Good Grief

I am not an expert. Instead I learn on the job.

Grief has many angles. Grieving takes place in different directions even in bipolar situations where a husband loses a wife. Remember that people don't only grieve for themselves; they also grieve in lieu of the departed. Substitute grief. I do, too. Especially when I look at photos of Lara in bad times (the Intensive Care Unit, her last weeks here at home, the days around her death) I feel this huge surge of pity and compassion. She didn't deserve to suffer like this (does anyone?); she was a good kid. I weep for her pain, discomfort and stress over so many months. Besides, she had her future stolen from her. She could have lived another twenty years (her mother died at 89) and planned to, in fact. She had projects and ambitions, travel plans, books to read, poetry to write. Having fun, enjoy, make love. Now all of them are snuffed out, along with her potential and her beauty. I weep for the amputated part of her being.

There is no monopoly on grief. It is not only about surviving partners and their loss. Even where one partner loses another, the grieving is not bipolar. Many people grieve over the same demise. Siblings, other family members, friends, anyone else dear. A bond between two friends of long standing can be every bit as strong as that of a marriage partner. The ensuing sense of loss will be commensurate. I learn that I shouldn't just wait to receive their sympathy for my loss, but that I should also reach out and commiserate with them for theirs. Both are real, both are authentic. There is benefit to both sides; for a burden shared is a burden lightened.

Your own grief is closest. You need to metabolize it, says Janis. You need to chew it up, says my mother, still remembering the death of my dad, twelve years ago. You need to eat the mask, says Lara in her last poem. That is ultimately a very personal endeavor. Nobody can do it for you. I understand many people never manage to, and agony is preserved for life's remainder. But it takes a long time in any event, even if it wears off.

Here, too, you grieve for different things in parallell. You grieve for the memories that have no sequel but should have. Yes, reminiscing has benefits, as you rejoice in reliving the good times. But the reckoning is in the realisation that the good times won't return. You remember her idiosyncracies with a smile on your face, even the quirks that used to irritate you perhaps. They are followed by a deep sense of emptiness, once you tell yourself she will never show them again. You engage in substitution here, too. (Lara used to spray a whiff of Chanel on her inner left wrist, then rub her wrists together. Her bottle is in the living room and sometimes, intensely, I find myself repeating the ritual.)

Retracing common footsteps, especially where happy times were poignant. Foreign travels. You retrace because you want to remember. You go there, even if you don't want to be reminded there will be no reprise. Still, you do want to go to those places, instead of shunning all of them at your own loss, adding injury to injury. (I will take my summer holiday in Vieste, Italy, where Lara and I have spent two vacations. I will even stay in the same hotel. It will be a mixture.)

Companionship. You may take it for granted, like I used to. You go through life together as if it will never end. You accept the other's presence as a matter of course. You do things the two of you (is there any other way?). You don't stop to think how precious it is. Togetherness falls away sharply. There is nobody at your side, or across from you. Here, again you may substitute some of the time, by seeking the company of others. It isn't the same, it isn't continuous and it certainly can't be permanent. You have become, in my case, a widower. You live by yourself. A void opens up as soon as a period of time has passed that is longer than any spell of separation you would normally accept.

No intimacy. We have had plenty. It is the ultimate form of self-affirmation through somebody else. It is mutual and habitual - and it can be wonderful. Regrets may surface once the other person vanishes. They did in my case. Why didn't we stay in each others' arms all of the time, instead of only some of the time? Here, enhanced by regrets, the sense of loss is most intense. And it won't go away until you've learned to love again.

Grief is self-pity. Or should I say self-compassion? At least in part. You grieve about yourself, too. You feel sorry for yourself. You are by far the most conflicted person, or so you would like to think. Poor me, a fresh widower with fresh grief. One partner from a strong couple, now left to his own devices. What am I to do?

The above description of my own experience is probably not complete. I am no expert. Experts have invented 'the wheel of grief' and other approaches to encompass all of grief's many facets. You can check them out. There are phases in grief, differently defined. I have no idea what phase I am in, or whether the progression is steady and irreversible. (Three steps forward, two steps back?) And I don't aspire to do it by the book. The only desire I have is that it be circumscribed, and finite. I will take it one day at a time, one bout of sobbing at a time, one lit candle at a time. 

