Yesterday, I read a story about a
recently married young couple who, in their 20s, had each lost a spouse. It’s a really interesting story: http://gma.yahoo.com/widowed-20s-couple-finds-love-again-212043491--abc-news-health.html. Other than being a widow, one of the things
I have in common with the couple is that they both blogged about their
respective losses. Just reading the
article had me teary, and I should have known better, but I decided to check
out the wife’s blog.
Did I start at the happy, newly
married part? Of course not! I went to the beginning. Big mistake.
Even though she had lost her first husband in an accident (her new
husband’s first wife had died of cancer), the things she described—the
emotions, the problems, the interactions with other people—were nearly
identical to mine. I only read three or
four of her earliest posts before I totally melted down.
Later in the day, I Skyped with my
friend William. I told him I was feeling
blue because of the story I’d read, and gave him an abbreviated version.
“That’s a happy story! They found love again,” he growled in his
Larry King-like voice. He was right
about the happy ending, of course, but I wasn’t in the frame of mind to
appreciate that angle.
“It’s not happy—they went through
so much pain, and so young!” I had
fallen into a deep pool of empathy for these people, and it had spilled into the river of my own pain. It’s impossible to explain how it feels to
people who haven’t been through the loss of a life partner, but the wife’s
posts had struck such a chord with me that her words could have been my own.
“Maybe you’re just sad because
you haven’t stumbled over your next husband yet,” he teased. He
can usually manage to piss me off just enough to snap me out of a funk.
“What-ever! I don’t even want a husband!”
“Then I’m not seeing the problem
here.” I’m going to have to get him some
suspenders for his Larry King days.
Even before Bunny died, I said I
didn’t want another husband. He of
course, fully expected me to re-marrry one day.
He didn’t want me to be alone and unhappy, and he was sure I would
eventually change my mind. If I had been
the departed one, Bunny would have remarried in shockingly quick fashion. He loved to have a constant audience for his
musings and his nearly incessant chatter, and he wouldn’t have been able to
tolerate the loneliness.
My thought—at the time and now—was
that marriage is hard work. Don’t get me
wrong—Bunny and I were very happy together—but the reason we were happy is
because we worked at it. On our twentieth anniversary, I told Bunny
that on the day we married, I couldn’t have imagined loving him more, but that
I had hardly loved him at all in comparison.
We both had our faults, of course, but we managed to work around them to
make our relationship flourish.
For example, when Bunny was ill--even with
minor ailments--he demanded a lot of attention.
Kidney stones equaled child birth to him—there was a lot of loud moaning
and groaning and lying around until the delivery, when he would proudly show
off his newest baby. When I was sick,
Bunny would do things if I asked him to (usually after giving a big, put-upon
sigh—which I promptly imitated), but he rarely did them of his own accord.
Cancer made him, at times, nearly
impossible to live with. I welcomed visiting
family members with more than the usual amount of enthusiasm, because their
presence gave me a respite from being Bunny’s only source of attention. During
what would prove to be the last week of his life, my sister Julie came to
visit. Within hours of her arrival, I
became violently ill with a stomach virus.
As soon as we got home, I took to
my bed, head pounding and stomach churning.
Bunny was happy to have a fresh set of ears to bend, and I was quickly
forgotten. I fell asleep almost
instantly, and was awakened about an hour later when Julie tiptoed into the
room and placed something on the nightstand near me. She slunk out again, unaware that I’d seen
her. As soon as the door closed, I
opened my eyes to see a tall glass of Sprite (one of our grandmother’s go-to
remedies for upset stomachs) waiting for me when I woke up. It was such a simple gesture, but I couldn’t
have been more grateful: someone was taking care of me, unasked. It made me feel like there was hope that
things would get better, even if only for a little while. Of course, we all know how the story ends—Bunny
took his final turn for the worst a few days later.
It’s possible that I’ll change my
mind about marrying again, because I’ve done it before--which Bunny well
knew. Back when I was a young divorcee,
I told everyone who would listen that I was done with marriage. Never again, thank you. When one of my good friends, Cheryl, sang the
praises of her organic chemistry lab partner (Bunny), I cut her short. For weeks, she badgered me to meet him.
“He’s perfect for you! Just come to dinner with us once,
please. People are going to start
talking about this married woman out with this young, single guy all the time.” I knew how easily gossip flowed in the
community, so I relented.
“Fine. Just to shut you up, I’ll go. One time.
Then I don’t want to hear about it again.” We
were married 11 months later.
The difference in my attitude about
remarrying now--aside from the hard work involved—is fear. I
never again want to love another man so much that I’m left this scarred by his
loss. We’ve all heard stories of elderly
people who die a short time after losing a spouse, and now I know why: their
hearts literally break. There is no way
to adequately describe the grief: how, even a year and a half on, I will
suddenly be seized by fits of despair so overwhelming that they leave me
breathless.
Imagine your worst break-up ever:
you are in love and content with your relationship, and then, with no warning, it’s
over. You are powerless to stop the ending, and you
can do nothing to get the relationship back.
The other person—your other half—is irretrievably lost to you forever. Your
heart would feel as though it were thrown out of a car going at full speed. Now, multiply that pain by a hundred, and you
have some idea of how much it hurts sometimes.
It’s no wonder some people’s hearts simply can’t take the strain.
Since I jumped back into the dating pool, I’ve made it clear that I’m not interested in marriage--maybe a little
too adamantly at times. For now, at least, my no-marriage disclaimer
is a defense mechanism to keep anyone from getting too attached. Realistically (God willing --knock on wood,
three times), I’ve probably got another 30 or so years left to figure out if I ever
want to dive back into the marriage pool. Until then, I'm just treading water.
