grief | Bertram's Blog

Fishing For Life

May 27, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Today is the 3 and 1/6-year anniversary of my life mate/soul mate’s death, and I’m still sad, still missing the spark to get my life going again. For thirty-four years, he was my spark — everything was so much more vibrant when he was in my life — and without something to spark my interest again, my life will continue to feel sad and flat.

A few days ago, in Dreaming My Life into Being, I wrote about my plans to go fishing for life. Well, today, I went. (The second part of that plan was to turn off my computer for a day, and as you can see, I didn’t do that, but following through on half a plan is better than doing nothing, right?)

Today’s fishing trip wasn’t a major journey by any means, just a long hike through the desert on a quest to find the trail to the top of Bell Mountain. I’d climbed halfway one day, but gave up when the trail petered out to 60-degree angle. There is no way I could have climbed that sort of slope with only my tennis shoe-clad feet and bare hands — who am I trying to kid; there is no way I could ever have climbed that slope — so I turned around and came back. (Slid down halfway, I’m sure, though I don’t remember. It was in the midst of the worst of my grief, and there are blank spots of pain in my memory.)

Bell Mountain

I’d recently read online that there is a trail to the top, though it’s on the other side of the mountain, so my quest today was to make my way to the other side and find the trail. Again, I had to turn back. I’d walked for two hours, and perhaps another two hours would have taken me around to the trailhead, but then, I’d have been too exhausted to make my way back. So once again, the mountain defeated me.

The way back.

Just because one goes on a fishing trip doesn’t mean you’ll get what you went for, but still, it was a lovely day in the sun with just enough wind to keep me from dying of the heat. So I did catch something — a bit of life.

I also caught a thought. We talk about life being a journey, but it’s always a forward motion or maybe even sideways. No matter how far we go, we continue on from there. Unlike other physical journeys, such as a hike, we don’t have to return to home base. So we can give it all we have without needing to keep anything in reserve for the return trip.

I hope I remember that when next I feel as if I can’t continue my life’s journey.

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Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Follow Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in being me, culture, grief, life. Tags: Bell Mountain, desert hike, fishing for life, giving life all we have, grief at three years, life's journey. 1 Comment »

Dead Man Walking

May 25, 2013 — Pat Bertram

In the movie The Nature of the Beast, Eric Roberts tells Lance Henriksen that “dead man walking” refers to an inmate on death row when he’s on the move. Anytime they take the prisoner anywhere, they make sure all the other inmates are locked down and that the condemned man is accompanied by several armed guards. As they walk, they announce, “Dead man walking,” because this is the most dangerous sort of person in the world. He can do anything to anyone without any repercussions. He has nothing to lose. He’s already going to die, so what can they do, kill him twice?

Listening to that exchange, it struck me that we are all dead men walking. We are all on death row, condemned to die, just waiting for the day when life executes us.

When my grief was at its worst, a bereft friend who was also struggling for reasons to live told me about a woman who had lost everyone she had ever loved, was now alone in her old age, but was the most joyful person my friend had ever met. We marveled at that because it seemed incomprehensible to us, but perhaps the woman knew something we didn’t. Perhaps she knew that we are all dead men walking, the penalty of death has already been handed out, and so we have nothing left to do but live each moment until the sentence is carried out. Maybe the truth is that within the prisons of our aging (and sometimes disabled) bodies, within the prisons of our responsibilities and financial burdens and fears, we can do whatever we want.

Of course, most of us have no interest in killing, robbing, or doing anything that will land us in the slammer; our desires are more socially acceptable and carry fewer penalties. And perhaps it’s not even a matter of doing what we want, but simply living each day as it comes and being open to whatever happens.

A woman who lost her husband many years ago recently told me that things will get better in ways I never imagined. She said she believes that we are all blessed and will know joy to the degree that we have felt sorrow.

