am moving on. My sporadic tears do not stop me from accomplishing the goals I set myself, such as NaNoWriMo and daily walks. My sorrow doesn’t keep me from taking care of myself — or mostly taking care of myself. (I don’t always eat right, and I don’t always sleep well.) Moving on, as I have learned, is not about abandoning one’s grief, but moving on despite the grief.

Grief is much gentler on me now, and I can sidestep it by turning my mind to other things, but I don’t always want to. I have not yet reached the point where thoughts of him bring me only happiness, and I need to remember him. If tears and pain are still part of that remembrance, so be it.

We shared our lives, our thoughts, our words — we talked about everything, often from morning to night — yet even before he died, we started going separate ways, he toward his death, me toward continued life. I often wonder what he would think of my grief, but just as his life is not for me to try to comprehend, my grief does not belong to him. It is mine alone.

And so the months pass, eight now. Soon it will be a year. Sometimes it feels as if he died only days ago, and I expect him to call and tell me I can come home — I’ve proven that I can live without him, so I don’t have to continue to do so. Sometimes it feels as if he’s been gone forever, that our life together wasn’t real, perhaps something I conjured up out of the depths of my loneliness. Sometimes my grief doesn’t even feel real, and I worry that I’ve created it out of a misguided need for self-importance. Such are the ways of grief, this strange and magical thinking. This could be magical thinking, too, but it seems to me that having survived eight months of grief, I can survive anything.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.

Posted in culture, grief, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , . 18 Comments »

Grateful Even in Grief

November 24, 2010 — Pat Bertram

Mairead Walpole, author of A Love Out of Time posted an article on the Second Wind Publishing Blog entitled “Thanksgiving: A holiday or the trigger for the countdown to Christmas?” I read the article more for her observations than because of an interest in the holidays, thinking I had nothing for which to be grateful, then it struck me how wrong I was. I have a lot to be grateful for despite my continued (though much gentler) grief.

I am thankful I have a place to sleep, food to eat, desert trails to walk, books to read, words to write.

I am thankful for the people who have entered my life to give me support during this bleak time.

I am thankful I had my life mate to love and care for.

I am thankful my life mate loved and cared for me.

I am thankful for the emotional security offered by our relationship, which gave me the freedom to try new things.

I am thankful he shared his life — and his death — with me.

I am thankful for our added closeness at the end.

I am thankful he is no longer suffering.

I am thankful he didn’t linger as a helpless invalid. He dreaded that. 

I am thankful for his legacy. He faced his death with such courage that he gave me the courage to face my life.

I am even thankful for my grief. It reminds me that he shared part of this journey called life with me, and it is helping me become the person I need to be to continue my journey alone.

So, this Thanksgiving, I am grateful even in grief.

Posted in culture, grief, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , . 19 Comments »

Tell Them Pat Sent You

November 22, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I am doing NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), which is why I am temporarily back to blogging the way I started out — a post a day. It’s been fun; I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed blogging. I started this blog soon after I hooked up to the internet because I heard that all authors should have a blog as the foundation for promotion. I hadn’t a clue what a blog was, hadn’t any idea what blog platform to use, but wordpress seemed intuitive to me, and so I signed up — a bit timidly, I admit. That timidity didn’t last long. I took to blogging like a frog to a bog, and never looked back.

The fun of blogging comes in saying whatever you wish, but the most fun is saying something that touches people enough that you get comments and have conversations. Thank you, everyone, for making this such a great experience.

A special thank you to frequent commenters: Carol Ann Hoel, Malcolm R. Campbell, Carol J. Garvin, Sheila Deeth, Joylene Nowell Butler, Leesis. Not only have they helped me through a very dark time in my life, which is reason enough to salute them, they all have wonderful blogs of their own. Clicking on their names will take you to those blogs. If you leave a comment, tell them Pat sent you.

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There’s Plenty of Grief to Spread Around

November 18, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I’m participating in NaNoWriMo, trying to find a new way and new reason to write now that my life has been turned upside down. I never liked wasting my writing — I liked to think that whatever scene I wrote had a place in the story. Writing comes hard for me (even when I’m playing the quantity game rather than the quality one) so writing for writing’s sake was never on my agenda.

This month, though, is all about the words, so it doesn’t matter whether the scene works or not. It doesn’t even matter if I scrap most of the book. It’s important just to write something so that when it comes time to put the story together, I will have bits and pieces to work with.

