A TERRIBLE-BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURE

Dad, Death and Disconnecting
A Companion to Twice Widowed

After You Read

You have just read Dad, Death and Disconnecting.

At the end of the previous chapter, I wanted what I called the sanctuary of the ordinary. I thought perhaps life had finally stopped escalating.

It hadn't. Dad died. The future of my work became uncertain. And by the time of Dad's funeral, something was happening to my mind that frightened me. Thoughts stuck. Sentences disappeared before I could finish them. I could move from engagement to detachment with surprising speed.

I had spent much of the previous year functioning through circumstances that would have been difficult even without grief. Now I was having trouble relying on one of the things I had always relied upon most: my own mind.

But Dad's death brought something else into view too. It reminded me that grief itself is not one experience simply because we use one word for it.

A Different Kind of Grief

My father's death was not like losing Jeff or Darrell.

I loved Dad. There were fishing trips, baseball games, boats, camping, and Sunday barbecues. There was his generosity and work ethic. There were his infrequently spoken but real words of love.

There was also emotional absence. Disappointment. Hurt. And the little girl in me who still wanted something from her father that he had never quite been able to give.

When Dad died, something else died with him: the possibility that our relationship might someday become what some part of me had continued to hope it could be.

In the memoir, I called it "the sadness of concluded hope for deep engagement."

That grief was different. With Darrell, I was grieving a living, reciprocal love that death had interrupted, along with the future we assumed we would share. With Dad, I was also grieving something that had never fully existed and now never could.

We can grieve what existed and what never got the chance to exist.

That taught me something about the word grief. Every grief does not ask the same thing of us because every relationship did not give us - or leave us - the same thing.

Previous grief can give us experience with grief without giving us experience with this grief.

And the person receiving the loss is different too. Not even my own grief could become my template. The woman who lost Dad was carrying a different history, living under different circumstances, and already holding other losses.

We bring to grief a soul in flux.

When Death Leaves Something Unfinished

Dad's funeral was filled with forgiveness. My brothers and I were able to hold his shortcomings alongside his humanity. We didn't have to pretend the painful parts hadn't happened in order to remember the good ones.

Looking back, I see another dimension of that experience. Death ends the possibility of mutual repair.

The person who died cannot come back and explain something differently, acknowledge an injury, apologize, change, or participate in a relationship that becomes something it had never been before.

Some relationships therefore leave behind conversations that death has made impossible to finish. We may find ourselves carrying both sides - the hurt and the explanation we never received, the anger and the answer we wish had come, the love and the disappointment that lived beside it.

My experience happened to include forgiveness. Yours may not. Forgiveness does not have to become the price of having a future. It does not require calling an injury harmless, making the dead innocent, or making ourselves responsible for completing what death left unfinished.

Sometimes grief asks, How do I live without this person?

Sometimes it also asks, How do I live with what can no longer be repaired?

Those are not the same grief.

When Strength Wasn't Enough

While I was encountering one kind of unfinishedness with Dad, something else was becoming unfinished in me.

For months I had been remarkably resilient. I had tended to Dad, secured his long-term care, moved households, unpacked decades of belongings, bought and renovated a home, worked, traveled, created, and kept responding to whatever came next.

Then my thoughts began sticking. This frightened me partly because being capable had become one of the ways I recognized myself.

Dr. Joy listened to everything that had happened and told me: "You are strong, Lorrie, but not Wonder Woman."

She saw accumulation where I was still trying to see individual problems I ought to be able to handle.

I had spent much of my life believing that we don't know the end of our strength, that weakness need not define us, and that setbacks don't have to stop us.

Those ideas hadn't been false. They had carried me through a great deal. And now they weren't carrying me through this. I eventually wrote, "My previous mantras worked until they didn't. They didn't."

A truth can be real without being the last word.

Then and Now

There is a practice in this companion called Then and Now. This is one of the places where I recognize its roots most clearly.

Something can have been true, necessary, or useful then and no longer contain everything that is true now.

That doesn't make then foolish. And now doesn't have to be wiser or better.

I really had been strong. I really had possessed extraordinary capacity. I had evidence of it.

I also had evidence now that something was happening to me that strength could not simply overpower.

I wrote in my journal: "Funny thing, I do trust my capacity in one hand as surely as I fear my incapacity in the other."

Both were true. Perhaps what frightened me most wasn't simply that I was having difficulty thinking or creating. Those capacities belonged to the way I knew myself. When I could no longer summon them as I once had, I lost another familiar way of recognizing me.

Loss can reach into more than our relationships. Sometimes it reaches into the very things we have depended upon to know who we are.

When One Loss Lives Inside Another

At the same time, I was fighting desperately to hold onto my historical work.

From the outside, losing funding could look like a professional problem. It was. But it wasn't only that.

Darrell and I had built that work together. He had believed I would continue it. I had imagined it as part of the life that would carry forward after him.

When it appeared I might lose it, I wrote that it felt as though Darrell were "being ripped out of my arms once again."

The losses weren't all the same. They didn't become one grief simply because they occupied the same life. But they could reach into one another.

The threatened loss of my work held the possible loss of something Darrell and I had built. It held part of the future I had imagined. It held something I still recognized as mine.

No wonder I couldn't experience it as merely a change of plans.

Sometimes what we are fighting to hold onto is carrying something else too.

Disconnecting

Eventually I began pulling away. I limited calls. I didn't open some messages. I worried about what this withdrawal said about me.

But by then I had spent a long time treating capability as evidence of who I was.

Perhaps my diminishing capacity didn't need to become evidence that I was someone else. Perhaps it was information about what I was carrying.

I had wanted the sanctuary of the ordinary. Instead, life had brought another death, an unfinished relationship, threatened work, cognitive changes, and another encounter with a self I did not entirely recognize.

There wasn't one lesson hiding inside all of it. There were simply more things that were true than I had known how to hold at once.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

Is there something that was true for you once that does not feel like the whole truth now?

A word is enough. A sentence is enough. Or take more room if you need it.