Perhaps that, too, is a lesson the old woman learned, and now she is experiencing that joy. Maybe someday we all will. If nothing else, it’s something to believe in, that despite (or because of) our sentence of death, we will be blessed with unimaginable joy.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: dead man walking, Eric Roberts, finding joy despite loss, joy and sorrow, Lance Henriksen, life and death, The Nature of the Beast. 7 Comments »

The Three-Year Anniversary of the Worst Day of My Life

May 20, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Today is the three-year anniversary of the worst day of my life.

Oddly, the worst day wasn’t the day of Jeff’s death. (Jeff was my life mate/soul mate, a man with whom I’d spent almost thirty-four years of my life. Normally I don’t use his name when I write about my grief, but I need the comfort of seeing his name today.) The day of his death was a sadly inevitable day, one I had actually looked forward to. He’d been sick for so long and in such pain, that I was glad he finally let go and drifted away. I might have cried then. I might have been numb. I don’t really remember. All I know is that I sat there with him until almost dawn when the funeral services people came for his body.

I don’t remember when grief first washed over me, either, but I do remember the anguish building for days on end until I was nothing but a screaming bundle of raw pain. (You’d think that grief would start out strong and then weaken, but it doesn’t. It swells and continues to swell until it reaches some sort of breaking point, which gives you a brief moment of peace until it begins to swell again.)

We bereft are told not to make any major changes that first year since we aren’t always thinking clearly — we just want to escape the pain — but I had to leave our home to come take care of my then 93-year-old father. I put off sorting out Jeff’s things as long as possible since I could not bear the thought of clearing out what was left of his life, but I finally steeled myself to do the job.

I knew what to do with most things because toward the end he had rallied enough to tell me, but still, there were a few items that blindsided me, such as photos and business cards from his first store (where we met). Every single item he owned was emotionally laden, both with his feelings and mine, and I cried the entire time, huge tears dripping unchecked, soaking my collar.

How do you dismantle someone’s life? How do you dismantle a shared life? With care and tears, apparently.

Just thinking about it now makes me weep. If I could have waited a year or two, the task might not have been so traumatic, but the truth is, dismantling someone’s life is always filled with sorrow no matter how long you wait. I kept a lot of his things — things he asked me to save and things I couldn’t bear to get rid of such as his music tapes, games we played, a sweater he wore when we first met — and the thought of getting rid of those things still brings me pain.

I did manage to clear out some of those saved “effects” during that first year when I’d get angry at him for leaving me. (Silly, isn’t it? It wasn’t his choice, but I was still angry. Sometimes I still am.)

It’s amazing to me that I survived that day. It’s amazing to me that I’ve survived three years and 55 days of grief. It’s amazing to me that any of us do.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: clearing out a deceased person's effects, death, grief at three months, grief survivor, losing a loved one, losing a mate, worst day of my life. 6 Comments »

A New Permutation Of Grief?

May 10, 2013 — Pat Bertram

The months keep passing. Thirty-seven of them have come and gone since the death of my life mate/soul mate.

I never imagined I would continue to be so affected by his absence after all this time. And back at the beginning of this bereft life, I never imagined I would survive to this point. The pain and shock of new grief was so vast that it took my breath away. (Grammar Check has underlined that phrase “took my breath away” as being trite. They want me to change it to “astounded me.” Yes, the pain astounded me, but the truth is, it literally took my breath away. I remember gasping for air, unable to suck enough oxygen into my lungs to make them inflate.)

Even now, all these months later, the thought that he is dead still has the power to steal my breath.

I am doing as well as anyone who has lost the one person who connected them to the world, and perhaps a bit better — or worse — than some in my “grief age group.” (Though this is not a contest. We have all lost, and we keep on losing every day they are gone.) I can get through the days, sometimes quite peacefully. I am lonely, of course, and even more than that, I am lonesome for him, but still, I do okay. I keep busy, both online and off, and I am getting used to his absence. Sort of.

But . . . when I remember the reason that he is absent — that he is dead, gone from this earth, forever beyond the reach of my arms — I again forget how to breathe. I gasp for air that somehow doesn’t make it beyond the tears that are blocking my throat.

