an essay i wrote early February 2024

Reflections on how the worst things are also the best things.

At 12:15AM on January 25th, 2015, I was awake. I don’t recall why I was up or what I was doing. The telephone rang. It was a nurse from the Palliative Care Residence where my husband had been admitted four days earlier. She said Your husband has passed away. You need to arrange to have his remains removed first thing tomorrow. Be here in at 7AM please.I called his closest friend to share the news. And even though it was, obviously, not unexpected, the feeling of shock was still overpowering. I put a movie on TV. I fell asleep eventually but woke early. When I arrived at the Residence, they told me they’d lit a candle in his room, and I needed to go in. They do this because seeing the body is sometimes necessary for loved ones to fully understand, accept, that their family member is gone. That the body that remains is just a body. 

Kierkegaard said life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards. I’ve done a lot of looking backwards in the past few years. In the immediate aftermath of Mike’s death, I continued my life as it had been. On autopilot, like a car shifted into neutral, the momentum kept me going. A fly on the wall would have thought nothing had happened. It took ten months before that phase ended. I cried for the first time in October. When it hit, it hit hard. I felt I had lost everything. My entire life had been taken away from me. I spent the next two years in a deep hole, alone with my dog, dealing with her sudden health crises. I had lost my husband; I was not going to lose my dog. He had left us both - left me with this precious, innocent life to guard, and I would not let her go. Looking back, I believe the urgent demands preserving her life made on me, saved my own life. What I recall of those days, aside from frequent desperate trips to the vet, is a cycle of endless walking, wandering together through our postcard neighborhood; sitting by my backyard firepit in the summer, or the blazing woodstove in the winter; drinking quantities of scotch; and weeping. Loudly, messily, with no inhibitions. 

Eventually I emerged from that bubble of grief. I went back to school to do another degree. It provided structure, and a goal. Tears continued to spring up at the oddest times. From nowhere, it would hit me. I would cry for a few minutes, then stop, and get on with the business of the day. It felt like it would never end. I was afraid I would cry forever. I was more afraid I would not cry forever. The idea that a day would come when the thought of him could no longer evoke enough sadness in me to bring tears to my eyes was heartbreaking.

When the pandemic hit, and I went through my own brand of upset related to that, once again, I felt the abandonment of the person who had been my protector, my partner. Everything turned upside down; I had a permanent sense of being in the twilight zone. The world I had believed I lived in was suddenly shown to be a mirage, and what was revealed in its place was terrifying, and I was all alone in it. 

My personality also changed, dramatically. During the seventeen years we’d been together, I was an easy-going, fun-loving dudette. In retrospect, this was due, largely, to being in that state of ‘together-ness.’ My main desire was to have enough pot to smoke and beer to drink, good tunes to listen to, and as few demands made on me as possible. Within three years of his passing, I had turned into the opposite. My threshold for anxiety was dramatically lowered. I would worry about everything, panic at the drop of a hat. The glass windowpane in the backdoor shattered? Panic. Lawnmower not working? Panic. My patience for dealing with physical objects diminished so much it effectively disappeared. Can’t get the sprinkler working? Throw it violently against the wall and curse at the top of my lungs. Confession here – I got so frustrated with an update on my iPhone that caused a problem, I took a hammer and smashed it to pieces. I wondered if I had Intermittent Explosive Disorder. I was seeing a therapist for while after Mike’s death, and when I told her about this, she said Of course you got so angry you smashed your phone, your husband just died. 

My school experience also revealed a major personality change – and not for the better. I was getting straight A’s, but constantly terrified I might get a B. Terrified.Since the school offered free counselling, I went. The psychologist, with her Ph.D. wisdom, explained very rationally that since some of my grades depended on the subjective assessment of the professors, (for example with papers, as opposed to exams, which have right or wrong answers) it was not within my control; therefore, I didn’t have to worry about it. I went to a psychologist because I was having anxiety about grades, and she literally told me that I didn’t “need” to have anxiety. This is the equivalent of Bob Newhart’s Stop It Therapy. It was the very fact of it not being within my control that was utterly intolerable. A desperate need for control was what drove me to get all-A’s in the first place. I could not allow one single morsel of course material to elude me. 

