Sometimes you just want to rush through the grief process. There’s confusion, pain, fear and a pulling inside, wanting to hide. Just take it slow and let life unfold gently, doing the best you can without making yourself do anything new until you’re ready.
Sometimes people aren’t sure what to say to someone who has suffered a bereavement. When you are the one who has suffered the loss of a loved one — at times you don’t know what will help to ease your pain either. Some days, there’s nothing that will help. Today I found a wonderful blog posting by Terry Rush, and I found his way of speaking to those who have suffered loss to be wonderfully caring and profound. The link is below.
http://terryrush.blogspot.com/2008/04/what-to-say-to-those-who-grieve.html
At first the loss was a relief, and that sounds terrible, but my husband had been sick with esophagus cancer for almost 12 months, was in tremendous pain and had wasted away to nothing. I never knew for sure how much weight he lost, but I would estimate close to one hundred and ten pounds.
When he died, he took that last breath, I knew it was best for him, as terrible as his life and lack of quality of life had become. At about six months it really began to hit me, and my life became a deep, gaping hole of lonely, empty despair. I was afraid to talk about it, to voice my fear, my total numbness. I had three children I needed to keep on an even keel. At times I would cry, or stare blankly, and I thought perhaps this is going crazy, or at least I was losing whatever grip I had on life. This was the beginning of my grief experience.
Now, four years later I can see the tremendous growth I’ve gone through, allowed myself to move through, and I feel I have come out on the other side, a better, more compassionate person. But I still remember the time in between, the time of incredible loneliness, feeling wounded and hurt to be left alone. In truth, I don’t want to forget those years in between. It made me who I am today.
Here’s a nice site, relatively new and they’re always accepting new members. They have lots of good people, all kinds of cool gadgets for leaving comments, music, videos and interesting posts, all with an uplifting message. The site is http://www.jenslove.com and it’s dedicated to Jennifer Rigby Stam, who passed away at 24 years of age.
Loss is devastating and we’re never prepared, even following caretaking over an extended period of illness. We need to talk about it more, to help bring each of us, the ill and the caretaker and family, to a more accepting, peaceful, loving and accepting conclusion. But it is difficult.
I came upon an interesting post today at http://theviewfromhere.wordpress.com
It brought up the subject of funerals, death and dying….and being honest with kids. My thoughts on the matter are it’s thought provoking — trying to give kids information without giving them too much information to scare them, but be honest. I never wanted my kids to feel they’re prohibited from asking questions they need to be answered.
We all handle/filter the death process differently, but I tend to agree that kids need the truth, as hard as it is sometimes. At my mother-in-law’s funeral, my then 9 year old wanted to play one last song for his grandmother, and he did this while 3 tears dropped onto his fiddle at the gravesite. When his dad passed away a year later and we scattered his ashes, my son played another song, but up in our field behind our house. It was his way to say a final goodbye, but we all know know that is only the beginning of the grief process.
I recall a many moments after I lost my husband, thinking, What am I going to do with the rest of my life? I recall that bone deep numbness, that total disinterest in life. I didn’t care if I ate, didn’t care that it was a beautiful sunny day outside, all I could think about was my lack of interest in life and my missing the life I’d had, my husband and our three boys. Gradually, with time, you do begin to feel again, you begin to experience joy and life. I knew I had to keep it together, if only for my boys. So be assured, in your own way and your own time, you will heal and love life again. It isn’t a steady one, two three, but in small steps some days and bigger strides other days. Some days you go backward, but you just keep trying to move forward. I talked with my boys about their father, and we would laugh and reminisce about silly things that had happened in the past. That in itself became a healing process, not being afraid to talk and remember. It will all come in time.
copyright 2008
My husband was ill ten months with cancer when I had the dream. I had been taking care of his needs for almost eleven months, and even though some days there seemed to be progress, in hindsight I see it was really a steady progression on a downhill curve.
One night I had a dream I was upstairs in our two story house and looked out my youngest son’s window, which faces a large back field. I could see a large machine coming inexorably closer and closer toward the house. It made a terrible racket, almost like a threshing sound. With fear, I knew that it was going to come into the house through the back, into the kitchen and to the corner of the living room where my husband sat. I tried to call out and warn everyone, but I couldn’t speak. I ran downstairs, hearing it get closer and closer.
