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.
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?
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.
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.
