Trying to Fill The Void Of His Absence With Remembered Joy

July 16, 2012 — Pat Bertram

All of a sudden, it seems, there have been changes in my life pertaining to my grief for my life mate/soul mate. For about a week after the Fourth of July, I endured a heavy upsurge in sorrow, but in its wake, I have found a semblance of peace midst the sadness.

Saturday was his birthday, and I started out the day feeling almost upbeat, gladder that he’d spent so many years with me than sadder that he is gone from my life. I’d never sung Happy Birthday to him when he was alive, so I sang to him out in the desert, where no one could hear. (Believe me, you do not want to hear me sing!) I planned to get a cake, too, but sometime that afternoon, the sadness returned. Next year, perhaps, I’ll bake a cake to celebrate his life.

I’ve also had some stray thoughts that indicate a shift in my perspective. A couple of days before his birthday, I found myself thinking, “He beat the system. He’s out of it now.” I don’t know where that idea came from because he didn’t beat the system. He didn’t have to grow elderly, but he was sick for so long it seemed as if he’d skipped a couple of decades of middle age and went straight to old age. But still, he is out of this life. He won’t have to worry about the coming changes in medical insurance or any other such foolishness, won’t have to watch himself age further, won’t have to continue suffering. Wherever he is (if he is) he is safe. And free.

To a great extent, our life together now seems unreal. I’ve been trying to live in the moment, and in the moment, he is not here. I’m still sad, still want to go home to him, still yearn to talk to him, but wanting such things seems to speak more of longing than of recollection, as if somewhere in the back of my mind I had conjured up a mate and a life and time of togetherness. But the truth is, if I had conjured up such a fantasy out of nothing but loneliness, I would have created happier memories. Too much of our life together was steeped in sickness and failure. Still, there were joys. The astonishing beginning of our relationship when he was radiant with youth and strength and health, the electricity of our long-lasting discussions, the sweetness of our final hug, the beauty of his smile, his wonderful gift of appreciation, his vast courage, and his determination to accomplish something each day despite his waning health.

I came across these words today from “Remembered Joy,” an Irish prayer:

I could not stay another day,
To love, to laugh, to work or play;
Tasks left undone must stay that way.
And if my parting has left a void,
Then fill it with remembered joy.

He stayed as long as he could, and it would pain him to know that his death brought me so much sorrow. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fill the void of his absence with only remembered joy, but I’m continuing with my life, filling it with new experiences, and for now that’s the best I can do.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , . 2 Comments »

Death Certificate Error

July 15, 2012 — Pat Bertram

My mother, far right, on her 60th wedding anniversary

I found out something today that shocked the heck out of me, and after the horrendous shock of my grief after the death of my life mate/soul mate, I’m not very shockable any more.

My mother died of lung cancer four and a half years ago. Her cause of death surprised me a bit since she’d never been a smoker, but at 85, one is susceptible to many forms of cancer, so I mostly found it ironic that a woman who’d never even been around second hand smoke (except for my father’s very occasional cigars) should die in such a manner. However, as I found out today, her death certificate says that she’d contributed to her death because she’d been a smoker for thirty years.

What???? How is that possible? She’d never smoked as long as I knew her, so if she’d been a smoker for thirty years, she would have had to start puffing away a couple of years before she was even a glint in her parents’ eyes, found a way to sneak smokes before she could crawl, and keep up the habit while enduring the privations of growing up in a coal mining town.

I hope this mistake on her death certificate was simply that — a mistake — rather than someone’s agenda to prove that smoking causes lung cancer. My sister doesn’t want to take a chance on upsetting my father during his final years, so she’s waiting until after he’s gone to get the death certificate changed. Until then, it’s a wonder my mother isn’t haunting us. My mother was a very exact and truthful woman, who believed in choosing the right words. (I can’t tell you how often we argued with her about “almost exactly.” She insisted things were either almost or exactly, while we were just as insistent that there were gradations of almost.) And this error on her death certificate is a more grievous transgression than a simple misuse of words.

To be honest, I doubt she cares any more what her death certificate says, but it will be good for the rest of us when the record is set straight. It isn’t only smokers who die of lung cancer. Non-smokers die of the disease, too, and their deaths should not be dismissed because of errors on their death certificates. Nor should non-smokers smugly go on about their lives feeling secure in the belief that they will never get lung cancer. They can, and they do.

