The Things We Say

On a Saturday night two months after Mark died, as I sat in our once lively house that was now deathly quiet and lonely, I thought that if I spent one more minute in it I might be tempted to set it on fire. It wasn’t the craziest thought I had except for the fact that I imagined setting it on fire with me in it, so I grabbed my keys and drove to Target. It wasn’t much of a solution to all that was wrong but it was a distraction. On the way home I got pulled over by the police. I had no idea why until the officer came to the window and asked me if I knew that I was driving without my lights on. I did not, nor did I care, but he did and so he took my license to run it to see if there were any warrants out for my arrest. I sat in the car with my forehead resting on the steering wheel and thought that I should be arrested for my husband’s suicide. “It was on my watch,” I’d tell him, “of course I’m guilty.” I got a warning that night and thanked him because that’s what you are supposed to do when you’re pulled over instead of screaming, “Where were you two months ago when I could have used a warning? Why didn’t you or anybody else tell me that the lights in my husband’s eyes were going out and he was in trouble?”

So much of the first year after Mark’s death is missing from me but there are pieces of it that I am starting to remember. I called off work three times. The first time I said I had a sore throat and my boss told me to feel better, the second time I said that I was either getting the flu or food poisoning and my boss told me to feel better, the third time I said I was too sad to get out of bed and my boss told me to take care of myself. I’ll be okay tomorrow, I texted back, because isn’t our productivity the scale on which we judge ourselves? Be useful, be busy, show up, produce something even if it’s shuffling papers from one side of your desk to the other, but I was too broken to be any of those things.

Every day was a monumental effort to get to work and do my job, to take care of all the paperwork that accompanies death, to figure out my health insurance, a car alarm that kept randomly going off, a dishwasher that wasn’t working, a dog that was neurotic. Some days I’d come home and realize hours later that I had not taken my coat off. I always felt cold, empty, and lost, and a thousand times I told myself the same thing.

You are pathetic.
You need to get your shit together.
You are damaged goods.
Who could possibly love you when you can’t even get yourself out of bed?

In the last month I have completely redone the upstairs. I painted, moved out of the bedroom Mark and I had since we bought the house, bought a new bed and bedding, new nightstands, lamps, and switched over closets. I could not walk into the room we shared for so long without being completely engulfed in sadness. I spent two years in it alone and never slept. In the process I went through every thing in Mark’s dresser. I saved some of his favorite bike jerseys and every one made me cry. I went through his socks, underwear, and tshirts. I made stacks of save, donate, ask the kids if they want. I told myself that what is left of a life isn’t reduced to what fills a black, plastic garbage bag, that it’s okay to sift through it all and keep what is meaningful, that letting go of most of it isn’t letting go of his essence, that a life without Mark is still a life and making everything a shrine is an unhealthy tribute to something that no longer exists.

When I think of me two years ago it makes my heart ache. I want to cup that face that sobbed over and over and tell her that she was shattered, traumatized, and in shock. That the life she had and loved had collapsed due to the person she trusted most in the world, that he didn’t mean to do that to her and she wasn’t responsible for it. I want to tell her that every day she kept herself alive she was productive enough, that nobody will ever understand her loss but her, that healing will take the rest of her life and most of that arduous and unrelenting work will go unnoticed by everyone, that one day she will be able to open the drawer that held his socks and see her tshirts and it won’t make her feel like throwing up.

I want to tell her that loss is brutal and misunderstood, that timelines for grief are meters of bullshit, that what should be set on fire are the words closure and new normal, that she will find her way back to herself and it will be unpredictable and take a very long time, that everyone is damaged and has wounds that are bandaged, and if staying in bed all day will stop the bleeding then that’s what needs to be done.

Mostly I want to tell her that she was never pathetic, she wasn’t supposed to have her shit together, that she would have to relearn how to love herself and it wasn’t going to be fast or easy. She was going to have to sit in the thick of her sorrow and it would terrify her most days, but if she didn’t do the work it would hide in all the cracks and the rest of her life would become stagnant and without meaning.

And if she were to allow that to happen, if she never gave herself permission to move forward from the anguish and the loss, how would life ever be able to unfold and surprise her as it always had?