Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.
Lao Tzu


I met an amazing group of people this past weekend.  I attended something called Camp Widow.  I know, two words that really don’t belong together.  But in a sense they do. After all, what is camp?  Besides a place that your parents send you to get a couple weeks of peace during the summer months.

A camp is a place where you are out of your familiar surroundings.  A place where you learn new skills.  A place where you meet new people and hopefully make new friends.

Well, this whole widowhood is definitely not familiar surroundings.  I learned some very important coping skills and I met a lot of new people and hopefully made a few new friends.  So therefore, I went to a camp.

I was never good at camp as a kid.  Being a social misfit, I usually ended up playing with the camp dog or helping take care of the horses or rabbits or whatever wildlife they had. All the other campers would scamper off to arts and crafts and I would lurk in the shadows desperately trying to figure out how long I could hide before some overly enthusiastic camp counsellor would bounce up to me with a toothy smile and a whole mess of happy, happy, joy, joy and force me to glue popsicle sticks together in an attempt to recreate the capital building but usually ended up looking like some odd modern art piece that someone accidentally sat on.   

Even as an adult I am socially inept.  My husband was the extrovert.  I’d follow along in his shadow, content to let him take all of the attention while I just smiled and nodded whenever I heard my name. I do have to admit that I now hide behind my service dog, Tiny.  He is an attention whore and a really cool dog so people gravitate straight to him, bypassing me, which is fine by me.  But I couldn’t stay hidden behind him for too long because those darn widows and widowers wouldn’t let me do that.  Don’t ever get in between a group of widows and something they want.  Believe me, they won’t let you win.  And I’m glad they didn’t.  Because I found that even though I am more often a dork than not, being a dork is okay too.  Some people even liked my dorkiness.  My dorkiness is loved and tolerated by my ranch family, but it does tend to startle strangers quite a bit.  It was pretty hard to startle this bunch.

 Another cool thing about hanging out with a bunch of widows is that when I suddenly stop talking in mid-sentence because I completely lost my train of thought, no one cared.  They either picked up the conversation where I left off or gave me a moment to come back to Earth, all the while nodding with understanding and someone would more than likely say “widow fog” and everyone would laugh or smile.  They also didn’t care if I suddenly had to leave the room.  No one batted an eye when I quietly let myself out of one seminar because it was hitting a little too close to home.  I wasn’t the only one and it felt really good to be understood.  Don’t get me wrong, my wonderful ranch family treats me just the same and I love them dearly for it, but unfortunately there are other people in this world I have to deal with and they tend to get a bit testy when I just drift off in mid-sentence and stare into space.

One thing I learned is that I have been selling myself short.  You see, people attend the camp who have lost their loved ones a month ago, a year ago, all the way up to 10+ years ago and beyond.  Because once a widow, always a widow.  It doesn’t go away.  Many people told me that they admired the fact that I was strong enough to attend when it hadn’t even been six months.  They said that at six months, they would never have been able to do it.  At first I sort of shrugged it off.  I always figured I wasn’t strong.  I just did what had to be done. But then I started thinking about it.

Dammit, I am strong.  Everyone there was strong.  Every single person that attended that camp was strong by just being there.  By still being alive when there were so many moments that they wanted to join their loved ones.  I know I had many moments like that. Luckily I have Tiny the Wonder Dog who kept me here.  You see, he is so attached to me that if I ever left this world, he would be shattered.   I honestly think he would pine away and die.  Strange as it may seem, the love of my service dog has kept me from driving off of a cliff.  But even making that decision still takes strength.

Just because I’m strong didn’t mean I wasn’t broken.  It simply meant that I was able to gather all those shattered bits that are me and carry them throughout whatever I had to do.  Getting out of bed, going to work, grocery shopping…I am strong enough to do all of that.

Sure, every once in a while I have to drop those pieces because they were just too heavy.  But that’s okay.  The dropping part is not what matters, it is the regrouping, catching my breath and picking them up again.

I learned to take pride in my strength.

I also learned that it is okay to be happy.  I have felt guilty because at times I was actually and truly happy.  When I had a good ride on my horse.  Going to a movie with a friend.  Spending time with my ranch family hanging out while waiting for our horses to drip dry after a good workout.  I wondered how I could actually be happy, be content in the moment.  Was I forgetting my husband already?  Did I not love him as deeply as I thought I did?  After all, how can I laugh and have fun when he hasn’t even been dead for six months.