Posted in culture, life, relationships. Tags: , , . 2 Comments »

Thursday the 12th — A Day of Bad Luck

July 13, 2012 — Pat Bertram

After yesterday, Friday the 13th holds no horrors. I started the day at an outdated dentist’s office that seemed like something from the inquisition rather than a modern tool of torture. It wasn’t so bad since I was not the patient, though I did have to be patient to sit through his political diatribes. (He’s British and thinks there are so few USA-born doctors because Americans are lazy, and he thinks our schools should be based on the British model, but he came here to dentistry school because he wanted a first-rate education and stayed because he couldn’t make money in Britain as a dentist.) I’ll stick with my Vietnamese dentist. At least he keeps the torturous chatter to a minimum.

Next, when I went online and checked Facebook, I discovered that someone had plagiarized me. I pointed out the word-for-word passages she used. She apologized, agreed to comply, since I was “so obviously offended.” Offended? You think? Then, after she finally removed the plagiarized bits, she said, “I assure you that this won’t be discussed with anyone.” Why would I need that assurance? I did nothing wrong. I don’t care who knows that she’s a plagiarist. I unfriended her, of course, since obviously, she was no friend. (She’s an author I only knew through Facebook, so I’m not losing a real friend.)

And then the real horror began. Something happened to my blog. The right sidebar with my covers sank to the bottom of the page, and the admin bar, the black bar across the top that takes me from the blog page to the dashboard and back again, stopped working. It turns out WordPress offers support only to those who pay for upgrades, which I don’t, so I spent all day on the WordPress Forums looking for a solution. One person suggested, Go to Settings > Writing and select “ ___ WordPress should correct invalidly nested XHTML automatically” and then scroll down and click “Save Changes.” Now, starting with your latest post, open it in the editor, make one minor change such as adding a space and then deleting it, and then click “Update Post.” Check your blog and see if it is back to normal.

The problem is on all five of my blogs that use the same theme, so the problem couldn’t have stemmed from anything I did. Still, I followed their instructions on the off-chance that it would help. It didn’t help me, but if you have a wordpress blog, I would suggest changing the setting. Any stray bit of html can wreak havoc on your blog.

Another person had me disable “infinite scrolling.” It used to be that you could choose how many posts would be displayed when people came to your blog, but now, when you reach the bottom of the page, you get more blog posts. In other words, there is no bottom of the page. If you want to dismantle infinite scrolling, here are the instructions: http://wpbtips.wordpress.com/2012/06/05/disabling-infinite-scrolling/

Dismantling infinite scrolling did not correct the problem, so the next task they had me do was change all the images in the right sidebar (which of course you can’t see if you are using IE9) to smaller ones that fit the width of the sidebar. Supposedly, IE9 doesn’t make the conversions from larger images to smaller ones very easily, though until yesterday, I never had a problem. But even going through all that trouble didn’t make a difference.

I hoped that things would miraculously be back to normal today, but alas, the blog is still broken. So . . . Friday the 13th? It doesn’t scare me. But Thursday the 12th? Yikes.

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

Is Facebook Still Cool?

July 12, 2012 — Pat Bertram

For years now, writers have been told that to promote their books, they need to sign up for Facebook, mostly because when Facebook was new, very few authors used social networking sites to engage with readers so those who did found a goldmine. Ever since then, authors by the hundreds of thousands have joined Facebook to find readers and found only other writers. Why? Unless you are a known writer, readers aren’t searching you out. Writers try to connect with everyone FB suggests or anyone they come in contact with, but readers don’t. They have no reason to connect because they have nothing to gain by it.

Because of the peculiarities of Facebook, I am connected to very few people outside the writer’s community (and those few non-writer connections are mostly family or real life friends). It’s hard to believe that with over 900 million users, I can’t break out of this tight enclave into the mainstream of Facebook, but I have nothing to say to anyone besides what every other author says, “Buy my books,” and even I know that doesn’t sell books. Mostly what I do is use Facebook as a bulletin board to post links to my blog posts. I also scan my feed to see if anything interesting is going on, (so-and-so’s book is being given away free on Amazon, such-and-such a book is on sale for 99¢ . . . yawn) and finally check in with my writing discussion group.

Shouldn’t there be more to such a vast network than a writer’s group? But then, I have made a lot of online friends through Facebook, I keep up with many of my fellow Second Wind authors on Facebook, and I try to get to know the people I am connected with. Considering that joining Facebook used to be a coming-of-age ritual for thirteen-year-olds, it’s amazing I’ve found anything to do on the site! I mean really, what could I possibly have in common with such new and untried persons?

