DesertBob

Hi Teny, I've not been here since the middle of last year and just dropped in for old time's sake. It is sweet of you to remember me after all this time. So here's a friendly hello to you. To all of you. I frankly needed to get away from fixating on my loss and have focused for awhile on more philosophical discussion forums. Back in March or so I discovered a widow(er)s forum on the site I was frequenting and went in and connected with a few people there. It's not nearly as large or active a group as this one but there are some good people there, but I was able to pop in now and then and give back a little. At around the 18 month mark I began to feel as if I had transitioned out of active grieving. I still have small moments now and then but I feel that I have found acceptance and been able to move forward with my life. I'm at nearly 23 months now. I am not sure what "moving forward" means exactly yet. I am still reconfiguring and exploring various things. I am doing a little more travel and I have been seeing someone the past couple of months. My daughter is going through a divorce and I'm trying to be present for her in that. So ... life keeps happening. Although, from a distance; my honey is in the midwest and my daughter on the east coast. Who knows where it will all lead. My parrot, SmallTalk, isn't with me anymore; she has joined my late wife's bird at the sanctuary down by Tucson. So I am well and truly living alone for the first time in my life, really. Although one's interaction with a parrot is rather minimal, she was still a little being who looked for me each day. But, I felt it was best for us both in the long run; I can't properly care for her alone and the odds are that I will be working more away from home over time. That's about it. I will probably pop in now and then and stay in touch. I thank all of you for your friendship and support in my first year of grieving. --Bob

All those people are actually doing is propping up their own illusions. You have to do what works for you, and apparently, you have. (Re)marriage is a very personal decision, as is how you go about it. People will judge you for marrying too young, too old, too fast, too slow, wrong person, wrong ceremony with the wrong people invited -- the list is endless. And I guarantee you that whether expressed or not, someone who might hear that you were "finally" remarrying would say to themselves that, aha, you never really loved your husband. You just can't win. So do what's right for you. --Bob

DoubleJo, We all bring a certain amount of suffering upon ourselves but we can't be responsible for more than being true to the light we have at a given point in time. Lots of people have whirlwind romances that work out. Lots of people have five year epic engagements that don't. You presume a great deal to suggest that my personal decision to not date Linda longer than I did is an "aha" moment of some kind. Shorter courtships are, all things being equal, riskier, but all things were not equal in this case. I will leave it at that. It's not something I want to go into. For a few blessed years we were deeply bonded and loved well. Whatever issues we had could have been worked out under normal circumstances. These weren't normal circumstances. This isn't about my relationship with Linda and how it did or didn't work out or second guessing something I did fourteen years ago or blaming Linda for how she acted under extreme duress. It's about two responsible adults attempting to find happiness together and running into a mine field. It's about over-estimating what one can reliably expect in terms of grace in the pursuit of happiness. Marriage is a high-stakes game that I don't choose to play based on what I now know and understand about it. Based, in fact, on what I now know, it's not a game I ever would have chosen. This isn't to say married people are chumps, but it's to say it's not for me. I am tired of putting my heart out there and having it broken in the most creative possible ways by a universe that's indifferent, at best, to what I'm trying to accomplish. Message received. If that makes me cowardly or bitter or small or irresponsible, so be it. I don't think so, though. As you've pointed out, my life isn't half bad at the moment. I can scarcely change it at this point without screwing it up. And that, in itself, is interesting information. --Bob

Happily ever after is a fairy tale. A beautiful one, a compelling one, but it is not reality. The problem is that living that illusion for decades it had become a strong motivator because you'd told yourself that this will be your reward for all the work and sacrifice. Please understand I'm not criticizing or teasing here ... there's nothing wrong with you or what you wanted, you've simply drank some kool-aid somewhere along the way, and society dishes up plenty of such things you can buy into. God knows I've swilled my share of kool-aid myself. Who wouldn't want to live happily ever after. If only ... Do we deserve to live happily ever after? Some would say yes. Our founding fathers said that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are god-given rights. However, pursuit is not a guarantee of success. It's just the freedom to try. One would think that diligence would be rewarded. But the problem is, evidence suggests that the distribution of outcomes is in fact fairly random. Even the Bible says god sends his rain on the just and the unjust alike, shows mercy to whom he chooses, etc. As I look back as objectively as I can on the story arc of my own life, I see little direct relationship between the rewards I HAVE received and the effort I actually put into them. I'd like to flatter myself that whatever success I have is the result of my own efforts, but honestly, I can't. Everything I've ever touched, business wise, has turned to gold in the long run, and I can't tell anyone why. There isn't a best selling book waiting to be written about it. On the other hand everyone I've ever loved has suffered and died or gone insane, with, thankfully, the exception of my children. Don't ask me to explain it. It's absurd. I'm not suggesting despairing and giving up. I'm just saying that as near as I can tell it's always a mistake to assume that outcomes you judge to be bad are some kind of punishment or that you are to be personally congratulated for outcomes you judge to be good. The cause and effect relationship there is weak at best. So, we don't have to take tragedy personally and either condemn ourselves or blame god. The older I get the more I realize I don't know much about anything. I have been living my life according to conventional wisdom, religious dogma, rules of thumb, assumptions, hope, dreams and aspirations -- everything but objective evidence. Maybe I need to change that. The good news is I haven't got anything to lose, so I can give it a whirl and see if I enjoy improved outcomes and better peace of mind. Better days to you, --Bob