I always knew the mother and daughter in my story didn’t get along. The mother needs someone who will argue with her, someone who has no sympathy for her grief. I’ve been assuming that the daughter found out about her mother’s cyber affair and accused the mother of being a hypocrite, and that is how I wrote the scene. Now I know that when it comes to grief, there’s enough strife to spread around, so I could probably leave the daughter in the dark about the affair.

Real mothers and daughters (not just storybook mothers and daughters) don’t see eye to eye when it comes to grief. Daughters often feel as if their mothers are carrying on too much, since grown children may come to terms with their loss easier than spouses do. Grown daughters often feel as if they’ve lost both parents when the mother becomes steeped in sorrow. Sometimes the conflict goes the other way, with the mother feeling estranged from the daughter especially if the daugher did not visit the sick father very often. (Not everyone can handle seeing a person dying slowly and in great agony and would prefer to remember the person as healthy and vital.) 

Grief should bring families together, but often it tears them apart. All that anger surfacing. The denial. The recriminations and guilt. Not everyone goes through the stages of grief in the same order. Nor do they go through them at the same time or with the same intensity.

With so much emotion to deal with, it does seem as if the daughter doesn’t need to know about the affair. In fact, I’d just as soon she didn’t come to visit her father while he was dying, at least not toward the end. A friend of the mother’s stopped calling too, which left her to deal with her dying husband without much of a support group. Which is why she had to find it online. Which is where she found her cyberlover.

If the daughter doesn’t know, though, I’m not sure how the mother will explain to the daughter why she’s taking off to meet the guy, but maybe the estrangement between the mother and daughter is such that no explanation is necessary. I’ll guess I’ll have to wait to see what happens when I finish the book.

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Ready or Not, Change is Coming Your Way

November 17, 2010 — Pat Bertram

Most of my internet hangouts and hang-ups (meaning obstacles to smooth progress for those of you who are too young or too erudite to be familiar with the term) are going through massive changes. I checked in with MySpace (one of the aforesaid hang-ups — it never seemed to be worth the effort) and didn’t have a clue where I was or what I could or should do once I arrived. I did like some of the changes — it’s easier to find things, but the constant barrage of ads is enough to give one a headache. Still, it might have possibilities, though many long-time MySpace fans seem to be abandoning the site. They say Facebook is easier.

Facebook itself is going through major changes. Not only did they revamp the group feature, which will eventually undo everything I have accomplished on the site, it makes it virtually impossible to keep control of your identity. Anyone can add you to a group without your consent, and that means that their friends and the friends of their friends have access to your information. For me, that’s not a problem. I go by the assumption that everyone in the world will see what I post on the site, and so only post what I want people to see. So far, no one seems overly impressed.

Facebook is unveiling a new message system, which supposedly combines email, facebook messaging, instant messaging, and texting, which means you can interface with anyone, anytime, anywhere. Quite frankly, I have a hard enough time keeping track of the people I am connected to. Most of them I’ve never met, so gradually I’m checking them all, and weaning out those I would never, could never be friends with. Perhaps a page, with it’s unlimited number of potential fans, replaces the facebook profile, but so far I don’t see the point. I do have a fan page, but haven’t figured  out how to make it work for me. Maybe frequent status updates? Or even unfreqent ones?  I do know sending an update (a type of message, not a status update) does not work. No one reads them. Or at least very few. How do I know? I sent out a coupon for a free ebook and to over 1400 fans and only three people took advantage of it. Of course, that could be me — maybe none of my fans want a free ebook. In which case, I’m back to wondering why I even have a Facebook fan page.

WordPress is undergoing changes. They retired the theme I used when I set up the Second Wind Blog. Perhaps the new one will work. I’d like to add book covers to the sidebar to make it more like a website and offer visual-oriented people something to look at besides the header, and the new theme has an extra sidebar. My main problem with the change is what it portends. I did not know Wordpress retired old themes. What if they retire the theme I use for my many blogs? I always liked the color variations I created (green, blue, purple, red, orange) and I would not be pleased with a forced change. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen another blog that uses this theme, which I always thought was wonderful since I could be unique. But unique means obsolete in cyberspace. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

Twitter is also making changes. I like my twitter profile, and even left space for my fourth book, Light Bringer, which will be coming out in the spring of 2011, but now twitter has added more features, the main section where the tweets show up is off-center (I prefer my main reading pane to be smack-dab in the center of the screen), and my custom made screen is defunct.

The friends I’ve made online remains the best thing about the internet. I’m hoping that will never change.

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Grief: Denying Denial

November 16, 2010 — Pat Bertram

I never really had a choice about feeling my grief. It wasn’t so much that I embraced it, but that it embraced me. It took hold of my life and didn’t let go, though it is easing enough so that I am able to see the process for what it is.

