Do the Loneliness and Tears Ever Stop?

February 9, 2021 — Pat Bertram

A friend who became a widow about a year ago asked me if the loneliness and tears ever stopped. I always hate to have to tell the truth that so many of us discovered — that it takes three to five years to find some sort of renewed interest in life, but even then, tears still come, though not as often or for as long as they once did, and the loneliness can continue to be a problem.

It took me ten years and a major life change — moving to a new town and buying a house — before I settled into a feeling of normalcy. I do still tear up at times, but that’s all it is — a momentary tearing up without enough moisture to escape my eyes, and I do still get lonely, though again, it’s more of a blip than a barrage of feelings because after all these years (it will be eleven years in seven weeks) I am used to being alone.

I still marvel that we can get to the point of feeling any sort of normalcy because the truth is, no matter what happens in our lives, they are still gone.

I remember having lunch with a woman who asked me how I was. This had to have been about four years after Jeff died, because I was mostly doing okay, which is what I told her. I would never even have mentioned him except that she asked, which is why her subsequent lecture on how I must really get over it and move on seemed so unfair. It’s not as if I brought up the subject or even bemoaned my fate. My response was just a simple, “I’m doing okay.” She eventually changed the subject back to herself, and this is where things really got bizarre. Her husband was gone for the weekend on a fishing trip, and she spent the rest of our time together talking about how much she missed him and how lonely she was.

I could only gape at her. Her husband had been gone but a day, would be home in another day or two, and their lives would continue as before. Jeff had been gone years, and would never return. It simply did not occur to her to correlate the two situations. Somehow it was okay for her to miss her husband, but not okay for me to miss Jeff. It was as if in her mind, death had erased him, not just in the present, but in the past, so that whatever we had shared was gone, eradicated from the record of my life, and for me even to think of him was an affront.

You’d think as the years pass, our loneliness and missing them would escalate because every new day is another day piled on the heap of days we’ve already spent missing them, but the miracle of grief is that although those feelings are still there, they become subsumed into the depths of our being, and so they don’t demand as much attention.

And so our lives continue.

But for most of us, getting to that point takes years.

If you are still in the midst of the hard years, I am truly sorry, but there is hope. Most of us who manage to claw our way out of the chaos of grief do find renewal of some sort. For me, first it was dance classes, and now it’s my house and home. For so long, Jeff was my home, but now I have an actual place I can call home. It’s not the same, of course, but considering the circumstances of my life, it’s pretty amazing that I got here.

This renewal isn’t unique to me. Many of us find ourselves, ten years after the death of a spouse, life mate, soul mate, in a completely different place, sometimes geographically, sometimes mentally or emotionally, sometimes spiritually, sometimes all three.

It doesn’t in any way make it okay that they are gone, doesn’t eradicate them from our lives, but it does make it easier for us to embrace life once more, to move away from the edge of the abyss where we teetered for so long.

Meantime, in your loneliness, know that at least one person understands, at least to some extent, what you are going through.

***

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

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Why I Write About My Grief

October 6, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I started writing about grief not only to make sense of my own feelings, but also as a rebellion against a society that reveres happiness at all costs. I’d never heard of the sort of all-consuming grief that I experienced except for those who were considered unstable, but I knew I was completely well adjusted, so anything I felt had to be normal.

To be honest, I never had any intention of getting personal in this blog. I launched it to establish an online presence for when I got published. (After starting this blog, it took a year to find a publisher, although I’d already been on the quest for several years. After acceptance, it took another six months for my books to be published, but I made it!) Those first years of blogging, I wrote about my efforts to get published, what I learned about improving my writing, the novels I read and what I learned about writing from their inadequacies.

After my life mate/soul mate died, everything changed. I’d intended to keep my grief to myself and continue writing innocuous little posts, but I kept stumbling over people’s ignorance of grief. I found this ignorance in people I knew. (I will never forget those blank looks of incomprehension in people’s eyes when, sobbing, I told them about my loss. Sometimes they looked at me as if I were an alien species, or some kind of strange bug.)

And I found this ignorance in books I read.

One novelist dismissed her character’s grief at the death of his wife with a single sentence, “He went through all the five stages of grief.” Anyone who has gone through the multi-faceted grief of losing a soul mate knows that there are dozens of stages of grief (or none at all). You spiral round and round, in a dizzying whirl of emotions, not just shock and anger and sadness, but frustration, bitterness, yearning, hope, helplessness, confusion, loneliness, despair, guilt, questioning, angst over loss of faith, and you keep revisiting each of these emotions, hanging on the best you can, until ideally, you reach a place of peace and life opens up again.