Well I learned that being happy does not diminish the loss I feel.  Being happy does not lessen my love for him.  In one of the seminars, the presenter said something that sort of hit me right between the eyes.  She said, (and I’m paraphrasing a bit) “It’s easy to say you love someone so deeply that you would die for them.  But can you say that you love someone so deeply that you would live for them.”

Think about that.  Yes, I love my husband so much that I would do anything to be with him again, but that’s not what he would want.  He would want me to continue on, to live my life, to enjoy my friends and family, to live.  Do I love him that much to live for him?  The answer is simply ‘yes’.

I learned other things too.  Not so much in the workshops or presentations, but by watching the other widows and widowers.  I saw people who had remarried.  The love they had for their spouse that died was plain to see.  Many were lucky enough to have such a love as I and my husband did.   But they also were able to find love again.  A different love, not more, not less…just different.  And their new spouses were there supporting them as they celebrated their lost loved ones.   Now I am nowhere close to even contemplating that.  That’s so far over the horizon, I can’t even see the beginning of that path.  But it’s nice to know that the path is there, and if I ever choose to follow it, it doesn’t negate what I and my husband had.

One of the biggest things I learned was that I needed to realize that I am no longer the person I was.  One presenter put it this way.  She said that on the day that her husband died, she was born.  And it’s true.  That day in January of this year, my husband died along with the person that I was.  A new person was born that day.  A person with different likes, different priorities, different outlook.  I still don’t know who that person is, but I need to realize that whomever she is, she is never going to be what the old me was.  Yes, I am moving into this new life kicking and screaming the entire way, but deep down inside I know that resistance is futile.  Because there is no going back.  So in a way, I am not only grieving for my husband, I am also grieving for myself.  Eventually I will figure out this new person that I have become.  That will just take time and a bit of trial and error, but I learned that it will happen.

There were some pretty high emotions during the camp, but there were also some pretty hilarious happenings too.  I saw widows and widowers of all races, ages, genders, sexual orientation but I really didn’t see them as that, if that makes sense.  I didn’t really notice race, age, gender, sexual orientation.  I just saw people who had the same struggle that I have, the same overwhelming grief, the same need for comfort and acceptance.  Because even though everyone’s journey through this widowhood is different, there are certain aspects that we all suffer through.  And everyone was there to share and support each other.

But mostly what I saw was hope.  Just that.  Hope.  I’ve been lacking in that department ever since my husband died.  All I could see was this bleak existence I am living in now.  This twilight of not really being alive but not being dead either.  After interacting and talking with these remarkable people, I felt a little spark of hope ignite within me.  I don’t know if it will last. I’m hoping it will (pun intended). But at least it is there now and all because of the amazingly strong widows and widowers at Camp Widow.

Oh, and one last thing I learned during that fantastic weekend:  Death Sucks!  Widows Rock!

The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.

Ernest Dimnet

 

I’ve had a few people inquire why I haven’t written much lately.  How come I don’t have a daily chronicle of widowhood?  The truth is, I do write every day.  Mostly just a phrase here, a thought there.

I then gather up all those little tidbits to make into an article and that’s when I realize that they are mostly the same.  I’m finding that widowhood is a repetitious process.  An empty void interrupted by scheduled and unscheduled events.

The void is just that.  A void when everything feels like it is being sucked away.  My energy, my health, my happiness.  It is a grey, bleak place that seems timeless and endless.  It is where I am most broken.

The void is all around me, circling, waiting to pounce at the worst moments.  Driving down the road and a song comes on the radio that brings back memories.  Watching TV and automatically turning to comment to an empty space.  Grocery shopping and holding up an item and asking, “How about this?” to someone who isn’t there anymore.  Those are the moments when I fall into the void.

The worst time for me is when I am returning home from an errand or an event.  I still automatically pick up my cell phone and dial my husband’s number to tell him that I’m on my way home.  The sharp pain in my chest is almost unbearable when I realize that I have no one to call.  And then I fall headlong into the void where I stay for quite a while.