Along with all the other problems Facebook is having (such as not finding enough ways to gouge money out of us via ads), they now have to contend with the loss of their youngest members. Among some young teens, it’s no longer considered cool to join facebook — they prefer to text or to join sites where they are not pressured to connect to everyone in their class. No wonder there are so many offline traumas instigated by online life. The unpopular kids can never get away from their unpopularity. And anyway, why would they join a network that is aging? Facebook is eight years old, which in online years has to be closing in on 57. (Assuming web years are equivalent to dog years.) Even worse, from the point of view of a young teen, is that more than one-fourth of FB users are 50 to 64 years old.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this post. It started out as a light-hearted commentary about the whole Facebook phenomena, and I planned to end up with saying that there are worst things that joining Facebook to connect with readers and finding only writers of a certain age, but I’ve since discovered a fb author friend plagiarized something I posted on Facebook, which is so not cool. So now I have no end to this post. Except maybe to say that I need to stop spending so much time online.

Posted in culture, internet, life, writing. Tags: , , , , , . 9 Comments »

Upsurges in Sadness Are Like Shortness of Breath After Exercise

July 11, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’m fine. Truly I am. For all of you who have expressed concern over my current upsurge in grief, I just want to tell you there is nothing to worry about. Upsurges in sadness do not in any way affect my life or my dealings with other people. They are just there, a fact of my life like shortness of breath after exercise. If I didn’t write about my feelings, no one would know about my times of sadness. There is so much bad advice given to people about grief, such as acceptable durations and ways of grieving, that I want to provide a counterpoint, and I wouldn’t do much good if I kept silent about what I happened to be feeling at any given moment.

Many people have told me that after the death of their husband, they never found happiness until they married again. People have told me that even after they got married, they still experienced upsurges in grief, sometimes years afterward. People tell me they never got over grief at the loss of a life mate, it just got different. The death of a cousin or even a brother doesn’t affect us the same way as the loss of a child or a soul mate, so the severity of the loss has to be taken into affect before you start wondering if someone is grieving inappropriately. Some people do fall in a pit of depression and cannot get out without help, but I am not one of them. Nor am I ruining my health by riding out the sadness. That’s what tears are for — to release the stress. Walking, exercising, and blogging also relieve the stress of trying to create a new life for myself out of the embers of the old one.

For me, an upsurge in grief usually comes right before or right after a new level of acceptance or a greater understanding. This latest upsurge began on Independence Day. It’s a day for families to get together, to have fun, to do whatever it is that families do when they get together, and I was alone. I understood that this could be the way holidays will be for the rest of my life, and I found it difficult dealing with the unwelcome understanding. Also, while walking in the desert recently, I’ve had several revelations that are helping me with my search to find a new focus for my life, and such forward motions bring on an upsurge of sadness because they take me further away from the past I shared with my deceased life mate/soul mate.

And anyway, even though I am no longer a child in the world of grief, I’ve not yet achieved full growth, either. Therapists who have studied grief and grievers admit that it takes three to five years to find your way back to life, and I am just past two years. I still have a long way to go. Besides, what’s a few tears among friends?

The truth is, though, I am more exhausted than sad. I’m tired of living in an alien world, tired of having to figure out where to go from here, tired of not feeling like me, but mostly, I’m tired of his being dead. Whether I continue to be sad or find happiness, whether I continue floundering of find new focus, he will still be dead. And absolutely nothing I do or say or feel will ever change that.

Posted in blogging, culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , . 6 Comments »

Grief and the Double Standard of Love

July 10, 2012 — Pat Bertram

It seems as if our whole culture revolves around and reveres couplehood. Most songs, novels, movies, are either about people looking for someone, finding someone, losing someone, or getting a second chance at love. A large percentage of non-fiction books are written to help people find a mate or help them stay mated. Hundreds of websites are devoted to matching people with their true love or a reasonable facsimile. Many holidays are geared toward love — Valentine’s Day, anniversaries, kissing your love at midnight on New Year’s day.

Clichés about love abound, mostly because they are true (or feel true). When you meet the right person, your life suddenly make sense. Whatever has been missing now is found. Love fulfills you. Love makes the world go round. All you need is him/her. Love is all that matters. Two hearts beating as one. Soul mates. Everlasting love.

It’s so inbred in us, this need for true love, that few people question it. In movies (and maybe even life) when someone has an affair and ends their marriage to be with the new love, all they ever feel the need to say is, “I fell in love,” and that explains everything.

But . . .

When you lose your one true love to death, all of a sudden you are supposed to be able to slough it off as if love didn’t matter, and go on with your life. Everyone else is celebrating their love, but you are supposed to accept that yours is over and you are supposed to have a good attitude so you inconvenience others as little as possible.