I am fully cognizant of my blessings and those blessings are why I am not in despair. Those blessings are in fact among the things that have "just worked". That is why they are now getting the emphasis. And why the other stuff is getting the boot. You have to understand though that simply making lots of money and having lots of toys, does not represent my core values. It is one less thing to worry about, and I'm grateful for that, and believe me, fully mindful of all the pain and worry that the lack of financial abundance adds to the struggle of others. But I wasn't getting my jollies from it and I doubt it is smart to rely on doing so now. Such things are fleeting, and I am the sort of person who would be very content living in a studio apartment with a bunch of bean bag chairs for furniture if I could share it with my soul-mate and have some sense that I had a reliable baseline there for everything else. The stuff I actually cared about ... my faith, my family, and doing those things with excellence ... that's all pretty much gone. I can't afford to take on other people's drama and lost causes anymore. That has used me up to no good purpose, or at least for dubious purposes. This is the death of a dream ("love conquers all"), and the greatest loss of all, but it is what the universe has extracted from me and I have to deal with it. Please don't tell me that I'm wallowing in self pity and should be happy because some peripheral things that have never been important to me are going wonderfully. I am not getting what I need from those things and it is going to take me some time to reconfigure so that I either can live like this or find ways back to faith and hope in the things that do (or will) matter to me. But I will by God do it, if only because I am too ornery to let it beat me. I had to chuckle at your thought that I am "trying too hard". That has actually been my problem in life: trying too hard and caring too much, which is why I need to learn to laugh at the absurdity of life. On the Myer-Briggs tests I come out as an ISTP. Their nickname for that personality type is "The Idealist". We make good computer programmers, systems analysts, engineers, firemen and policemen, and ... hit men. LOL! --Bob Ha! Well if you study linguistics you will come to believe that there is no such thing as an unambiguous statement. What does that saying mean by "handle"? We think the natural unforced meaning of it is that we can readily cope with it and still have our peace and joy. I think god's only requirement is, we can endure it and still be standing (perhaps drunkenly) afterwards. God is not a gentleman. I am encouraged though that you can still be p_ssed off. I'm reminded of the words of the centurion to Ben-Hur when he was chained as a galley slave: "You're angry. That's good. Anger keeps a man alive." --Bob

It is something of a paradox to say that life is life and it is what it is and, at the same time, we have choices. I understand the sentiment, and it's fine as far as it goes, but some choices are choiceless choices. In my case, what life is has limited my choices to where I don't find what's left acceptable. I have to completely reinvent myself to go on. New beginnings requires the expenditure of considerable energy. I need to build a fire in the ol' fireplace but I'm out of logs; I used 'em all up in my previous life. So I'm burning the furniture. I don't have any heartwarming platitudes on hand, so I need that Peter Finch, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more" outrage to energize me. It is probably sub-optimal, but it's all I've got. Any port in a storm. I look back on the half-century my life has covered so far and I ask myself, "What has Just Worked? What has flowed to me with ease? What blessings have come to me unbidden?" And on the other hand, "What has Just Sucked? No matter how pure the motive or earnest the desire, no matter how seemingly natural and reasonable the impulse, what has nevertheless been an automatic clusterf_ck?" In other words, if I really, really listen and pay attention, and don't manufacture what I WANT to see or think I SHOULD see, what has life taught me thus far? If life makes any sense at all, it must be trying to nudge me in some direction I've not been going in. So I have become a pragmatist. I go with what works. I eject what doesn't. To do this, I have to fully let go of a lot of illusions. To do that, I need something to get me past the loss of all the mental structures I've built up and lived by for so long, to whatever lies on the other side. So I am doing something I've never done in all the years I've walked this earth. I'm calling on Terminator Bob, so to speak. It's not pretty, but it's necessary. Nice Bob is too used to being understanding and empathetic and accommodating and deferential. I've seen everyone's point of view but my own. I've arranged my life for everyone's sensibilities but mine. Frankly, at the age of 51, I'm not entirely sure what I really want ... other than peace and quiet, which is kind of vague and passive. Pathetic but true. I can't be as ruthless as I now need to be, at least for the present, without going a little overboard in the other direction. I am forced to re-evaluate my assumptions about life, love, god, purpose, meaning ... yech. I seriously don't appreciate having to do this at my age. But I have to. Pardon my dust. And for those who can be Zen through it all, good for you. Be thankful you've got it sufficiently figured out for your purposes. Cheers, --Bob

