Widows and widowers often exhibit a tendency to grant sainthood to their departed spouse. I idolized my husband in many ways, but knew full well that he was no saint.

Nostalgia can do a number on your memories. This NYT article made some interesting points about it:

"In personal life, the warm glow of nostalgia amplifies good memories and minimizes bad ones about experiences and relationships.... It always involves a little harmless self-deception, like forgetting the pain of childbirth....Nineteenth-century Americans were extremely worried....about the incidence of nostalgia....According to physicians of the era, acute nostalgia led to “mental dejection,” “cerebral derangement” and sometimes even death."

"There’s nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain."

"I have come to think that the most useful way to understand the past, and make it work for you, is to look at the trade-offs and contradictions that, however deeply buried, can be uncovered in every memory, good or bad."

These people [who examined happy memories] didn’t repudiate, regret or feel guilty about their good memories. But because they also dug for the exceptions and sacrifices that lurked behind their one-dimensional view of the past, they were able to adapt to change. Both as individuals and as a society, we must learn to view the past in three dimensions before we can move into the fourth dimension of the future."

Beware Social Nostalgia By STEPHANIE COONTZ, New York Times, May 18, 2013

Last night, Doug's parents L and J took PS and I out to a fancy schmancy restaurant, for a celebratory wedding supper.

As we were leaving the house to meet them, an emergency alert buzzed our phones - "Tornado warning - take shelter immediately!" We turned around and rescheduled for a half an hour later, but the irrational part of me thought maybe it was a sign from Doug. Of course it is silly to presume that the weather is controlled by my personal life. :-)

LZ and JZ are amazing people - loving, kind, non-judgemental and generous - so it's not surprising that their son was so special. I was quite touched at their gesture. It highlights how caring and compassionate they are. PS wondered if it would be awkward, but I told him LZ and JZ are like my own parents - they have been in my life for 23 fortunate years. We all had a great time.

LZ and JZ have been married for 57 years.... PS and I haven't even been married for 57 days! I pray we are granted the mental, physical and spiritual strength to lead a happy, healthy life, and that the Universe gives us the chance to grow older together.

Some people mark the anniversary of a loved one's death. From now on, I choose to mark Doug's birthday - now THAT was a happy day!

Today was Doug's birthday. PS went with me to the rain garden to install the plaque I had made. He had to dig a hole three feet deep in soil that was filled with New England Potatoes (rocks), and mount the plaque. It looks beautiful.

Tonight we both raised a tasty beverage in Doug's honor.

A friend who is struggling shared this with me:

I had an epiphany a few weeks ago after reading about a documentary about Golden Gate Bridge suicide jumpers. This quote from a guy who actually survived did something to me:

"He said that the second he jumped off, he realized everything in his life could be fixed - except for the fact he'd just jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge."

Steve Cole, a genetics and psychiatric researcher at UCLA, " has linked various kinds of chronic adversity to a particular gene expression pattern. When people feel lonely, are grieving the loss of a loved one, or are struggling to make ends meet, their bodies go into threat mode. This triggers the activation of a stress-related gene pattern that has two features: an increase in the activity of proinflammatory genes and a decrease in the activity of genes involved in anti-viral responses." Read more..

Another article discussed a lethal kind of stress "characterized by a lack of a sense of control over one’s fate. "Psychologists who study animals call one result of this type of strain “learned helplessness.”" In experiments, indiscriminate shocks are administered to a caged animal, which results in depressions. "But if the animal has some control over how long the shocks last, it remains resilient. Pain and unpleasantness matter less than having some control over their duration." My takeaway from this is concern about the fact that, when someone dies, it seems like a total loss of control over life itself.

More on stress.

When my twin sister died, my mother and father dealt with it in very different ways. Because my father expressed his grief differently, my mother assumed he didn't feel the loss as deeply as she did. I don't know whether he did or not, but here is a ood article discussing how men express depression differently from women: http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-depression-men-20130829,0,2605342.story

In the news today: Robert (92) and Nora Viands (88) were married for 71 years. They were in separable. They were both in hospice, and died on the same day - within four hours of each other. More....

I know some couples (including my mom) initially wish for such a fate. Then they wouldn't have to experience the pain of living without their loved one. But if this were to happen, their families and friends would be doubly bereft. Also, the surviving spouse is often surprised to find that, eventually, they do go on to live a fulfilling life.

Honestly though, I don't know which is worse: to have your life cut short, or to be left behind.