Another novelist had her widow cry for a night then put aside her grief and get on with her life. Believe me, you can’t put aside such grief. It’s not just emotional but also physical, a ripping away of his presence from your soul, a deep-seated panic when your lizard brain realizes that half of your survival unit is gone, a body/mind bewilderment so great you can barely breathe. You don’t control raw grief. Grief controls you.

Not only did I discover that few people had any idea of the scope of such grief, most people selfishly urged the bereft to get on with their lives because they couldn’t bear to see their mother/sister/friend’s sadness.

There is something dreadfully wrong with a society that expects the bereft to hide their grief after a couple of months simply because it makes people uncomfortable to see outward shows of mourning. Seeing grief makes people realize how ephemeral their lives really are, and they can’t handle it (which leaves the bereft, who already feel isolated, totally alone with their sorrow.) It also cracks the facade of our relentlessly glass-half-full society.

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 two-and-a-half 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.

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. It takes three to five years to find a renewed interest in life after such a grievous loss, so the next time you see your mother, father, sister, daughter crying for her/his spouse, deal with it. Just because you’re no longer tearful, be aware that even though you have lost the same person, you have not lost the same connection. If it makes you sad to see her mourning, think how much sadder it is for her to experience that sorrow. Hug her, be there for her. Don’t hurry her through grief. She’ll find her way back to happiness in her own time.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the conspiracy 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.” All Bertram’s books are available both in print and in ebook format. You can get them online at Second Wind Publishing, Amazon, B&N and Smashwords. At Smashwords, the books are available in all ebook formats including palm reading devices, and you can download the first 20-30% free. Print books can be ordered from your favorite bookstore.

Posted in being me, culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , . 11 Comments »

A New Pattern of Grief

January 7, 2012 — Pat Bertram

I’ve lived ninety-three Saturdays since the death of my life mate/soul mate. Of course, I’ve lived ninety-three of each of the other days, too, but Saturday is the day I cross the Rubicon. (Or do I mean it’s the day I meet my Waterloo?) Either way, it continues to be my sadder day, the day he died, the day I always have an upswing of grief.

People think that by counting these sadder days I am steeping myself in grief, when the truth is, the sadness comes even before I know what day it is. Something deep inside of me is counting the weeks of this new life of mine. I’m sure there will come a time when first one Saturday passes without an extra burst of melancholy, and then another, and eventually my internal datekeeper will forget the day ever had a special meaning.

But not yet.

I truly thought I’d be done with grief by now. I’ve had several periods of relative stasis where I felt as if I’d moved beyond the sorrow, but so far, my grief has always returned, and it will probably continue to return for many months to come. It seems as if this process takes three to five years. Most people I’ve talked to who lost a mate say it took them four years to find the joy of living again. My twenty-one months, in comparison, falls way short of that.

Lately, a new pattern has been emerging. After a grief burst, there is a backwash of serenity, an acceptance of life as it now is, a determination to deal with my remaining years as best as I can. I even start thinking about the future, trying to imagine things I might try or places I might go. My mind drifts and I wonder how he will like those things or places. Then I realize . . . again . . . that he is dead, and grief washes over me.

I feel like a not very bright child who keeps running into a wall because she can’t quite understand her inability to pass through to the other side. For me, his total goneness from this life is my wall. I don’t understand death, don’t think our brains are wired to understand it, yet I keep running into his goneness as if somehow I think the solidity of it will dissolve under my attack. Not very bright of me, is it?

I don’t live in the past. I remember our shared life, of course, but mingled with the good memories are too many recollections of his suffering, which makes the past an unpleasant place to dwell. Or to dwell on. Nor can I bear to think of a future where he has no place, and so I live in the present. But I make note of my sadder Saturdays to prove to myself that yes, I can do this. I can live in a future without him. Ninety-three weeks ago, these Saturdays were all in the future and now they are all in the past. I lived them, and I’ll continue to live and count my Saturdays.

My main problem is that even though I know I can do this — living without him — I still have a problem figuring out why I would want to. But the reason will come. It has to.

Posted in culture, grief, life. Tags: , , , , , , . 11 Comments »