Conversely, does everything we want to be different in life reflect hubris or selfishness? Does living within limitations of what we can't change mean that those limitations aren't lamentable? Is the mere possibility that one bad outcome prevented an even worse one proof that it did? No, we rationalize after the fact, not before it, because we don't have foreknowledge. Hope springs eternal, and all that sort of thing. It is a good thing that the human capacity for rationalization is nearly unlimited, or we would all go mad. But, we need some sense of outrage to drive any human progress. Some things are just objectively outrageous. There are certain things I cannot and will not accept as my due. I can accept their reality, and acknowledge my inability to fix them, and I can find other things to do instead, and choose what happiness I can find. I can pick my battles and let some things be. But, that doesn't make them fair. To me it is a cop-out to dismiss them as something that will surely somehow come out in the wash. This life is finite. Everything can't be deferred to the sweet by-and-by. I realize that fairness has been given a bad name by whiners everywhere but it is still a valid concept that I'm not quite willing to discount. My idea of "fairness" may be imperfect and subject to my personal bias against pain and loss, but I assume that since I possess this fairly universal human yearning for justice and balance and equity, that I am supposed to do something with it and not just say, "oh, well". DoubleJo, we are talking two sides of the same coin here ... I'm not saying you're wrong, but I do think it is possible to be accepting and serene and still call a spade a spade. To acknowledge and sit with the tension between what is and what ought to be. It's part of the human condition. It's part of what defines us as human, rather than as automatons of fate. --Bob

Good for you! That took guts! I'm glad it worked well. That's a big step in the right direction, kiddo. In my experience people who take care of everyone else don't treat themselves nearly so well. And indeed, in the thick of it, you often can't. Bill would want you to have a long, luxurious vacation. After all those years, you've more than earned it. Cheers, --Bob

I couldn't bring myself to buy and read it, but tonight at the store I browsed through the new biography that is out on Christopher Reeve and his wife Dana. I was dimly aware that Dana (a non-smoker!) had fallen ill with lung cancer but I didn't realize she had died, and just 17 months after her husband, leaving a teenage son behind. On her deathbed, still not giving up, she said that "there is fairness and balance in life". I don't pretend to understand, Wendy, how someone can endure that sort of calamity and still feel optimistic. If I've learned anything, it's that god isn't a gentleman. Someone else, remarking on Dana's passing, told it like it is: life isn't fair, but sometimes it's brutally unfair. I wish I had Dana's equanimity. Or my wife's. I don't. On the other hand I have done my best to let it go, because I'd go mad if I didn't. And I do find to my surprise that letting it go can be done independently of having all your questions answered or all your wrongs righted. But it sure is easier said than done. I'm sorry for your loss. No, not just "that" one but the day to day, hour to hour loss ever since. Peace to you, --Bob