Grief is inevitable. Grief is hard work. It is also the only way of getting on with your life. Lara may have been robbed of twenty-odd years of her life, yet I may well have twenty ahead of me. Who's to say? Grief can get me to make something out of them - just as Lara would have wanted. Grief is good.

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All the readers of this blog, whatever the level of your sorrow, I thank you for your empathy, your loyalty and your support for Lara. Please stay in touch with me. I will try and return the pleasure.

Blossom

Excruciating not to receive answers to questions I am posing to Lara. Or spontaneous comments from her side. I hate the silence, and miss the quick repartee.

What one needs to remember is that over a period of almost nine months, Lara and I lived together without interruption. Before she turned into the hospital anew, at the end of March 2012, we would talk to each other the whole day. Every thought or impression worth vocalizing was communicated back and forth. We would do things together all the time - shopping, the movies, the gym, family visits, friendly dinners and what not else. At least a hundred times a day we would check and verify something between the two of us. She was always there, available to engage.

I miss the immediacy of her presence. Although: this past weekend, when in Germany, I had a conversation with her. As it happened, I had walked out of a dinner onto a public square, because inside, unpredictably as always, emotions were getting the better of me all of a sudden. I didn't want to embarrass myself, or the company at the table, most of them unaware of my recent loss (barely two weeks).

Of course, I have to be careful. Anybody can conjure up an imaginary conversation with somebody else in his own mind, even with an imaginary person. If you do that on the spot, the speed of the conversation may not to be as high as in real life. It is like playing a game of chess against yourself. You have to constantly twist and turn; it slows you down. And that was precisely the difference. There was a voice in my head, Lara's voice, from before she became sick, and I was silently talking to her, or maybe muttering to myself. Remarkably, the answers from her side came much more quickly than I could think them up. I didn't have time to imagine them. We even interrupted each other as we normally would have in a real-time exchange.

The conversation was strikingly banale, due to the hapless way I approached the opportunity. I was unprepared, caught off-guard, but even so. "How are you?", I asked. "I am fine, don't worry about me", she said. And so it continued for several minutes. But the point was more in the contact than the content. The very fact that we were even talking like this, that was the rich part! It was totally unscary. No goose pimples as people easily get when in a spiritual encounter. The experience was reassuring and satisfying in a wonderful way.

That was once. Silence reigns again.

And with silence, doubts crop up.

Why is she not talking to me? You read of dead people appearing to their loved ones. I haven't received a visit! Why not? She's been dead for over three weeks! Isn't there some sort of deadline, I chuckle? Did I do something wrong perhaps? Is she angered or displeased? In her enlightened state, has she gained insights that make her less loving towards me? Has she turned away from me perhaps? Could I still face her?

These doubts are part of grieving, as I know from helpful counselors. But knowing that they are is not enough. They still eat away at you. I dismiss the thoughts rationally, but in my heart I stay worried. I call up friends of ours, dear to Lara in particular, people she has confided in, who have known her for much longer than I have. I ask them to reassure me. Did she truly love me all those years? Did she trust me? Was I measuring up to her? Did I make her happy?

Deep down I believe I know the answers, but I need to hear them with unimpeachable conviction. Friends do reassure me. Lara's love for me, they say, was deep and unwavering. Even when she was mad at you, she once said, she still loved you. Her love for you, they say, was unconditional. One said, that the only aspect of reincarnation that interested her was whether you and she would be together again. She was just happy she would not lose  you. Lara told Yasmin: "I want to be with Opa." (see "More Signs") Proof positive.

What about trust, I ask? Lara, by her own account, I knew, had trust issues since a very young age. Friends are unanimous: her trust in you was unshakable. She knew you would always be there for her, stand up for her, find her wherever she would end up, and come and get her. She believed you were both faithful and loyal. And yes, you were a la hauteur, no doubt. Lara, a woman with a sharp mind, would never have married anybody with a peanut for a brain.