When Mike died, it was as though the hand of God came down, grabbed up the life I had chosen, the life I had built, and just tossed it aside. The feeling of disempowerment was so complete it’s left me with a permanent inability to deal with things that are out of my control. Achieving that piece of the Serenity Prayer – to accept the things I cannot change – seems out of reach. Without that, without the capacity to look at things I have no power to change and shrug it off, and say, as I see others do, there’s nothing I can do about it so no point being upset, true peace of mind will forever elude me.

Losing the one element that had given me a sense of validation also had the effect of plunging me back into the space I’d been before meeting him, of never feeling good enough. The background and family environment I came from demanded success in a very limited range of careers, and I failed at one after another of these. I was the proverbial fish who spent its whole life being judged on its ability climb a tree. With no innate sense of self-worth, being wanted, loved, and accepted by the man who became my husband was what allowed me to finally feel ok. Which was lovely for the seventeen years we were together but evaporated as soon as he died. Since then, I am, once again, never good enough.   

From an experiential perspective, these changes are universally, intensely aversive. So how can it be that the event that caused all these deeply distressing changes is simultaneously the best thing that ever happened to me? 

Passing the nine-year mark of losing my husband last month, it occurred to me for the first time to imagine who I would be right now if he had not died. I did not like what I saw in that vision. 

While I spent most days drinking heavily during that first year, by January 2016 I realized that wasn’t a wise lifestyle choice. It got me over the shock, but it didn’t solve any of my new problems. The first thing I did to assuage the overwhelming feeling of being value-less was make the decision to lose weight. In the movies, when the protagonist reaches rock bottom, they start working out. I didn’t know how to build up emotional strength, but I knew I could develop physical strength. Maybe emotional strength would follow. Maybe not, but I had no idea what else to try. I succeeded. Over the course of 18 months, I took my BMI from 26.5 to 20.5. I am as healthy and fit as it is possible to be, and I do love how that feels. And whether for better or worse, it is one area of daily life where I can exert total control, most of the time. 

As painful as it is to confront the demon of low self-worth that slumbered while my husband provided validation to me, at least now I have a chance to meet it head on. Make the attempt, marshal my courage, and try to overcome it. Engage in an honest effort to do something that uses the talents and interests that I should have recognized as a teen or young adult. To learn to swim instead of trying futilely to climb that tree. Mike loved me, but, like my parents, didn’t care one whit whether I was self-actualized, in the Maslow sense. He worked, and I had to as well, at whatever job would best pay the rent. If he hadn’t died, I would still be employed at that same horrible job that I hated. I would still be eating crap and smoking pot, instead of running marathons and working on a query letter for my first manuscript.

There is an understandable tendency to want to idealize a lost partner, and the life one had with that partner. Some part of me wants to be able to state, unequivocally, that losing Mike was The Worst Thing That Ever Happened To Me. If only he hadn’t died, everything would be hunky-dory. If only he hadn’t died, life would be perfect. Somehow, it would be more comfortable to believe that. 

When I think of the ocean of tears I’ve cried for that loss in the nine years past, it strikes me as disloyal to even take one step away from the belief that if he was still alive, things would be better. My life would be better. I would be better. More than disloyal. It would dishonor his memory. And he was a good man. 

There are many ways I feel that losing him has made me worse. I don’t like how inflexible I’ve become, how dependent on sticking to my routines, maintaining tight control on as many aspects of life as I’m able to. I don’t like the fact that I seem to have lost my ability to just relax and have fun, enjoy myself, be happy. But if I try to imagine the counterfactual, who I would be if Mike were still alive, what my life would be… The woman in that alternate universe appears to the me-I-am-now as asleep. She is probably happier than me. And yet, despite that, I still would not choose to be her. The feeling that losing my husband is the worst thing that’s ever happened to me is unquestionable. It’s also the best thing that ever happened to me. I don’t know how to reconcile that paradox. But I can’t deny it’s truth.