I am sitting on my front porch in the evening heat, listening to the remnant of hurricane Beryl, as it pours out the last of its energy on Ohio. Listening…to the wind as it swirls the trees and the pounding rain as it waters the welcoming plants. I'm thinking about the ocean churning up nutrients, refilling wetlands, and flushing out lagoons in places hundreds of miles from where I sit. Thinking about all the people. Listening, because Nature always brings wisdom, hope, and a new perspective to me.
My heart spoke to me of hope earlier, driving home from picking up a Mexican dinner. Though Craig and I frequently ate out or picked up Chinese when neither of us felt like preparing anything, bringing food home to eat alone is obviously new. Time in the car allowed me to think of all the ways my life is different now.
I read about this one particular change in several books on grief I ordered soon after
Craig died. I wanted to know how to do grief well, so I turned to those who had experienced this before me. Each one mentioned how different our circles of friends would become, but I didn’t believe it would for me. No author could definitively explain why this phenomenon happens, but it is universal. I suppose it is a complicated mix of awkwardness,
jealousy, apathy, fear, anger, geographical distance, etc. But eventually, I looked around and many old connections were either vastly different or completely broken. It happened and I wasn’t really prepared for it. So, instead of continuing to be the initiator, because grief had taken so much of my energy, becoming more and more solitary was the natural course of action.
Even the non-organic realms of life changed. Our house is continually being reordered, redesigned, reclaimed. Little by little it is emptied of our old life and clues that Craig once lived here. His clothes no longer take up half the closet. His chair is gone. His big grill, replaced with a smaller version. Only one vehicle now occupies the one-and-a-half-car garage. Because Craig was adopted and we have no children, it is doubly hard to know how to handle some of his family photos and memorabilia. Tossing them in the trash feels so disrespectful and final. But no matter what I do - throw out or store for someone else to eventually throw out - he continually fades or dissolves into the background of memories. But now there is more space.
And the reels of my imagination have cut him from the script. He is no longer part of any romantic fantasies or thoughts of the future. He can’t be. I know it is partly because it would be too painful for me if he remains there. The other part is that I am beginning to open up to something NEW; the freshness and excitement of a new friend; the possibilities for involvement within a new community of like-minded people; the rush of a new, romantic relationship. I want someone else to create a new story with me, if I ever stumble across that person. Sometimes, the fantasy of moving far away and setting up a whole new life in a whole new geography with someone is more than palpable.
For years I also felt dormant. After the initial shock of grief and the subsequent years of varying degrees of depression, I was unmotivated and purposeless. It’s true there was much productivity during those first few years…houses and cars had to be sold, a business had to keep running, the house needed repairs and maintenance, etc. But all that was done against my will to want to just sit and watch TV or cry non-stop. It is a harsh reality to know you are no longer tethered to someone you loved or to friends...or to your own identity.
So, it hit me this evening on my drive home, with the yummy smell of fajitas filling the car, that my life is COMPLETELY different now. The realizations I’d made hypothetically years ago are sinking in more deeply. It is no longer “our life minus Craig” as had been my perspective for so long. It has become TOTALLY MY LIFE. It’s a hard distinction to describe if it’s never been your experience, but a profound shift in thinking. And though at any other time, this would have dropped me to my knees from sorrow, it actually got me kind of excited. It shifted my thoughts toward all the possibilities.
And then the next thought was odd (and I do mean odd, as in, out of the norm of grieving the love of your life), but somehow comforting:
WHAT IF THIS NEW LIFE IS WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO HAPPEN?
This is a thought I am spending some time with in reflection and prayer. What if this was the strange, horrible, heart-opening plan all along? Could I accept this now, after all the devastation, fear, and uncertainty? I could not, even just last year. But the question begs an answer. How do we accept the natural and necessary hurricanes that rip our lives apart for no apparent reason than that we were merely in its path. Random. Horrible. Life-altering.
Because this experience of loss had so thoroughly stripped me, I often asked God through tears, “Why?” or “Why me?” or "Why not me?" But what if I’m supposed to have a new and different life? Not just settle in or gut it out for the next however many years, but actually embrace a new purpose, maybe a new love, a new circle of friends, new spaces, new creativity, perhaps even new parts of my personality. Maybe there is a person who needs what I can give, albeit friend or lover. What if there are gifts and talents I can bring to a community? Right now, people are bringing light, love, and hope to those who have lost everything in Beryl’s wake.
Most days I know I am not done with life, yet. In my sixty-eight-year-old-life, I can still be light. I can still bring humor and beauty. I can share the wisdom and folly of my experiences to whomever might listen. I can still be relevant (I listen to Taylor Swift, for crying out loud). I can still bring a little bit of hope to a broken world or person. This is now easier to imagine when the energy of grief dissipates over time, like the weakening movement of a hurricane over land. So perhaps Life and Love have cleared out more than just physical space in Craig’s absence, allowing me to fashion a second life…or better yet...willing for me a new destiny?
The very definition of hope.
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