And, yes, you made her a happier person. She was not before you two met. In fact, she was deeply unhappy. But we saw her getting more and more complete and balanced as a person as she grew into the marriage. And on the rebound, you became happier, too. We saw it. You had a wonderful relationshp, they claim. Most of all, says her oldest friend, you gave Lara the freedom to blossom. And she did.

I smile through my tears. What more assurance do I need?

Regression

How to be a widower? How to grieve?

People are not prepared for it, at least not the first time around. I still have to roam the Internet to see if there are any 'how to' books about it. There must be. Given the market, it is hard to imagine that, by now, someone has not made an attempt to make money over one. Instead, starting the day of Lara's cremation, I referred to trusted people who had all lost a wife to cancer, as recently as last summer. (Lara and I went to her funeral.) I tried to learn from their experience, and I probably did, if only because they were able to empathize with natural ease. The atmosphere was thick in all three encounters, but gratifying.

One of them, a former colleague from the Foreign Service, had a remarkable comment. He had followed my blog daily, and more recently viewed Lara's photo album. I told him she and I had been true soul mates. He nodded in recognition, and then went on to say that we "probably already met in previous lives". The statement, slightly startling as it was, was offered not as a speculative one, but as one of fact. Impressed by his self-assured poise, I asked him if that is really what he meant, and he said: "That is what I believe, yes."

Then he started telling me about the writings of Dr Brian L. Weiss, a Florida psychiatrist, who published his first book some twenty five years ago. I had never heard of the man. My friend gave me one of his books to read, his third actually, entitled "Only Love Is Real'. I took it gratefully home, started reading at 6:00PM and finished it at 3:00 in the morning. The next day I read it again. Then I quickly ordered three more books through Amazon, by express mail, and read those as well, including Weiss' first book, titled "Many Lives, Many Masters".

Why were they so fascinating?

Weiss is a Colombia and Yale trained physician. His medical education had followed orthodox lines and his psychiatric training had been by-the-book traditional. He practiced, taught and published widely, building up a solid career as a therapist and a nationwide name among his fellows as a scientist.

Then, one day, a patient walks into his office, a young woman by the name of Catherine. She has all kinds of problems and describes herself as a 'mess'. None of Weiss' standard methods work over many months; her symptoms persist unabated. Frustrated, he then tries hypnosis in order to look for traumas earlier in her life that might explain her present condition. Still standard practice. Nothing truly dramatic turns up even as early as her third birthday.

But at the next session, seeking to explore what lay in the period around her birth, he gives her an open-ended instruction: "Go to when your problems began!". Catherine in a way overshoots the runway, and starts describing herself as a woman in Egypt, four thousand years ago! Many accounts follow from different lives, some fifteen or twenty, out of 86 she has lived so far according to what Catherine says in trance. Her present condition improves and all of her complaints eventually disappear.

Weiss tells he didn't want to believe what he saw happening in front of him. He calls himself a sceptic and at that point he certainly didn't accept reincarnation. But he saw no alternative way to interpret the facts he was witnessing in his very own office. He tapes her statements, has the tapes transcribed, adds his comments. But he waits four years before publishing, for fear of being ridiculed by his peers, and afraid to lose his position and financial security in the process. Then he publishes his first book and it sells two million copies over the next 25 years. Since Catherine, Weiss has treated thousands of patients with this so-called regression therapy, going back to their earlier lives. Many other psychiatrists and therapists now do, too.

The books evoke a coherent view about the relationship between, soul, body, life, death and the hereafter, in which serial reincarnation figures prominently. The overall view takes in free will and destiny, immortality and transitoriness as well. The books elaborate on empathy and compassion, but above all, love. (Why did it remind me of 1 Corinthians 13?). They tell about how people experience death and rejoin the origin of their souls, before being born again into a next life. 

Patients recount their stories under deep hypnosis with great lucidity and a sharp eye for detail. Some patients acquire documentary proof that their stories check out. Some even stand at the grave of a person they once were. Most benefit from the therapy, in that their contemporary problems disappear.