People talk about denial as if it’s a bad thing. If I’d been able to deny grief and just go on living as if my mate of thirty-four years hadn’t died, I’d probably have done so. Grief is debilitating, disorienting, causes innumerable physical and emotional reactions, makes one susceptible to cancer, accidents, and other closer-to-death encounters and on top of that, it’s just downright painful.

So why deny denial? Because in the end, it’s better to embrace grief, to learn to live with the pain (which does diminish, though according to comments left on this blog from others who have also lost their mates, it never goes away completely. It can resurface even years later). By embracing grief, by learning how to cope with it, you can learn how to feel deeply again, look forward to the future, and embrace life. This in no way negates your loss, but allows you to honor his death with your life.

Another reason to deny denial is that grief will affect you whether you embrace it or not, but the effects of denied grief are not overt ones such as crying, eating too much or too little, sleeping too much or too little, feeling as if you’ve been kicked in the gut, feeling as if half your heart is missing. Instead, grief that goes underground can create in you long-term problems, including the symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder. Two friends — both of whom lost their husbands a few month ago, both of whom are deluged with family and family obligations that give them no time to grieve  — were diagnosed with PTSD after days of internal quivering that only responded to drugs. They do not have time to spare for grief, but grief is not sparing them.

Grief is stressful, which is why crying, screaming, beating up on defenseless sofas are necessary — they help relieve that pent-up stress. You can go into denial and hold grief in, but it’s like holding in your stomach for years on end — you can never think of anything else but your stomach. If you hold yourself tightly against memories, dreams, unexpected encounters with photos, you have no time for living. Perhaps you don’t see a purpose for living now, but if you do your grief work (and grief is work, there’s no doubt about that) chances are you will regain your desire to live. You might even be able to love fully again, and that means risking more pain, but after dealing with your grief, you will be strong enough to accept the risk.

At least, that’s the way I’ve interpreted the grief process. You might see different reasons for either denying grief or denying denial.

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Grief: All Things Considered . . .

November 14, 2010 — Pat Bertram

Another Saturday gone, thirty-three of them since my life mate died. Saturday — his death day — always makes me sad. Even if I’m not consciously aware of the day, my body still reacts, as if it’s been marking the passing weeks. For some reason grief hit me hard this past Saturday. Perhaps it was the lovely weather we’ve been having, weather he will never enjoy. Perhaps it was the homesickness for him that has been growing in me again. Perhaps it was just time for another bout of tears to relieve the growing tension of dealing with his absence. Grief doesn’t need a reason, though. Grief has an agenda of its own and comes when it wishes.

I’ve been mostly doing okay, moving on with my life — walking in the desert, writing, blogging and doing various internet activities, making friends both online and offline — but nothing, not even my hard-won acceptance changes the fact that he is dead. At times I still have trouble understanding his sheer goneness. My mind doesn’t seem to be able to make that leap, though I am getting used to his not being around. I don’t like it, but I am getting used to it. Maybe that’s the best I will ever be able to do.

Someone asked me the other day how I was doing. “I’m doing okay all things considered,” I responded. His witty and wise response: “Then don’t consider all things.”

I’ve been taking his advice, and trying not to consider all things — trying to consider just enough to get through the day, especially on Saturday.

I don’t expect much of myself on Saturdays. Often, I spend the afternoon and evening watching movies my life mate taped for us. It makes me feel as if we are together, if only for a few brief delusional minutes. I try not to consider that he’ll never watch his tapes again. I try not to consider the long lonely years stretching before me. I try not to consider that I’ll never see his smile again, or hear his laugh. I concentrate on the movies, and so Saturday passes.

By Sunday, I usually regain a modicum of equanimity, but Saturday always comes around again.

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Desert Revelation

November 7, 2010 — Pat Bertram

While walking in the desert this morning, I had a vision. Well, not a vision so much as a revelation.

I’d been thinking about my grieving woman novel, which is shaping up to be the story of a woman in search of herself. She is directionless after her loss, has a lot of unfinished business to take care of, and is trying to figure out who she is now that she is no longer a wife. I wondered if people would accept that this woman is finding out all sorts of things about herself that she didn’t know — after all, a person in her early fifties should have some idea of who she is.

Then I realized that even if we have a strong identity and know almost everything there is to know about ourselves, it’s still possible and perhaps necessary to revise our self-concept, especially after going through a trauma such as a major loss.

I saw that our psyches are like nesting dolls or boxes within boxes or doors within doors (choose your cliché). You never see the doors, so you think you know who you are, but a great emotional upheaval can cause a door to open, letting you see more of yourself and what you are capable of, revealing a part of your identity that might have been hidden from you until that moment.