This double standard is hard to deal with. Not only do we bereft have to contend with the effects of suddenly being deprived of love, companionship, fulfillment, not only do we have to contend with being alone in a coupled world, we have to deal with our culture’s belief that love is all important. Other people can continue to have the benefits of a living love, but somehow we bereft are supposed to be able to make do with memories.

My life mate/soul mate and I didn’t have an easy life, in large part because of his illness and other setbacks beyond our control, but like most couples, we hoped for a payoff sometime in our golden years, and his death killed our hopes.

I’m finally to the point where seeing couples doesn’t bother me, but for many months, just the sight of two people, middle-aged or older, holding hands brought me to tears. I realize some people never find anyone to love, but others have been married for forty, fifty, even sixty years. I try not to compare, try to accept my situation, but the truth is he was my home, and now I am homeless. When I was with him, I had a sense of belonging, but now I belong nowhere, especially not in this coupled world.

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

Floundering in a Sea of Sorrow

July 9, 2012 — Pat Bertram

A friend sent me a link to website describing grief as walking a tightrope back to life, which is an interesting metaphor, but doesn’t fit with what I’ve been feeling lately. Mostly it seems as if I am bobbing on a sea of sadness, going with the flow, accepting what has happened to both me and my deceased life mate/soul mate, then suddenly I start floundering and, occasionally, I feel as if I am foundering.

The verb flounder means to struggle, to make clumsy efforts to move or regain one’s balance, much like a fish out of water. The verb founder means to fail utterly, to collapse, and comes from a Latin word meaning “bottom.”

I seldom feel as if I am reaching bottom any more, though sometimes, grief catches me unaware and I feel as if I am once again drowning in the sea of sadness. Those times confuse me, because after two years and three months, I feel as if I shouldn’t still become so submerged in sadness. Luckily, though, my times of feeling as if I am foundering don’t last long. My times of floundering, however, are still fairly frequent. A few days can pass without an up swell of grief, and then for no reason I can fathom, I begin floundering again, and have to try to regain my balance.

Even though I’m becoming used to his absence, his goneness still confuses me at times. How can such a vital human being be gone from my life, gone from this earth, just . . . gone? And why do I still miss him? Shouldn’t I be over him? Accept that he is gone and get on with my life? But grief doesn’t work that way, or at least, my grief doesn’t.

He was a big part of my life for more than half my years. Almost everything I own belonged to the two of us. I have a few things that predate his appearance in my life — my car, some household goods — but everything else reminds me of him. He was my best friend, the one person to whom I could say anything, no matter how shocking the rest of the world would find my musings. Oddly, he is still the only person I can talk to, though I do find it pathetic at times that the only one I have to converse with on a regular basis is a dead guy, especially since he doesn’t keep up his end of the conversation.

I am getting on with my life, though I seem to be missing something — verve perhaps, or buoyancy. Even when things were going wrong, our togetherness brought lightness to my life, and I don’t know how to find that in myself. I feel heavy-hearted and lead-footed, as if every movement takes more effort than it should. I suppose it’s just a matter of getting used to this weightiness as well as his goneness and my loneliness and everything else I have to get used to.

And I will get used to it all. My good days, my days of going with the flow show me that it’s possible. And then I flounder, and I wonder how I ever managed to get as far as I have without foundering.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , . 12 Comments »

Pat is Prologue

July 7, 2012 — Pat Bertram

Yesterday I mentioned a revelation I had in the desert — a question, really. What is the point of being me?

It had suddenly struck me that I am truly part of the unfolding universe. There I stood baking under the sun, my sweat evaporating into the space around me, my feet solidly on the ground, air flowing in and out of my lungs, connected in dozens of ways to the world and, ultimately, to the universe.

When the universe came into being, creating itself in the big bang, everything that ever would be came into being at the same time. The matter of the universe — stardust, to be romantic — has been connecting and disconnecting, rearranging itself in an infinity of shapes and forms, for billions of years. At one moment of such creativity, I was born. I am of the universe, perpetually a part of it. Although my body seems to be a thing in and of itself, it continues to exchange matter with its surroundings. In a quantum sense, my few electrons are indistinguishable from the whole.

Here I am, a creature born of stardust, at once eternal and ephemeral, physical and psychical, emotional and logical, alive yet forever dying.

Everything that ever happened on earth and in the universe since the beginning has culminated in a single person — me. Everything that happened in my life up till now has created the person I am today. So, what is the point of being me?