“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.” ― Gilda Radner

As they say, "All plans are arrogance." Nobody knows what will come their way in life. The challenge and the choice is how to deal with what comes your way.

Earlier I blogged about what to do with their "stuff" and how difficult it can be to give up personal items that remind us of our lost loved one. This is an interesting graphic: http://www.appfolio.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/img_hoarding_infographic_appfolio_1000_3336.png

"Compulsive hoarding is a psychological illness in which individuals assign high personal value to an unmanageably large collection of items. Throwing away any of these items causes the hoarder psychological stress and emotional exhaustion. It is generally a maladaptive response to several common life circumstances:

• A reaction to developmental and attachment issues.
• A coping mechanism for abandonment issues.
• A reaction to a lack of family warmth.
• Uncertainty in the self or others around them.
• A coping mechanism for loss.
• A self-identification in their objects."

Obviously a number of these circumstances could result from loss. We were attached to the person who died (Buddha said attachment is the cause of all suffering.) We may feel they abandoned us. The warmth we got from them is now gone. Our lives are filled with uncertainty. We are trying to cope. We identify their objects with the person who died.

Common items associated with the dead person that may be hoarded include clothes, letters and cards, mementos, pictures and gifts they gave us.

Hoarding can be dangerous and unhealthy. It can damage property, block emergency exits, interfere with ventilation or sprinkler systems, and perishable goods can attract mold or rodents. If you or someone you love is exhibiting the symptoms of hoarding, seek professional counseling, and help with clean-up.

"Don't compare your life to others and don't judge them. You have no idea what their journey is all about."

I saw this quote today on Facebook. It's a good reminder. People have judged my journey at times - the way I grieved, the speed or lack thereof, the timing of falling in love again, the choices I made. And. I have watched others and not understood why the behaved the way they did. We can only know ourselves, and even that is a challenge.

PS took care of his wife for 1.5 years after she was diagnosed with cancer.. (His memoir is haunting and moving description of the experience and his solitary struggle after she died.) I once referred to him as being her "caretaker." He reminded me that the correct term is "caregiver." I have the utmost respect for caregivers, and have no concept of what it must be like to be one..

One daughter documented her mother's experience in "Knocking on Heaven's Door." Butler "describes how her mother struggled to bear the burden. "On the phone with my brothers and me that winter, she cried. She loved my father. She'd vowed to be with him in sickness and in health, she told us - and who was she to think they'd escape the sickness part? He'd taken care of her for 50 years, and now it was her turn. But in ways we were only beginning to fathom, my father was no longer her husband, and she was no longer his wife."

Her mother's life came to a grinding halt. "At 77, she had become one of 29 million unpaid, politically powerless and culturally invisible family caregivers - 9 percent of the United States population - who help take care of someone over 74."

"Had he died, there would have been a funeral, condolences, company. "But there is no public ceremony to commemorate a stroke that blasts your brain utterly, and no common word to describe the ambiguous state of a wife who has lost her husband and become his nurse." (From the New York Times Book Review, Letting Go)

A woman looking at my compilation of quotes shared this eloquent excerpt from Transcending Loss with me:

Grieving is not a short-term process; it's not even a long-term process; it's a lifelong process. 'Having a future' now means that although your life will flow again, it will flow differently as a result of the loss. Your grief will become incorporated into your life history, become a part of your identity. And you will continue now, and forever, to redefine your relationship with your deceased loved one. Death doesn't end the relationship, it simply forges a new type of relationship - one based not on physical presence but on memory, spirit, and love.
~ Transcending Loss by Ashley Davis Bush

Bush also notes:

"Grief is not a mountain that you climb, go over the top, and then climb back down the other side so that you're at the same ground level as when you started.... once you finally make it to the top, you're not going back down. You can never go back down. This journey brings you to a new place, a different place from where you started...." to transcending loss, and gaining a new perspective.

Isak Dinesen said "all sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them."

Perhaps this is one reason why writing your story in a journal, or the story of the loved one you lost, or piecing it together with the help of a therapist may help process loss. When your old life has been turned topsy-turvey, it is natural to try to seek some sense of control or understanding.

Psychiatrist Anna Fels says that "Creating a coherent narrative of one’s life has long been seen as a central goal of psychotherapy. It provides the internal structure that helps us predict and regulate future actions and feelings. It creates a stable sense of self."

"We should be careful to get out of an experience all the wisdom that is in it -- not like the cat that sits on a hot stove lid. She will never sit down on a hot lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one anymore." ~ Mark Twain

I struggled with this when I decided to get involved with someone new. I was worried about falling in love and having to deal with loss again. I am glad I overcame this fear enough to move forward.