Tears always seem to be pooling deep inside, even when I am at my most content, and they spill over at the least provocation. I find myself crying at losses (my own and other people’s, especially if they have lost a soul mate). I cry at changes, including change of season. (I’m not crying because the seasons changed, of course, but seasonal changes create corresponding hormonal changes in the body, and those changes bring on the tears.)

And I cry at movies. I’ve been going through my mate’s movie collection, and it’s rare for me to get through an entire movie without tears. I cry when a character leaves, because it reminds me that he left. I cry when a character returns because it reminds me that he never will come back. I cry at the moments we used to turn to each other and smile in shared enjoyment. The last time I watched these movies, I watched them with him, and sometimes I weep when the movie is over, no matter what the ending, because never again will I watch it with him.

This oversensitivity and tears might be a new permutation of grief (others who have lost their mates around the same time I did are also dealing with this same tendency to weepiness). Or it could be that my grief has changed me in some fundamental way, and now tears are a way of life.

Whatever the reason, this hypersensitivity is just something else to deal with as the months — and years — of this grief journey slip by.

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Posted in culture, grief, life, writing. Tags: grief and loss, grief and tears, still crying after three years of grief, three years of grief, took my breath away. 7 Comments »

Excerpt From “Grief: The Great Yearning” — Day 43

May 9, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Someone asked me today if I had any tips for writing a book about grief, but I have no such tips. I never actually set out to write a book about grief, never planned to make any of my writing public (except for the blog posts, of course), but I was so lost, so lonely, so sick with grief and bewildered by all I was experiencing, that the only way I could try to make sense of it all was to put my feelings into words. Whether I was writing letters to Jeff (my deceased life mate/soul mate) or simply pouring out my feelings in a journal, it helped me feel close to him, as if, once again, I was talking things over with him. The only problem was, I only heard my side of the story. He never told me how he felt about his dying and our separation. Did he feel as broken as I did? Did he feel amputated? Or was he simply glad to be shucked of his body, and perhaps even of me?

It’s been three years now since the following piece was written, and though I don’t have the physical trauma and emotional agony, I’m still lost, still miss him, still pinning my life mostly on “perhaps.” How did I get through three years of such great yearning? I honestly don’t know other than by taking life one step at a time.

Excerpt from Grief: The Great Yearning

Day 43, Grief Journal

On Wednesday I took my car to the mechanic to get it ready for the trip, on Thursday, I took Jeff’s car to get the brakes fixed, then yesterday I had the first day of the yard sale. Spent most of last evening crying and screaming. “Grief work” they call it. It’s sickening (literally) to be dismantling our lives. Sickening to think of leaving here, leaving Jeff behind.

My time with Jeff wasn’t always “quality” time in that we were out of sync the past couple of years (no wonder, what with his dying) but I have learned one thing. ALL time with a loved one is quality time. Time is the currency of love. It’s not so much what you feel as what you do. It’s having time for someone, being present for him.

I do okay while writing in this journal. I can write rationally about Jeff, our past and my future, but when I’m in the throes of anguish, I’m anything but rational. This whole experience makes me feel unbalanced. Well, I am un-balanced. When Jeff stepped off the world, he unbalanced it, unbalanced me. I have to find balance and do it on my own—I can’t expect anyone else to balance me and my world.

Well, gotta go get ready for another yard sale day. The worst part comes not from selling our stuff for pocket change, but from seeing all the couples picking over the shards of our life. If I’d known that the only ones stopping would be older couples, I might not have put myself through this. It’s too difficult. Reminds me that I am no longer half of a couple. That I have no one to grow old with. No one to be with.

I won’t cry.

At least not until I’m alone tonight.

Click here to find out more about Grief: The Great Yearning

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Posted in culture, grief, life, relationships. Tags: finding balance, fourty-third day of grief, grief and loneliness, grief journal, grief work, Grief: The Great Yearning, quality time. 1 Comment »

I Don’t Want Your Sympathy

May 2, 2013 — Pat Bertram

If you think I write about grief to elicit sympathy or to look for a shoulder to lean on, well . . . you just don’t get it.

As I’ve said so often, I started writing about grief to make sense of my own feelings, and I kept doing so as a rebellion against a society that reveres happiness at all costs.