When I got down to the living room, my husband’s chair, where he always sat in the corner, was totally gone. The machine had come through the back of the house as I’d feared and swept him and his chair away. It continued around the front of the house and across the side yard.
I heard my youngest son talking out side to a friend of my husband’s, and the talk was normal, as if nothing had occurred. I wanted to cry out, but it was no use. When I awoke, I knew with certainty my husband was going to die.
I never told him about that dream. I couldn’t talk to him about it. I was afraid to acknowledge what I knew it meant. I was doing the best I could to keep my husband alive, but in my dreaming state, I knew he was going to die.
That day was the first time I acknowledged the truth of his impending death. That afternoon our regular hospice nurse arrived, and my husband asked her quietly, without fanfare, how much time she thought he had. I just stared at him, not saying a word. She said based on her experience, probably two or three weeks. I went into a numb state. I was not expecting him to confront his own death and mortality in this manner. And yet, it was only natural he would know the end was near. I had been denying it to myself.
When the nurse left, I walked outside with her. I told her of the dream I’d had. She put her arms around me in my distress. I faced the truth that he was going to die.
That week, my husband refused to let me put any of the protein rich formula I had been preparing for him, into the enteral pump, his only source of nutrition. I tried to argue with him, but he was quietly adamant. I still see the expression on his face. He simply said, “No more.” That was it. That was his way of telling me this is the end. Two weeks later he died. It wasn’t discussed, we didn’t’ tell the kids he no longer wished to receive the little sustenance his stomach could take. It was just done. Should we have discussed it with the kids? I don’t know. We talked with them about everything else. Most importantly, their father continually told him how much he loved them.
The last week is a mixed collection of jumbled memory. My husband didn’t sleep well, since he dozed on and off all day. He developed a bed sore that we were trying to cope with, but had to be incredibly sore. His focused turned inward. There was little verbal communication, and I stayed by his side most of the time. At night, he would be awake at two or three in the morning, and he’d drink cups of water at a time. It was amazing, considering he hadn’t been able to drink or eat in three months or more. He became incredibly weak, and I could no longer lift him to help him onto the commode, even as light as he had become. My heart cried inside, but there was nothing I could do, except love the man I had married twenty years before. I was exhausted, and knew I couldn’t take anymore. I wished for him to go to sleep and asked God to take him. His passing was relatively peaceful, but I always wondered if it would have been easier if we had talked more about him dying.
Elaine Williams copyright 2008
After my husband’s death, I enclosed myself in an emotional shell. A hard cased, untouchable cocoon of nothingness. I wanted to be numb, I wanted to be left alone. Many days my self-imposed prison made me want to be loved by someone. Some days I lived and breathed by rote. God kept me breathing when maybe I took that for granted. It sank in one morning when I woke and asked myself what do I do with the rest of my life. I decided I probably had another forty years to go. Where do I go from here?
I felt an overwhelming disinterest in life and living. I had three boys, so I put one foot in front of the other and took care of the things that needed doing. My kids were my first priority. I was and am so blessed to have them. And yet, I felt bad that they lost their father. My youngest was ten, and I just wanted to fold up some days and hide in a corner for sadness. But I didn’t. I decided, subconsciously, my children needed me more to be straight and unbroken then I needed to crumple.
I avoided people sometimes because I didn’t want to talk about and therefore confront my grief. I didn’t know who I was anymore, now that I was alone. And I felt very alone and isolated, even from family. Isolating myself, I just wanted to be left alone. Sometimes others didn’t know what to say. It’s just the way it was.
I read with gratitude the cards and letters friends and family sent. Many of them wrote about how much my husband had meant to them, and expressed their sorrow at his passing. Those were the letters that meant so much.
I understood acquaintances awkwardness with my grief, but there was nothing I could do, beyond trying to alleviate their unease with my own sense of caring.
Gradually I grew into my life, a new life where I carved a niche for myself. Over time, I grew to enjoy living again. Some days when I thought I had progressed so very far, I would suddenly go into a depressive state of mind. I hated when that happened and tried to think analyze why it happened, but some days it just came unbidden and pulled me down.