They also tell of soul mates, but not in the colloquial sense of the term (and in the way Lara and I liked to hear ourselves described). Soul mates, in the Weiss' overall view, are two souls who keep running into each other in different incarnations but in different relationships over time, even different genders: not only husband and wife, but also sister and sister, mother and daughter etc.

I find reading those books exceptionally uplifting, for they offer a construct that is much more plausible (strange as it may sound) than the one emerging from the catechism by which I grew up. (In fact, early christianity accepted reincarnation, until all references to it were deleted from the New Testament within the first three hundred years.) Had I read Weiss' works before Lara went to her death, my tranquility of spirit would have been greatly enhanced compared to where I found myself now. I am also sure that if Lara had read these books, she would have derived greater peace of mind from them. Instead, she relied - a little half-heartedly perhaps - on the mere strength of her own conviction that life ends at death. 

Having read these books, I now find it easier to be at peace with Lara's death. One, because I feel she is living on in another dimension until she is ready to assume a next life. She is not really dead, in other words. And two, because I am certain that the two of us will meet again in a future incarnation, just a breath away.

Saying this, I run the risk of being seen as soft in the head. "Poor man, fresh widower, his emotions frazzled, groping for any form of solace; no wonder his mind is rambling." True, I would be prone to connecting the dots without looking at the numbers.

And still, and still and still.

Missed Chances

Between Lara and myself, we have both lived longer without each other than together. Lara was 38 years old when we first met, I was 45. Since then, we were a couple for some twenty years. We both had lives behind us. I still have one in front of me; she no longer does. I am 66 now; she was 59. I have only known her for about one third of her life.

Although that encapsulates our situation mathematically, it doesn't reflect the preponderance of our years together. The twenty years we were granted on earth as a couple, for both of us, were the richest by far.

As probably most couples do who are united later in life, we lived in the present with an eye on the future. Information on what came before, was never exchanged systematically, and awareness back and forth remained episodical. Stories were exchanged which allowed to gain an impression of the 'grandes lignes' of the two lives before our life together, but knowledge was never complete; nor did it need to be. We fell in love the way we found each other in 1991, and how we each got to that point was of lesser import. There was too much else going on in our lives. Good things.

Photographic material was scarce either way. Lara didn't have many pictures as testimony of her first 38 years; what she did have, she showed to me. I had a lot of material but to this day have failed to reclaim it with my ex-wife; so Lara never saw it.

Lara was a poet, and educated as such (see "Luggage" in the previous blog). I know precious little of her exploits in that regard, as she was always brief in talking about it. In a leather binder which I found the other day, I came across poems dedicated to people who must have meant something to her: a Pam, a Lisel, a Joan. I have no idea who these people are and what indeed they meant to her at the time. I could ask friends of Lara's who are still around, but the point is: I cannot ask her. 

Several times a day, I follow the same reflex when stuck for an answer about something, but she is no longer around to give me one. From here onwards, whenever I still want to find something that belongs to her, or find out about her, will inevitably be a matter of reconstruction, and second-guessing. Some things will never be known. So many things occur to me now which I should have asked her when she was still with us, but which I failed to put to her over her final weeks at home. I realize now that for all of the time since doomsday (17 April), the day she received the devastating verdict of her impending death, I have lived in a continual state of constricted consciousness. I guess it is a form of denial which shrouded me as a survival mechanism. I wasn't prepared to absorb the enormity of what was about to happen: losing my soul mate. Siblings and kids saw I was 'out of it'. Of course I should have told her things or asked her things that now I no longer can. I missed my chance while it was in front of me, overwhelmed as I was. There I have regrets. They only occurred to me a few days ago, after I had regained some of my usual self again.

Or perhaps I should be satisfied that, just before she went under, two days before she died, I asked her the habitual question - one I must have asked her hundreds of times, about validating her feelings for me. I posed it as I was stretched out beside her on what had become her death bed, our heads joined together, holding hands. "Do you still love me?", I asked. And she gave me the habitual answer, unwavering, with resonating profundity as usual, completing an exchange immensely reassuring in all its brevity. What more is there to say or to ask that matters, really?

"Oh yeah!", she said.