I watched a TEDTV talk by Amanda Bennet, author of The Cost of Hope: A Memoir. Her husband was diagnosed with kidney cancer. The couple's singular goal was to find a cure. The doctors tried too - after all, their goal is to "fix" things. But she notes that so far, no doctor has been able to cure anyone into immortality. In their never-ending quest for the next treatment, they forget to prepare for the end. They spent so much timing fighting the inevitable that they missed the opportunity for a graceful departure.

PS's experience was similar. As a caregiver, he felt like a failure when his only patient died. But humans are remarkably resilient, and life does go on if we allow it.

I look at Doug's picture and just shake my head - how can it be? I see his whole-body-smile and ache. But I have gotten much better at shutting off the pain.

I had another dream about Doug - a kiss that seemed so real that it woke me up. Some people say when you die, it's over - like a candle light snuffed out. Others say energy cannot be destroyed, just transformed, so you become part of the cosmos. Yet when I have these "visit" dreams, I am convinced he still exists in some coherent form. I wonder if that lasts as long as someone on earth who knew you remembers you. Perhaps when they are all dead, the person's essence then melds into the greater energy of the cosmos.

The days and weeks leading up to major holidays can be challenging when you have lost a loved one - sometimes the anticipation is worse than the actual holiday. I've seen different versions of recommendations on how to handle the holidays - this one was shared by LifeChoice in their newsletter:

The Mourner's Holiday Bill of Rights

• You have the right to say "Time out!" anytime you need to.
• You have the right to tell it like it is. When people ask "How are you?," you have the right to tell them how you really feel.
• You have the right to some "Bah Humbug" days. You don't have to put on a happy face for the benefit of others.
• You have the right to be where you want to be. Be at home or with friends.
• You have the right to have some fun!
• You have the right to change directions midstream. Grief is unpredictable. It's alright to change your mind about going somewhere or doing something.
• You have the right to rest, peace and solitude. You don't need to be busy all the time.
• You have the right to do it all differently this time and next time. Just because you change things one year doesn't mean it is written in stone. Next year you can change it back or do it yet another way.

The investigative report on the Sandy Hook murders committed by Adam Lanza has been issued. One of the victims was Victoria Soto - who, like Doug, graduated from Eastern. Her family had this reaction to the report:

“While others search for the answer as to why this happened, we search for the how. How can we live without Vicki?”

“So, yes, we have read the report. No, we cannot make sense of why it happened. We don’t know if anyone ever will. We don’t know if we will ever be whole again. We don’t know if we will go a day without pain. We don’t know if anything will ever make sense again.”

Many people who lost a loved one under sudden or tragic circumstances can relate.

Unfortunately, I believe it is not possible to make sense of something so senseless. The only thing we can do is search for meaning elsewhere in our lives.

As for the pain, it does subside, but as long as you are alive, it lives on inside you. Fortunately, so does the love.

No Husband, No Friends, by Charlotte Brozek, NY Times 10/23/2013 is a good description of the lonely early stages of loss of a spouse. (Fortunately I had a lot of friends who helped me survive - she was very alone.)

She says: "I spend most of my days alone in the bereavement bunker...... I went from depression to panic attacks back to depression to migraines, to abdominal migraines, to not sleeping, to sleeping too much, to never leaving the bunker, to not wanting to go back to the bunker."

Julie Wang, a commenter, responded thusly "it takes two, even three years, usually alone, to get over the grieving and to really honor the memory of the man you lived with and loved. But eventually a new morning will dawn when you realize you have to reinvent yourself and start out on a new path." The other comments are also insightful reading.

Here is a "lesson learned" that a Brazilian bus driver shared with his passengers. They were complaining about being waylaid on their transcontinental trip.

“Plans rarely match up with reality, and it’s almost never immediately obvious whether that’s a good or a bad thing.”
(New York Times Magazine, Camino Real by Monte Reel, 02/23/2014)

Of course, it was immediately obvious to me that it would have been a good thing to realize my plan to live long into old age together with Doug. And there's no question that it was a bad thing that Doug died at age 52.

Although I suppose there could have been a cursed ending to our plan, ala "The Monkey's Paw." (If you've never read the short story, it's available free online. It is a clever "be careful what you wish for" tale of horror.) Suppose Doug had lived to be an old man, but was in a vegetative state for the last forty years because he was not revived in time. That would NOT have been a good thing.