You get to know who you now are, adding to or changing your idea of yourself, rethinking the past in light of this new awareness. You get comfortable with this revised self-concept and then BAM! More trauma, and another door. You never have to go through the door, of course, but if you do, you might find riches of which you were unaware.

What can I say? It was the desert. Wandering in the desert is traditionally a place for both sun-induced absurdities and great insights.

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How to Respond to “How Are You?”

November 3, 2010 — Pat Bertram

A month or so ago, a Facebook friend, another woman who lost her mate, suggested I write a blog on what to say when people ask a griever, “How are you?” When I first realized that people were losing interest in my sad tale, I asked a bereavement counselor that very question. She said a good response is, “I’m coping,” which is the response I used for a few months. Now I just say, “I’m okay.” Even if I’m not okay, I tell people I’m okay. Or if I’m being polite, I say, “I’m fine, how are you?” There is nothing wrong with that — it’s a rote response to a rote question. Most people who ask how you are do not especially want to know. It’s an accepted conversation starter, a way for people to show token interest so they can move on to more exciting topics — themselves, for example.

Someone who comes back at you with, “No, really, how are you?” is someone who deserves no response at all, especially if they add, “this is me, remember?” If they need to remind you who they are, you don’t know them well enough to tell the truth. Besides, if you wanted to tell the person how you really were, you would have already done so.

People who truly care will ask a more specific question: “Did you sleep well,” for example, or  . . . I don’t know. Any question that shows genuine interest will suffice, and those you can respond to honestly if you wish. Or not. In the end, your grief is your business. People do not need to know you are still crying yourself to sleep every night, or that you miss him so much you can feel it like an ache in your bones, or that the world feels as if it’s aslant now that he is gone. Unless you want them to know, that is.

Even at the best of times, “How are you?” is a question without any response except “I’m fine,” or “I’m okay.” It always makes me wonder, “how am I in relation to what?” Are they asking about my health, my state of mind, my finances? With grief added into the equation, I wonder if they are asking how I am in relation to the way I was before he died, in relation to the way I felt immediately after his death, or in relation to nothing at all.

I have to admit, like everyone else, I usually ask the question, but as a part of the greeting, “Hi! How are you?” I don’t mind if someone comes back at me with, “I’m fine, how are you?” because that is the ritual. Once that is out of the way, we can settle down to a serious discussion. If the person is another griever, I don’t expect an in-depth response, I know how they are doing.

So, to recap a rather wordy and convoluted post, if someone asks how you are, “fine” is fine.

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

Spontaneous Stupidity or Vision Quest?

October 31, 2010 — Pat Bertram

There are so many stages to grief one gets dizzy trying to keep up with the changes. I’ve tried to embrace my grief during the past seven months, giving in to the emotion of each stage, but the stage I’m in now is one I will not tolerate — self-pity. Lucky for me, this new manifestation of grief shows up right in time for NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo (National Novel Writing Month and National Blog Posting Month, though considering the international aspects of both challenges, they should be called InNoWriMo and InBloPoMo). The nano challenge is to write 50,000 words during November. The nablo challenge is to post a bloggery every day during November, and I signed up for both of them. Yikes. At least I’ll keep myself so busy that I will have no time to feel sorry for myself.

The nano site says: “Writing a novel in a month is both exhilarating and stupid, and we would all do well to invite a little more spontaneous stupidity into our lives.” By doing both NaNoWriMo and NaBloPoMo I’m inviting more than just a little spontaneous stupidity into my life, but I’m looking forward to it.  I’m a very slow writer, so I’ll probably end up writing stream of consciousness, which is a cheat since it’s not exactly writing a novel, but I’m doing this more as a vision quest than a writing exercise. Grief digs deep into one’s psyche, dislodging buried feelings and thoughts — sort of like digging for fossils in a tar pit. I’m hoping that by forcing myself to write an insane number of words the loosened bits will surface, bringing me enlightenment. Or wisdom. Or . . . just about anything other than self-pity.

Nancy A. Niles, author of the upcoming thriller Vendetta, posted an article on the Second Wind Publishing Blog mentioning the three things necessary to maintain good mental health:

  • Challenges, or facing fears
  • Attitude
  • Support system

Well, this month I have the challenges, I have the attitude, and I’m privileged to have a wonderful online support system — people who will help keep me motivated.

I’ll let you know what happens. To be honest, you couldn’t stop me. There’s that small matter of having to fill thirty blog posts during the next thirty days . . .

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