Kathy, Last December 3 would have been our 13th. At that point I was only four months into this solo flight. For some reason I was drawn to a fancy restaurant where we used to have brunch on such occasions. I thought it was going to be horrible, but as I sat alone at that table looking out over the city, I felt almost as if Linda has joined me. It was actually a positive experience as I looked out at all the places we had been together over the years. Afterwards, I bought a big red rose and lashed it to the Ironwood tree in our front yard that shelters my wife's ashes. That rose stayed beautiful for almost a month afterwards. ("The Rose" was "our" song and in anticipation of her death Linda had written me a note, asking me to keep a Swarovski crystal piece in the form of a rose to remember her by). No promises, but can you identify anything or anyplace you're drawn to? If so, meet Bill there in memory and then do something to honor your marriage. It might help more than you'd think. I think it might be a mistake not to tip your hat as it were to some of those sacred rituals that marked your years together. Anniversaries are one of those. I can't tell you how to go about it or even if you should but I'm just tossing the idea out there for what it's worth. It's one of those counter-intuitive ideas that worked very well for me. As for it getting better ... I think we can know real happiness and peace but it has to come in its own time and in its own way and we dare not make any assumptions about what form it will take. I have interesting and enjoyable work and hobbies, good friends, and a much needed time of quiet and rest and healing. Maybe that will become something else eventually. Maybe I'll walk all the way to the clearing at the end of the path this way. Either way it will be okay. It's certainly not my preference but I don't think it need be sterile or sad either. Best, --Bob

I have come to believe, Elizabeth, that anything which causes suffering (not pain, but suffering -- they are not the same thing) is giving you very clear information that it is something you need to let go of and eject from your life. There aren't many hard and fast rules in life but this, I've found, appears to be one of them: if I'm suffering because of X, invariably, regardless of the apparent cost or unthinkable-ness of it, getting rid of X is exactly the right thing to do. (It's important of course to correctly identify X). Do I understand correctly that you're concerned about your murdered friend's eternal destiny because they did not make a particular profession of faith? If so, let me dispense with my opinions and ask a rhetorical question. Even if Derek is right and your friend is eternally separated from God now, is that not a matter between your friend and God? What can you do about it? Nothing. That train has already left the station. So agonizing about it is pointless. To agonize about it is to argue with God about how HIS system works, and that's a fool's errand. You will suffer the rest of your life with that ... unless you let go of it. I've said it in this space before and I'll say it again. Letting go doesn't mean you approve, or like it. It just means that you are letting it be as it is. This is the basis of the "serenity prayer" that you probably know very well: you want to accept what you can't change, change what you can, and know the difference between the two. In the case of your friend's soul, there's nothing you can change now, whether the person's consciousness currently resides in heaven, hell, or Palm Beach. To what purpose? Elizabeth, your thoughts and you are two different things. There is a surprising amount of power in observing a thought as it arises, and simply saying, "Huh. That's just a thought. It's not me. I don't identify with it. I don't choose it." Don't let your thoughts run you. Recognize them for what they are -- things that arise and go and that you can choose to identify with or not. Then have some standards about the thoughts you choose to entertain. There is no point in deliberately indulging these violent, dark thoughts and imagining what it was like. You absolutely need to let them go. You aren't helping your friend and you are hurting yourself. So then you were mistaken to believe that the source of your suffering was lack of information or investigative closure. Deal with the real source of your suffering, which is letting your thoughts run you because you don't wish to accept that what happened, horrible though it was, happened. What would you feel like without those thoughts? If you would feel better without them, then quit choosing them. I am not saying they will instantly vanish -- they have a life of their own by now because of habit and by reason of your over-abused limbic system getting stuck in a rut. But I promise you that if you quit being a victim to your thoughts and detach from them they will gradually leave you. Don't fight the thoughts ... that will strengthen them. Observe them clinically and let them go. "They are just thoughts ... they are not me". Try it; you haven't got anything to lose. Get professional help if you need to, or take up a meditation practice or take a few days off to break the vicious circle, or whatever you need to do. Right now your thoughts are a roving gang of thugs beating you to a pulp because you're allowing it. Don't feed them. Go ahead and enjoy your quilting on its own merits. If your heart tells you that it has become obsessive / compulsive or an excuse to escape from something you need to deal with then back off some and throw something else into the mix and don't neglect facing into the pain when you sense it's what you should be doing. Facing the pain is fine. It hurts to lose someone you love. It hurts to lose your sense of safety and innocence and to feel violated and to see someone you love receive the ultimate violation. You have to work through the pain, but you do not have to suffer by insisting that what happened didn't, couldn't have, shouldn't have, wouldn't have. It happened. Things get better, not worse, when you allow that and admit that. We don't always get all the answers. Sometimes we didn't do our best. Sometimes the person we lost didn't do THEIR best. Nearly always, we never did everything we wanted to do, said everything we had on our hearts and minds, did an adequate job of communicating our love, or spent nearly as much time with them as we wanted to. Almost always, life refuses to go as we wish it would or thought it would. Alas ... it is what it is. It's okay not to try so hard, Elizabeth. It's not your job to make it right. Some things can never be made right. But you still have a life and a future. It isn't the life and future you planned on. It never is. You can still make the best of it. I don't want to even risk facing my wife when I die and tell her that I whizzed away all the years after she died pining for her and the old days together such that I never had any joy again. She would think that was the crowning glory of all the dumb things I ever did, not to mention a complete disrespect for what her life and example was all about. And she'd be right. Linda always asked, no matter what the loss, "what now?" and then did it. At the end, at one level you could say her whole life was sh_t and not worth it, but to the end, she chose the thought, "I had a good life" and pointed to her many accomplishments ... not at how much harder than everyone else she had to work to achieve them, nor at all the things she lost along the way. Even now, I still want to impress her by having a good life ... anyway. Honor your friend by being happy and well, --Bob