Anyway, in the end, all plans are arrogance.

A few years back, I wrote a piece on WHY I think people want you to hurry up and get over loss - see Why they want you to get over it. This discussion is related:

In our fast-paced Western culture, discussion about our painful inner experiences is discouraged. Talking about our pain is considered a sign of weakness and evidence that we're not getting on with our lives. Needless to say, we don't have too high an opinion on grieving, either. We don't like to grieve - it's a painful process and there often is no immediate end in sight. We expect the grieving process to be brief and done in private. We steer clear of people who are grieving. Other people's grief brings up our own unhealed wounds and unmourned losses." ~ Julie Simon, The Emotional Eater's Repair Manual: A Practical Mind-Body-Spirit Guide for Putting an End to Overeating and Dieting

Possibly the best gift a friend can offer is true listening when a bereft person wants to talk about their loss. Read more.

I was watching the lame pilot of the TV series, Falling Skies. Planet Earth has been taken over by aliens, and a group of survivors rebels. In the midst of the calamity, a father asks his son what he wants for his birthday. The boy - an annoying kid of maybe 8 or 9 - whines that he wishes that everything could be back the way it was. He wants his mother to be alive, he wants to play with his skateboard blah blah blah.

I found myself thinking this was a useless waste of a wish by a naive juvenile. Then I realized that I spent more than a year of my life wishing for pretty much the same impossibility. For time to rewind, for Doug to be alive, for us to have our life back. No better than a petulant child.

I have often wondered whether it is easier or more difficult to be with someone you love when they die.  It haunted me that Doug was alone.  But if I had been with him, I would probably be haunted by the experience and inability to save him. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that it sucks every which way. 

In a New York Times opinion piece entitled "When a Child Kills," Gregory Orr eloquently describes a child's response to a tragic death. When he was 12 years old, Orr killed a younger brother in a hunting accident. This tragedy exposed him to "the deeper randomness of life and the terrifying fact that so much of our experience is beyond our control."

He knows firsthand of "the danger of words used as premature consolation and explanation. I lost a (naïve and conventional) religious faith the day of my brother’s death, because a well-meaning adult assured me that my dead brother was already, at that very moment, sitting down in heaven to feast with Jesus. How could I tell her that my brother was still near me, still horribly close to me — that every time I squeezed shut my eyes to keep out the world, I saw him lying lifeless at my feet?.. .Don’t think that quickly administered bromides will help, much less heal." (See my advice on do's and don'ts with the recently bereaved.)

He goes on to say that in these situations, people "are often willing to take on responsibility and guilt rather than admit something even scarier: that accidents happen; that even the most ordinary among us live in a world of risk and randomness that we don’t control. Sometimes, blaming ourselves feels safer than this realization that the world is an unpredictable and even dangerous place. But self-blaming and shame isolate and shrivel the human spirit."

He hopes that a young girl who accidentally killed her shooting range instructor will have a different experience. "In this impossible situation, I hope that whatever is said to that girl is not said in order to relieve adult anxieties in the face of horror. And this also, as a deep longing out of my own, long-ago shame and isolation: that someone larger and trusted by her, someone who pretends to understand this bewildering world, will hold her and give her permission to feel what she feels and, in some way beyond words, give her the courage to endure what she must endure."

After visiting a regional A.L.S. office staffed by a widow, a recently diagnosed husband said this to his wife: "Promise me something. When I die, you will never work for A.L.S. No fund-raising, no telethons, not even a bake sale. Nothing. You are not allowed to let my A.L.S. become your life. If you become a professional widow, I will haunt you. I will haunt you hard.

Gene Fiffer died of ALS in April 1978. But before he died, he gave his wife a gift - freedom. Freedom to live her life without guilt.

Read more: "Breaking My A.L.S. Promise," by Sharon Fiffer, 09/10/2014

My guilty pleasure every weekend is reading the Sunday New York Times, cover to cover. In today's New York Times Magazine, Abigail Meisel wrote about an invasion of bird mites that forced her to vacate her Manhattan apartment. Since mites can travel with you, she was also forced to leave her collection of book s behind, including "...the first-edition Sendak books my mother, who died when I was 16, had inscribed and read to me at bedtime...."

A friend built a bonfire so these touchstones of her life could received the dignified end they deserved. She writes "The controlled destruction of these books brought finality to months of uncertainty and gradual attrition....Part of me hovered above the scene in shock. But I knew that I had the power to make meaning of the loss. That was my charge and mine alone. I looked at the pile of coals and ashes before me and decided to call it a beginning."