I Know A Lovely Rose

Tuesday 26 June

Since a few years, I own a Bechstein. This is largely due to Lara's insistence.

We were visiting Stockholm from Vienna; I think it was in November 2008. About a year or so before that, while still Ambassador to Sweden, I had bought a restored grand piano, Bechstein too, for the residence ball room. It came from a piano store on the borough of Sodermalm, about a 15 minute walk away. This time around, since we were staying in the residence as guests, I of course tried out the piano. Vis-a-vis Lara I lamented the fact - for the so maniest time - that I had made the bargain deal on behalf of the Embassy, instead of purchasing the instrument for myself, a long held wish.

So why don't you give the store a call, Lara suggested. I doubted the chance that at that precise moment they would have a second-hand Bechstein on offer, and told her so. What were the odds? But she kept insisting. (It later turned out she'd already called the store and knew for a fact that the odds were actually looking a lot brighter than I thought.)

So finally I phoned the store. They had not one but two in their shop!

Lara and I speed-walked over there rightaway, around five o'clock, dark already since hours, trying to beat any competitor who might steal my piano before I ever got to it. I bought the larger one (a 'B' of 211 cm in length), dating from 1941, in fine shape. After refurbishing, it was home-delivered in Vienna, a few months later.

I would doubt the odds a second time.

A day or so before Lara would come home from the hospital this last time, I made arrangements for the piano to be tuned. The date was set for 7 June. At the time, I was resigned to the fact that, following all predictions, Lara would have passed away by then. After all, she was sent home on 24 April with only two or three days to live.

Suddenly the day of 7 June had arrived, and the tuner presented himself at the appointed hour. I'd forgotten all about him. Lara objected to having the piano tuned in her presence, and rightly so. So I sent the tuner away; shocked, he more than understood. I didn't dare make a new appointment until after she had actually passed away, since she had continually beaten the odds, ever since 17 April. Lara lived an amazing 57 days after having been given up by her doctors!

I played the piano for her from time to time during her final weeks at home, including some of her favorite pieces. Particularly soothing among them was a traditional Swedish hymn, which we both cherish as one of the finest melodies ever composed, imbued with sweet melancholy. Jag vet en dejlig rosa. I know a lovely rose. Listen to it using the following link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPnN_zDwKng

The tuner came this morning.

More Signs

Saturday 23 June morning

Yesterday afternoon I needed a dictionary from Lara's office book case. As I took it out, I noticed a motley leather binder behind it, holding a stack of white pages (at least 75) covered with machine script (manual type writer) and edited in pencil in Lara's handwriting. Upon inspection it turned out to be poetry written by Lara ten years before we first met. Lara had always been reticent to show me her own poetry - why, I do not know. It was a side of hers that during our twenty years together remained woefully underexposed, at least to me. It felt as though, now, she wanted to divulge this aspect of her being to me, without having to account for it.

Our granddaughter Yasmin (going on 5) came to the breakfast table this morning with a story to tell, a triumphant glint in her eyes. Oma Lara had paid her a visit during the night! Oma sat down on the bed, she told her parents, and her hair was long. They were speaking Dutch together. Lara had something to tell her, and I recognized her syntax in expressing them at the level of a five-year old. As it turned out, there were four messages. "I want to live." (Ik wil leven.) "I want to be with Opa." (Ik wil bij Opa zijn.) "I miss you very much." (Ik mis je erg.) And: "I will see your mam as well." (Ik zal je moeder ook zien.)

My daughter made her repeat the story two more times, and Yasmin held the line. Then asked her if she had been afraid. No, was the answer. Lot asked if it had been a dream ("images in her head"). No, Oma was there.

Still making the family rounds. Lot seems to have a visit coming.

Signs

Staunch as she was a disbeliever of God and a life hereafter, astute so she was a lawyer hedging her bets. There was enough awe in her - or should I say apprehension - of what lay beyond demise, for her to engage in speculation, keeping her options open enough to allow  the unexpected to happen. She was not afraid of death so much, knowing in her mind that 'passing on' would amount to the be all and end all. It was more the process of dying and how scary it would be. In her heart she cherished the idea of - beyond the chasm - seeing her dad again, and mine, too. She agreed to giving off a sign to us mortals who stayed behind, to tell us that she had safely arrived on yonder side. A lawyer myself, I made her promise she would not scare the wits out of me; a clap of thunder would be a tad over the top, I intimated as a point of reference. She got it.