This is not a religious question. Nor am I looking for simplistic answers or rehashed dogmas. Instead, it’s more of a credo or a different way of looking at the world and my future. What do I want to do while in this body made of stardust? What do I want to feel? What do I want to think? How do I want to live? How do I keep from wasting the miracle that is me? How do I celebrate this connection to the unfolding universe? What is the life that only I can live? In other words, what is the point of being me?

(You, of course, are the culmination of life up to the point of your birth, but it’s up to you to ask your own questions.)

Posted in being me, culture, life, relationships. Tags: , , , , . 9 Comments »

What is the Point of Being Me?

July 6, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I walked in the desert today, talking to my deceased life mate/soul mate. (Or maybe I was talking to myself. I’m still not sure to whom I think I’m talking when I’m out there, but it does help me to talk aloud at times — I don’t feel quite so alone.) I was trying to understand my latest upsurge in grief. It doesn’t seem to be tied into an anniversary or a holiday, though it did start on the 4th. Nor does it seem to have resulted from any new or renewed experience. Anyway, there I was, walking, talking aloud, feeling sorry for myself, and I heard myself say, “I’m not much good to anyone, so what is the point of being me?” I stopped in my tracks, arrested by the simple question. What is the point of being me?

For the past two years, ever since his death, I’ve been haunted by the hard questions: Who are we? Why are here? Is this all there is? Where did our loved ones go? Will we see them again? What is the meaning of life, and probably most haunting of all, what is the meaning of death? In all this time, I have never asked: What is the point of being me.

It seems such a simple question, doesn’t it? But here is the truth of it:

Billions of years ago, the universe was born. Through untold eons it learned how to create various life forms, and finally, it created a semblance of a human being. A million years later, our present species came into being, and many thousands of years after that, I was born. I learned to walk and talk, and as I grew, I learned how to communicate ideas rather than just simple needs and wants. Later, I learned how to read, and because of that one skill, I learned way more than I ever could by merely observing. Along the way I learned about love and finally, during the past six years, I learned about dying through watching loved ones struggle with the end of their lives. (I won’t really know about dying until I have the experience, but it does seem as if I have been steeped in death for too many years.)

Here I am today, the culmination of billions of years of learning — a unique individual. So, what is the point of being me?

I’m not sure why the question has caught my imagination, but I’ve found myself smiling at odd moments today. It seems as if finding the right question is as important as finding the right answer, and this appears to be the right question. The meaning of life and especially death is too immense for my mind to grasp, and anyway, finding the answer can’t really help me figure out how I am supposed to live the rest of my life alone or what I am supposed to be doing. Yet suddenly, there it was, my guide to the future — a simple question, specific to me, that no one else can answer.

What is the point of being me?

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

Waiting. Always Waiting.

July 5, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I am waiting. Always waiting.

I’ve had this sense of waiting for a very long time, but didn’t realize until yesterday how much energy I put into waiting. I wait for the phone to ring. I wait for the mail to come. I check each of my email accounts several times a day, waiting for . . . hoping for . . . I don’t know what. Perhaps a few words that will make sense of my life? Maybe a sense of connection to another person or to life itself?

This pervasive sense of waiting started years ago when my life mate/soul mate first got sick. I used to wait for him to get better, and then, during that final, terrible year, I waited for him to die. After his death, I waited for the worst of my grief to pass. I waited for him to call and tell me I can come home — he never did, of course, and I understand now. . . I feel it . . . that he never will. I also waited for something wonderful to happen, because only something extraordinarily good could balance such a trauma as his death. Since life does not keep a balance sheet and does not seem to care that we need to believe in balance and fairness, I gave up that particular notion.

But still I wait.

When we are happy, we are automatically in the moment. We are where we want to be, so there is no more waiting — we have arrived. But when we are not particularly happy, it’s hard to accept the truth of the present, and we wait for something else.

I need to get past this sense of waiting and realize that however empty and lonely, this is my life at the moment. This is what I have to deal with. This is where I am. (And yet, at the same time, I have to allow for the possibility of something wonderful happening.)

Sometimes when I finish writing a blog post, I’ve figured out the answer to that day’s conundrum, but not this time. I haven’t a clue how to deal with this sense of waiting. Maybe I need to live more in the real world? Stay away from the internet with its siren song of expectation? That will be difficult. Offline, not much occurs in my life, but online there always seems to be something to do. Writing this essay for example. Clicking on facebook to see what is happening in my online world. Checking my email accounts, waiting for . . . hoping for . . .

Posted in blogging, grief, internet, life. Tags: , , , , , . 12 Comments »
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