Her decision reminded me of a book talk that Patrick and I attended last week with the author of The Morphine Dream. Donald Brown told us he knew what each of us was going to do with their rest of their lives, even if we didn't. It was whatever we decided to do.

Many people who lose a loved one think they don't have choices. That life decided for them. But you can still chose how you react to that loss, what you make it mean, and what you decide to do with the rest of your life.

One of my historical heroes is Teddy Roosevelt. I was watching the Ken Burn's series on the Roosevelts, and learned that Teddy was widowed suddenly at a very young age.

Roosevelt fell in love at first sight with Alice Hathaway Lee, whom family and friends called "Sunshine" because of her cheerful disposition. Their engagement was announced on Valentine's Day. They were married when Alice was 19 and Teddy was 22. Four years later, she died in Roosevelt's arms on Valentine's Day. She had just given birth to their first child. Her pregnancy had masked kidney disease. Roosevelt's mother died the same day in the same house from typhoid fever.

Roosevelt wrote one line in his diary. "The light has gone out of my life." He rarely mentioned his wife again - not even in his autobiography. He would not allow others to speak of her.

Then Roosevelt left his newborn daughter in the care of his sister, and ran away. He went west and lived a rancher's life in North Dakota for four years. It seems he was running from grief. He wrote "Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough."

Roosevelt remarried two years later. His second wife had been his childhood sweetheart. He kept their courtship a secret. Not even his sister knew. When she saw their engagement announcement in the New York Times, she demanded a retraction, believing it was untrue. Apparently Roosevelt struggled with feeling as if he were betraying Alice.

One of his biographers concluded that Roosevelt had depressive personality to begin with. Roosevelt wrote that"Only if you've been to the lowest valley can you know how great it is to be on the highest mountain top." I wonder if he was referring to the valley he lived in before he met his first wife, or the valley he descended into after she died, or both.

(Apparently Teddy's daughter Alice was pissed that Richard Nixon used that quote when resigning from his presidency in disgrace.)

In a letter to his son, Roosevelt wrote "I have no business to feel downcast or querulous merely because when so much as been given me I have not had even more." He was referring to the presidency (he was not sure he would be re-elected). But it reminded me of my own situation, and how grateful I should be for the limited time I was lucky enough to have with Doug.

I just heard from a young widow I correspond with. Several years ago, she lost her husband suddenly as a result of gross medical negligence. She was inconsolable.

About a year after her husband died ,her high school sweetheart contacted her through social media. He told her he had never stopped loving her. She experienced many of the same issues I did - guilt, uncertainty, issues with friends and family, getting involved in a relationship while still going through the grieving process. Despite the challenges, she kept her mind and heart open. They will marry at the end of the year.

I am very happy for her new beginning. I hope all those around her can share in her joy.

It just goes to show you that you never know what lies ahead - be it bad or good.

I just read a thought-provoking article from the 10/17/2014 NY Times: Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

I touched on this subject in a past post: regarding the "random, serendipitous coincidences that we use in our search for meaning. We are trying to put a handle on a hot pot. Or because our lives have suddenly spun out of control, we search for meaning in meaningless events (a phenomenon dubbed "Patternicity.")

This article discusses how our tendency to see meaning in life events can foster "the illusion that the world itself is full of purpose and design," even for those who are not religious.

"Some people are more prone to find meaning than others.... the more likely people are to think about other people’s purposes and intentions, the more likely they are to also infer purpose and intention in human life itself."

"WHATEVER the origin of our belief in life’s meaning, it might seem to be a blessing. Some people find it reassuring to think that there really are no accidents, that what happens to us — including the most terrible of events — reflects an unfolding plan. But the belief also has some ugly consequences. It tilts us toward the view that the world is a fundamentally fair place, where goodness is rewarded and badness punished. It can lead us to blame those who suffer from disease and who are victims of crimes, and it can motivate" a bias to accept the status quo becuase it reflects " the workings of a deep and meaningful plan."

The atheist Richard Dawkins wrote that "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.” But even those who are devout should agree that, at least here on Earth, things just don’t naturally work out so that people get what they deserve. If there is such a thing as divine justice or karmic retribution, the world we live in is not the place to find it."The authors counsel us to "resist our natural urge to think otherwise."

In my opinion, if this belief brings peace to those who torment themselves with "wudda, cudda, shudda" thinking, maybe it's not such a terrible thing. The downside would be failing to learn from the past, and to take charge of the future where possible.