Methinks you are correct. I also think that in regard to the woman who was happily married with children whose father had died peacefully / normally after a long happy life -- two years ago -- his remark was also a bit superficial and smug. Yes, objectively she was the person in the room who should have least felt grief. But she was obviously feeling it, because she was, after all, there. It wasn't right to say that she had no reason to be there -- that she was just "taking up a chair". Bottom line, I think his whole family stumbled into a gathering of older / older fashioned ladies and it wasn't really what the family needed. Mom was probably right to pull the plug and do something else. Of course from that experience the guy is now an authority who can write articles about grief [sigh]. --Bob

I don't know what to make of this article I just stumbled upon but it's s rather interesting point of view. www.oprah.com/omagazine/200807/omag_200807_men_d.jhtml It's written by a guy. His observation is that men tend to vastly over-estimate their independence and end up as pathetic train wrecks when their wives die, whereas women tend to fight their way back to normalcy when their husbands die, surprised, apparently, by how much they had UNDERestimated their ability to cope. I guess I can see how these things might be true of the generation now about 70 plus years old -- because men tended to unnecessarily do everything for women and women tended to mother their men. I'm not sure that's so true anymore. Interesting, at any rate. --Bob

I'll always remember Linda, too. That's our job, Kay ... to bear witness to and remember a special life. It's not the other folk's job, at least not to the degree it's ours. They're going to mostly forget. We aren't. We all want to be remembered when we're gone. That's what we're doing for our late partners. They needn't have worried about whether they would be forgotten, eh? (()) --Bob

For me, things got a lot better when I was able to accept my wife's death. The insight that was key for me is that acceptance doesn't equal liking or approving of it. Acceptance is just not rejecting your loss as reality and obsessing on the death as if doing so could somehow change that it happened or make it seem smaller. Also acceptance is NOT the same thing as forgetting your partner or not loving them anymore. It is simply accepting the fact of their death. It is, you might say, the end of "NOOOOOOOO!" I can now say "yes, it happened". Once I can do that, then I can begin to ask, "now what?" So much of the wasteland of misery that is grief is being trapped and unable to do anything to respond to the loss. Once you can start to respond realistically, you can start to feel better. When you stop to think about it, when we first start out we MUST reject most of this new reality because it's way too much to digest. Gradually, we can accept more and more of it. The need, for instance, to blame ourselves, God, the doctors, or even our deceased partner eventually fades. We no longer need a throat to choke. There are other aspects to it as well. But this is something you can't rush or do at anything other than your own pace. However, it may help to hold it in mind as a goal. Of course, you have to define "better". I define it as "less suffering". That isn't necessarily the same as "easier". It may come as a surprise to you that the level of suffering hasn't got much to do with how different or how much more difficult it is living without your partner. I still miss Linda, and my life is totally different, and continues to change. But I am not in agony over it any more except for brief flickers here and there. It's like a lot of things in life that aren't easy ... it's just there and you cope. But you can still experience life positively, experience new things, etc. I could tell you that I started really gaining ground at "X" months and felt like I was substantially established in my "new normal" at "Y" months but that really doesn't mean anything for anyone but me. Every situation is different. My guess is 6 months is the very earliest most people could expect to see some genuine easing of suffering, and getting to a place where the loss does not color your every waking thought. But even if you experience some relief that soon, it will be spotty. And it wouldn't be unusual to take 12 or 18 months to start finding your way back into the land of the living. It wouldn't be rare to still be stuck at 18 months and need to seek help to get unstuck. Hang in there and give it some more time -- be patient with yourself. It won't get easier but it will get better. --Bob