It’s hard to keep the void at bay.  I busy myself with things and places and chores.  Constantly trying to keep myself away from the gaping maw that threatens to engulf me.  I am not normally a chatty person, but yet I find myself desperately clinging to conversations, trying to divert my attention away from me and towards someone else.  Because I don’t want to think of me.  At least, not the me I am now.

I still don’t know who this broken person is.  I can’t seem to reshape myself.  I can honestly say that at this moment I am merely existing, taking whatever comes the day, throwing myself into any and all projects because the doing is a distraction from the being.

Some of the thoughts I jotted down were mere questions. "How many tears can a person shed?"  Right now, I say an infinite amount.  I have yet to reach my limit.  "How does one handle the extreme loneliness?"  For me, I have my service dog and I cling to him like a lifeline.  I go nowhere without him and he seems to feel my need as he never lets me out of his sight.  My heart aches for those widows that do not have such a loyal and faithful companion.  I am pretty certain that I would not be here if I did not have mine.

Other notes I have address specific issues.  "Need to learn how our automatic gate opens."  I never thought twice about that, but really and truly, if it broke, I’d probably be stuck because I don’t have a clue.  That was within my husband’s domain.  Somewhere there is a manual, but even the thought of searching for it cause a severe drop in energy.

Learning everything that he did, that he took care of…it’s a full time job.  At the same time I still need to work, run the errands that he did, figure out how to do the chores or at least figure out how to pay someone to do the chores that he did.  It’s never ending and at the end of the day I am not done with what I needed to do, simply because I ran out of mental and physical energy.  One aspect which saps my strength is the underlying cause of why I have so much to do.  There is still a voice inside me crying out to the heavens that it is not fair, it is not right, this is not the way it is supposed to be.  And even though I try to tell myself that life isn’t fair and that these things still happen, I can’t quiet that inner voice.  I can’t comfort it.  Mostly because I don’t believe it either.

Another note simply says: “I need you.”

That one pretty much speaks for itself.  I need my husband by my side.  I need his strength, his love, his willingness to stand by my side no matter what.  Unfortunately, there is a very nasty financial situation with a medical company that I have been dealing with for years.  The company has made it a personal vendetta and is prone to engage in a few dirty tactics that often leaves me speechless until I muster up a defense.  Needless to say, when my husband was alive I felt invincible, that there was hope that eventually we would prevail because together, we could handle anything.

Now, I just feel vulnerable, and like a pack of jackals, the medical company has sensed it and started to pound on me again.  Each letter, each action feels like another blow that I can’t duck.  I feel so alone and any interaction with them leaves me driving home in tears, sobbing for the strength and protection I have lost.  I know that I will eventually resolve this situation but I can’t help but wonder if I will break before that happens.   It is wearing on me bit by bit like water dripping on a stone, except that the stone is cracked now and threatening to split into pieces, whereas before it was solid granite.

My last note I wrote just a few days ago.  It says “Make something good happen.”  So I am, hopefully.  I volunteered for an organization that helps widows and widowers.  They have a 3 day ‘camp’ in a couple of weeks, luckily here in San Diego.  There are workshops, seminars, helpful classes on everything from finance to finding love again.  I am looking forward to it.  I have talked to people about it and they say that it is a joyful occasion.  There are some tears, but mostly it is people gathering together who have experienced the same hell and learning how to enjoy life again.  I’ve also volunteered to run a local chapter as there is a North San Diego chapter but not one for South San Diego and what we call the East County.  My hope is that in helping others, I can help myself. 

One last note that I will write about is one I have a hard time obeying.  The notes says to just let myself be.  Simple as that.  That it’s okay if I have to take off of work early because I suddenly am overwhelmed with grief.  That it’s okay to shut the front door and not answer my phone for an evening.  That it’s okay when I suddenly shut down while out with friends or family.  That it’s okay to just be.

I’ll try to write more often.  Even if the posts become a little repetitive.  Because that is what widowhood is about right now.  Repetition.  The same feelings, the same reactions, the same deep breaths, the same minute by minute existence. 

But this is a blog about the journey of being a widow. I said in the beginning that I will try and be completely honest about this journey, the good and the bad.  So I will make a more concerted effort to document each step...even when it is just going around in circles.