At about three and a half years after my husband’s passing, I began to feel a noticeable lightening of my spirit, as if I’d suddenly found new purpose in my life. I had been doing some dating, and had reached the point where I decided to empower myself by not dating men who were not in the same space mentally and emotionally as I was.
By four years, I knew I had made it on my own this long, I would continue to be alone until the right partner came along. No more rushing into dead end relationships. My writing career took on new life, giving me a sense of purpose once more. I truly began to enjoy my life as I developed new friendships and took on interesting job endeavors.
The little whine inside me that protested my circumstances, became quiet and almost content. Somehow, I had skipped over some milestones in the last several years and made my life my own. I am proud of myself for where I have gone and where I will go. It’s been an interesting journey, and totally unpredictable, a journey I expect to get better with each day.
Elaine Williams copyright 2008
When my husband was diagnosed with esophagus cancer, we never talked about him dying, except in the very beginning. I think we were afraid to voice the worst scenario we could think of, him not making it through this disease. He refused to consider taking the traditional route in medicine, which was chemotherapy and radiation treatment. He told me early in his illness he was certain that the chemotherapy would kill him right away. When such a diagnosis is delivered, you begin to carry around with you a heaviness inside. When someone you care about is terminally ill, it dominates your thoughts and every waking moment. Your mind races over the different treatments and the newest drug trials, in the slim hope that things aren’t as bleak as they seem.
When the doctors told him he had this cancer, which essentially prevented him from eating, he wanted them to operate and take out the largest tumor at the junction of the stomach and esophagus. His doctor said it would be a major operation, where the ribs would have to be cracked open, and not one that he had the ability to perform. After more extensive testing was done, the doctors decided not to operate because they felt there was a good chance the cancer had already spread to the lymph nodes in the esophagus region. I didn’t know it then, but I guess I should have — they didn’t want to operate because they felt it was a lost cause.
We didn’t feel we should give up — we just knew that each human life is a cause worth fighting for. We never gave up hope that he could beat this cancer, even though it wasn’t discovered until almost last stage. I never actually asked the doctor what stage his cancer was. I believe it was an emotionally insulating factor for myself. I was afraid to know. I did so much research on alternative therapies that might help him, but I was afraid to know where traditional medicine saw him in his stage of cancer. Perhaps I was just better off that way. If I had known, perhaps that may have taken some of the fight out of both of us. We passed many milestones on our quest to heal him. To me, it wasn’t extending his life, it was attempting to heal his life and his body.
When someone is terminally ill, you want to preserve every moment, and that in itself becomes exhausting, though you’re not really cognizant of the toll day to day life takes on you. You want to try every avenue available to get better. I wanted my husband to visit a clinic we learned about in Mexico, where they had a good success rate of treating his type of cancer. I questioned our alternative medicine doctor about the latest therapies for cancer patients. I refused to let hope die, especially when my husband’s smaller tumors disappeared, and even when he kept losing weight. My mother said to me once, that some women might have left, but it never occurred to me. How could I ever think of leaving someone who I love when they needed me?
We took note of every mile marker along the way. Each step forward felt like a triumphant race to the ultimate goal, his being totally cured of cancer. I read many stories about others who had beat this devastating disease. It wasn’t until three weeks before my husband passed away, the night I had a dream, that I knew he was going to die. I’m sure many others knew right along he was going to die, but being in the thick of living this illness, it wasn’t an option for me. When I had the dream he died, I awoke and knew he was going to die. It was that simple.
All hope turned to despair. And still, we did not talk of him dying. Perhaps we should have, I don’t know. Perhaps he didn’t talk about his dying to spare me and my children. Perhaps he was afraid that even though I’d always been strong, maybe he didn’t want to see me break into a million tiny fragments. And I might have. I might well have broken apart, lost the emotional glue that was keeping me together in those last weeks. When hope flees, emotion and fear can break you down.
Some days I thought there was nothing more terrible than watching someone you love waste away from 200 lbs to ninety or so pounds. The spirit and the brightness in his eyes was undiminished, until the last eighteen hours. When you look into a loved one’s eyes and all you see is a black glassy emptiness, you know it is the end. For someone who likes to take control, and make other’s comfortable, I knew there was noting I could do. It was the most helpless I ever recall feeling in my life. The end had been written, but we never talked about the end. I think it was just too hard.
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