Although I am a private person, not given to airing my problems in public, I thought it wrong to continue the charade that life goes on as normal after losing the one person who makes life worth living. So, over the past three years, I have made it my mission to tell the truth about grief. Even though I have mostly reached the stage of peace, and life is opening up again, at least a little bit, grief is still a part of my life. There is a void in my world — an absence — where he once was, and that void shadows me and probably always will. Although his death changed the circumstances of my life, thrusting me into an alien world, grief — living with it, dealing with it, accepting it — changed me . . . forever. It has made me who I am today and who I will become tomorrow — strong, confident, and able to handle anything that comes my way. (And maybe even a bit tough to deal with at times.)

Would I prefer to have him in my life? Absolutely. But that is not an option. All I can do, all any of us can do, is deal with what lies before us, regardless of a society that frowns on mourning.

But I don’t need sympathy, I don’t need you to bleed for me, and I don’t need your shoulder to lean on. So what if I’m unhappy? Does that diminish your happiness? If it does, then that’s your problem, not mine. And you miss the point of these grief blogs — to survive a horrifyingly grievous loss by finding my footing in an unbalanced and alien world.

I do want something from you, though. If you are still coupled, I want you to smile at your loved one tonight instead of kicking him or her in the shin as you might prefer to do. I want you pause to hug him or her, and maybe give an extra kiss. This is an incredible gift I am giving you — a memory to cling to if ever you should become one of us bereft.

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Posted in culture, grief, life, relationships. Tags: grief and loss, heart bleeds for you, sympathy, writing about grief. 17 Comments »

Grief Archives

April 30, 2013 — Pat Bertram

I’ve had so many people stopping by to read one of my grief posts and then staying to read more, that I’m making it easy for everyone. I set up a separate page for all the articles I posted about grief. You can find them here: Archives — Grief Posts.

These are not the only writing about grief that I did. As you can see from the list, I hardly posted anything at all those first few months, but I still wrote. I was so lost, so lonely, so sick with grief and bewildered by all I was experiencing, that the only way I could try to make sense of it all was to put my feelings into words. Whether I was writing letters to Jeff (my deceased life mate/soul mate) or simply pouring out my feelings in a journal, it helped me feel close to him, as if, once again, I was talking things over with him. Those were such private moments, meant only for me (and him) that I never intended making any of it public, but when I found out how much it helps the bereft to hear about someone else’s grief and understand that their anguish is normal, I published them in my book Grief: The Great Yearning.

If you know someone who is grieving for a husband or a mother or a child, I hope you will consider gifting them with a copy, or at least sending them the link to my grief posts. Thank you.

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Posted in books, culture, grief, writing. Tags: Grief archives, grief blog, Grief: The Great Yearning. 7 Comments »

My Aching Breaking Heart

April 29, 2013 — Pat Bertram

My heart is breaking. I thought when my life mate/soul mate died that the organ had shattered beyond repair, but it must have healed because I feel as if it is breaking again.

When I first entered the world of grief, I was stunned by the constant assault of emotions, physical reactions, mental conflicts and torments because I’d never heard of such grief. Well, there was that one old woman who wore black the whole of her life, celebrating her widowhood, and occasionally there would be talk of someone keening in agony at her husband’s funeral. I thought those were isolated cases of unbalanced women, but I am not unbalanced. (And probably they weren’t, either.)

I wrote about what I was going through so I could try to make sense of the onslaught, and it helped. Blogging about grief also helped because I met many others on the same journey, which brought me comfort, and a few who were years ahead of me, which brought me hope.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I thought this fathomless grief set me aside from everyone else, and perhaps I even thought I should have special consideration because of my situation. Then others I knew lost someone they loved, and I realized grief didn’t make me special. It just made me . . . bereft.

After three years, I am still sad. I tend to think I’m not making any progress, but then I hear from women who just lost their husbands, and I am drenched in tears, remembering what it was like when grief was new. And I can see how very far I have come. But I also know what these women are feeling and how much they will have to deal with in the coming months and years, and my heart breaks for them.

