Treading Water

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.