Lara went about it in a sophisticated manner, multiple in form and diverse in location. "Doing the rounds", as my family in California phrased it. Had we expected anything less of her? Of course, to a cynic, all manifestations of the so called transcendental, would need to be submitted to Occam's razor, a law of logic which holds that the simpler explanation of any phenomenon is likely to be the true one. Being the romantic that I am - and still wildly in love with my wife, or "SWILWY" - takes me, I grant you, to the opposite end of the scale. Certainly in my present state of frayed emotions, I would be inclined to engage in connecting the dots without looking at the numbers. Anything that could possibly be interpreted as a manufactured sign from beyond the chasm, would be recorded and acknowledged as such a sign, even welcomed.

With those caveats, what have we got? (And I am talking about a family who collectively believe that when their father died - Howard - he caused a double rainbow to appear in locations as far apart as San Francisco and Hawaii.)

As for my personal experience, I think of the teardrop that appeared in Lara's eye after she had passed. Popular belief has it that the dead don't cry. Yet she did. That one little droplet is of deep consolation to me, whatever the medical odds would be in manifesting itself. I will keep it hors de competition.

The winner sofar is an incident that is incontournable, as the French say, or something that no one could possibly ignore or deny. It concerns a 14-months old baby, my granddaughter Madelief, who in the middle of having her diaper changed, focussed on something or someone behind her mother off to her right. Asked what she was looking at, the baby said "Lara" - the first time she had ever said that word. Both the baby's father and mother got the goose pimples when they realized what had just happened; and so did I being told about it over the phone.

In second place, is Leslie's beehive. I will quote her own rendition of the event:

Some strange events occurred during Lara’s passing. We have a bee hive in our roof, and have had for around 5 years. The day Lara came home from the hospital, the hive split, and the small hive left behind appeared to fail over the next couple weeks, falling silent and declared ‘fin’ on the day before Lara passed. I climbed up on the roof to check it out (see if there was honey for me to harvest) but as a dedicated chicken, I ‘forgot’ to do it. On the day Lara passed, millions of bees emitted from the hive in the roof, MILLIONS. It was like watching that stuff come out of the Dude’s mouth in that Tom Hanks movie: The Green Mile.

In third place would be Christine's turkey. Again I will let Chris tell the story herself:

David and I have a 'game' of sorts that is like "Where's Waldo?" We came  across a peacock in the middle of no where just in the road as pleased as can be with itself. Very strange and we decided, though the showy peacock is male, that it was indeed Lara in all her finery. Charlie called 3 days ago and said that a peacock landed in the back yard of his father's, strutted around and then after a bit just took off. Knowing where they live, it would be just as unusual to see one at Ed and Connie's house. We again, said "ah, there's Lara making the family rounds", wondering where she will turn up next.

In fourth place I would put my own experience during the send-off in the crematorium, where through coincidence or otherwsie, a tear drop and a drop of blood (produced by a thorn on the rose of love) landed on Lara's coffin and rode with her into eternity. It didn't occur to me in the moment (slow as I am), but only later as I rehearsed the whole episode in my mind.

In fifth place is Leslie's story about the bird. Here's what she wrote about it:

Before Lara started the chemo, a bald-headed stellar blue jay started coming by every morning.  Bald, but otherwise large and adorned is a beautiful coat of various blue feathers.  When Lara passed it stopped coming.  I have never seen it since.

And she adds:

Then, of course, there was Lara’s voice in my ear saying “ We’ll always have Paris”...which is a really sort of a funny, amusing, expression for Americans in a certain cultural vernacular, which we share. But we actually did have Paris, and you were there too.  These things. (I remember it well, for it included a dinner at Fouquet's on the corner of Champs Elysees and Georges V.) I don't know how long deceased people stay connected, but we should be prepared to receive more signs as we go along.