A good friend recommended that I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking in which the author struggles to take in the sudden loss of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, also a writer. He died of a heart attack at the dinner table one night late in December after the two of them returned home from the ICU where they’d visited their only child who, ultimately, did not recover. At times, it just doesn’t let up, does it?
But Didion’s book gave me beautiful words for beginning to understand ‘loss’ versus my totally new experience of ‘grief.’ Loss is what most of us feel when, for example, a parent dies. It’s a sadness that never goes away, but eventually morphs into poignant, even happy, memories of those who shaped us. But here’s Didion’s point: despite that loss, life goes on pretty much as it always has. Make meals, send kids to school, go to work, write, do what you do. Continue moving along in your life.
But grief! I have been stunned, no stymied, by my grief at the loss of my husband of many years—three months ago today. Much like Didion, I experience that grief as a complete undoing. Some integral part of myself is missing and irrecoverable. Doing what I’ve always done makes no sense. That is if I can even remember what I’ve always done. A big time brain-fog has settled.
Since I don’t have a reliable feel for my widowed self, I cannot see my way forward. Maybe that’s the three-month anniversary of his passing talking. Maybe tomorrow will be clarifying. All one can do is wait and see, much as I have for these months, day by day by day.