How is it possible that so many of us have lost our mates and soul mates? It’s like a bizarre dance of butterflies, where those we love flit into our lives, bringing wonder and color and joy, and then they flit away, leaving us devastated. How can the world survive when it is so awash in grief? (Perhaps that’s where the oceans came from — the tears of the bereft. After all, throughout the ages, billions of people have mourned for their dead.)

Sometimes I see a photo of or an article about a couple who has been married for forty or fifty years. They always have helpful advice about how they stayed together for so long, but the truth is, despite all their ways of keeping love alive, the reason they were together so long is that one of them didn’t die. Not every loving couple gets that opportunity.

And my heart breaks for the ones left behind.

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Posted in blogging, culture, grief, relationships. Tags: blogging about grief, grief and loss, grief at three years, loss of a soul mate, new grief, world of grief. 4 Comments »

Thirty-Seven Months of Grief

April 27, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Today it is 37 months since my life mate/soul mate died. It is also a Saturday, and for more than two and a half years, Saturday was my sadder day. He died late Friday night or early Saturday morning, depending on how you look at it, and often my mind/body saw it both ways, with an upswing of grief on Friday that grew to a crescendo on Saturday and didn’t dissipate until sometime on Sunday. Even if I paid no attention to the calendar, grief surged, which always mystified me — how could my body know when I didn’t? And when the date of his death (the 27th) fell on a Saturday, that was always a double whammy of grief.

But today, I don’t feel much of anything. Well, the usual thread of sadness that bastes my life together, but other than that, I am mostly . . . blank. And tired. I am tired of his being gone. Tired of being sad. Tired of being lonely. Tired of this alien world that still, after all this time, doesn’t quite seem normal with him out of it. Tired of trying to be positive and open to new experiences. Tired of trying to find a way to live through the rest of my life. (Hmmm. Maybe I’m just tired?)

Those who still have their mates simply live. We live without. It colors our world and depletes our energy.

I’m sitting here staring at the page, too blank to think of anything to say about grief that I haven’t already said a dozens times before: I miss him. I yearn for one more smile from hm. I hope he is happy. I hope he is. That’s just the way it is, and probably always will be.

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Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: feeling blank, grief and exhaustion, grief and loneliness, grief and loss, grief at three years, tired. 21 Comments »

The Surprise and Sadness of Grief’s Journey

April 22, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Every step I take on grief’s journey brings with it surprise and sadness. I’ve come far enough that I am no longer wracked with pain and sorrow at the death of my life mate/soul mate, though sadness and loneliness do shadow my life, and tears are sometimes needed to wash away my yearning to see him once more. Now that the trauma of his years of dying has dissipated, I remember more of what he once was, and those memories have both given him back to me in an oblique sort of way (which surprises me), while separating us even further because of the profound reminder that he is no longer here (which saddens me).

For so long, the two images I had of him in my mind were the last time I saw him, right after he died, before the nurses enshrouded his body in a white blanket and first time I ever saw him when he was young and vibrant. The juxtapositioning of those two images shattered my already broken heart. I could not understand how that strong, radiant being became the wasted unbeing who barely made a dent in the bed.

I had a lot to process during those first years of grief and now that I’m past the shock and disbelief and have even managed to come to terms with the anger, guilt, and regrets, those two images are fading to the same sepia tones as the rest of our thirty-four years together. His goneness — the very void of his absence — haunted me for almost three years, but now I’ve become more used to his absence (though I still do not like it at all!), and that too, serves to give him back to me, at least in memory.

But the truth, that I will never again see him in this lifetime, is still incomprehensible. How is it possible that he is gone? How is it possible that I am still here?

Maybe I have tasks to undertake that he cannot help me with, and that is why I am here — to complete these tasks by myself. Maybe it’s simply chance that he died and I didn’t. And maybe the reason (or absence of reason) is as unfathomable as death itself. But in the end, the reasons don’t matter. It’s the reality I have to deal with, and the still unpalatable reality is that, however near he sometimes seems in memory, he is immeasurably far from me.

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