10/8/19 - In all of my reading and study about cancer, and now about grief, I have occasionally come across observations and commentary that connect immediately with my own experience. In reading comments to an article specifically about husbands grieving the loss of a wife I learned of one surviving spouse's fears, which, as I realized immediately, echoed my own. I fear the absolute, total and forever cessation of Penny's existence. This fear ventures deep into questions of spirituality. I was raised a Catholic, attended mass and Catholic schools almost exclusively through my early adulthood, but eventually slipped away when I found that my divorce from my early first marriage, and my subsequent marriage to Penny, constituted transgressions that put me, and our children, beyond the Church's constituency. I had never had serious doubts about the existence of a soul, and some concept of an afterlife, but now I cannot say that I have a serious belief in it either. Struggling with the deepest issues of faith, at this tumultuous time, seems almost beyond my ability. I am meeting tomorrow with a priest, a friend and client of mine with whom I have never discussed faith or religion, but to whom I will lay out my doubts and concerns in the hope for some thread of credibility to the notion that in some form, someday, we will be together again.
But I have other fears that are equally real, secular, and formidable. I fear that my grief (as an impediment to a level of happiness and contentment in any way approaching what I experienced before) will be with me for the rest of my life. Our life was not perfect, but I thought on so many occasions that we had achieved as much happiness, with and for each other and our family, as anyone can realistically hope to find in life. From my perspective today, I simply cannot contemplate having a moment in which that thought begins to form that does not immediately wilt away in the glare of the loss I have suffered. The hole in my life is so immense that backfilling with new experiences, family members not yet born, friends not yet made, will not begin to fill it. I have been so lucky in my life, from my childhood on, and achieved a pinnacle of happiness and satisfaction in the life I built with Penny and our boys. I cannot imagine scaling that mountain again in any other circumstance without her.
My third fear is that time will erode even the last vestige of her in my life, my memories. I previously mentioned that my mental images of Penny are already failing to register her as she was at the end. I try to hear her voice in my mind, recreating conversations that we would have each day. But that is becoming harder and harder to do without finding a sound clip that puts me back in the moment. Already I must look for pictures of her in her every day look to imagine her once again coming through the doorway after being out shopping, or greeting me from her favorite chair as I came from work. The image we retain becomes fixed and does not age. The colors and texture fade, and just as I remember my mom and dad as snapshots in my life, I fear that the presence of my soulmate in my mind and heart will become only an icon.
Are these fears real and realistic? Yes, to a large extent I will have to live with each of them for the rest of my life. But I think often of a passage in C. S. Lewis' soul-baring "A Grief Observed", in the Foreward by Madeleine L'Engle, that "when two people marry, each one has to accept that one of them will die before the other." If the marriage has been long and fulfilling, that first death is an amputation for the survivor. The pain, fear and loneliness are baked into the cake that has nurtured and provided so much Joy for so many years. The death could have been mine. The fears would have been hers. It is the risk we take and the price we pay for a chance at the happiness we shared.
No comments:
Post a Comment