Riptide

A few weeks ago I was telling my therapist about something that was in the works that was causing me some distress. It has been my lifelong habit to worry and what if most problems, events, or decisions. Never did I what if my husband dying by suicide, and if you can’t predict that someone you’ve known for forty years was capable of that you should probably throw that worthless stash of what ifs off a cliff. Even so…..

“Is your worry because you feel like you’ll have to wear a mask too long?”, she asked me. That was absolutely it. The mask is my daily grief accessory, the one I wear to show the world that I am rising from the ashes of Mark’s death, the one that people see and tell me that I look great and seem to be doing just fine. Once inside the house, though, it gets flung off as quickly as a pair of too tight shoes.

After Mark’s death the outpouring of love and support was overwhelming. I was in shock and would stay in shock for months and months, but these days as that has slowly worn off I often feel at my lowest point. All around me life goes on as it always does, but I am stuck on that September day when my whole life went up in flames and I couldn’t see through the smoke to know who was actually living and who was dead. I was told that it was Mark who was dead, but how come it felt like I was too?

Since then I have checked all the boxes of recommended things to do when a traumatic death occurs, even doing meditation at night so I can sleep more than a few hours. But the morning light delivers the same sad as regularly as the alarm clock, and so I put the mask on when I walk out the door so that I don’t scare everyone with my dazed look of loss.

Before Mark’s death, my image of healing seemed much like the yellow brick road. Just follow it, do what you’re supposed to, and you’ll get to the Wizard who can grant your most fervent wish. But real healing shows up as a desperately needed tourniquet and I.V. that gets administered many times a day, and just as often gets yanked out unexpectedly by a song, a conversation, a sunset. It’s sailing through the morning believing that you’re doing okay, that just maybe you’re going to be happy again one day, and then you’re in your car and you turn the radio on and it’s Science Friday. You pull over because you’ve heard your husband talk about the very thing you are listening to and dig your phone out of your purse to text him and stare at the last thing you sent. Are you okay? Please call me. I’m so worried about you.

It’s the 4th of July and the floodgates of every happy memory of that day burst open from the backyard picnics at your parent’s house when you were dating, to vacations, to the neighborhood cookouts with your three kids. You never expected that this day would make you so sad, but the flags, and parades, and sparklers would intersect with the ten month mark of when your husband died and you are flattened by it. Friends are expecting you at their cookout but you are fighting against a riptide of grief, the power of which is scaring you until you remember that you have to swim perpendicular to the shore or it will carry you away. In over your head, you know that pulling yourself out of this will be entirely dependent on you, and arriving at a cookout with a salad and a smile will be one of many unnoticed acts of bravery in this new and complicated life.