A TERRIBLE-BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURE

Reconnecting
A Companion to Twice Widowed

After You Read

You have just read Reconnecting.

I didn't mean to disconnect in the first place. By then, people around me were noticing things I didn't entirely understand myself. Sarah worried that I wasn't taking care of myself. Jeffrey noticed enough to quietly prepare an Epsom salt bath for me. I knew I was behaving differently. I knew I was losing time. I knew my ability to think and engage with the world was not what it had been.

What frightened me was not knowing whether the detachment would become permanent.

What Does Care Look Like?

People who loved me wanted to help. Sometimes they noticed something before I did. Sometimes they offered what they thought I needed. Sometimes people said things that were awkward or unhelpful. Suffering can be difficult to witness, particularly when there is nothing another person can do to make it stop.

I understand that better now. People don't always know what to say or do in the presence of another person's suffering. They may reach for advice, encouragement, explanations, or something positive because they care. Sometimes what they offer helps. Sometimes it doesn't.

I don't have to be angry with someone because what they offered wasn't what I needed. I can have grace for the attempt. But I don't have to take the advice either. Someone else's idea of what I should need, how I should grieve, or what ought to make me feel better does not have to become another expectation I must meet.

I was already disoriented enough. I didn't need to be derailed further by trying to become the grieving person someone else understood how to help.

Making Grief Palatable

I knew it was difficult for people to watch me struggle. Sometimes I tried to make that easier for them. I could talk about my grief in a way that put a positive spin on it. I could reassure people. I could try to make what was happening to me more comfortable for everyone in the room.

In Hawaii, I began to sense the cost of doing that. I wrote that if I talked too much or tried to put a positive spin on my grief, I might forfeit connecting with myself.

I didn't need to make my suffering more palatable. I needed room to experience what was actually there. That didn't mean everyone around me had to understand it. I wasn't always sure I did.

Going Home

I felt drawn toward Hawaii.

I couldn't have said exactly what I expected to find there. It simply felt safe to me. I didn't know what I was looking for there. I only hoped that being somewhere that felt safe might give me room to find out.

I arrived without plans because I didn't know what being there would do to me. I didn't know whether those memories would comfort me or tear me apart.

Both happened.

But something else happened too. I began to experience ease.

Life had required so much from me while I was trying to absorb what had happened. In Hawaii, for a little while, some of those demands eased. I slept for nine hours on the flight. I picked up my camera again. I helped Nancy renovate. I wandered. I spent time alone and with people who loved me. At the North Shore, I sat down thinking I would read and discovered that I didn't want anyone else's words. I listened to the ocean. I slept.

There was room for me to unravel a little without having to immediately pull myself back together.

None of those things was a treatment plan. They were simply what happened when some of the demands around me quieted enough for me to experience whatever came.

An Environment That Doesn't Judge

Years earlier, Nancy had given me something I would later describe simply as an environment that doesn't judge. She did it again in Hawaii.

In the middle of installing a backsplash, removing hardware, or painting a cabinet, I might feel an emotional snag. A random memory would find its way through some crack I hadn't known was there. Nancy would stop and hold space for me.

She didn't have to fix what was happening. She made room.

There is a difference between caring for someone and deciding what that person ought to need. Care can offer. Care can notice. Care can sit beside. Care can ask. Sometimes care gets it wrong.

But care begins with the person who is suffering.

Going Back to the Places

Soon I felt ready to revisit the Hawaii Darrell and I had shared.

I went alone.

I drove around Oahu, returning to places where we had lived and where our family had taken shape. Some memories came easily. Others didn't.

One of our old houses looked just as I remembered it, yet somehow felt fake, as though I were remembering someone else's story. I didn't linger.

Then I stopped at Makapu'u Beach, where we had taken our last family photograph in Hawaii. I remembered the ridiculous argument Darrell and I had while getting ready for the photo shoot. We had both failed to pick up the flowers and leis, and we were late.

I smiled.

The argument belonged to a younger marriage. We had tried hard to be successfully married in our twenties and had not yet learned how to give one another enough free air. But that habit had not followed us forever.

For once, the memory didn't hurt the way I expected it to.

Both Memories Were Mine

And then another memory found me differently.

A song came on, and within minutes I was pulled to the side of the road, devastated. Darrell was dead. We had died. The pain was physical enough that I wanted the world around me to stop.

The peaceful memory had been real. So was this.

One did not cancel the other. The smile did not prove that I was moving beyond grief. The collapse beside the road did not prove that I had gone backward.

They both belonged to me.

Reconnecting

Something began happening during those weeks that I had not known how to make happen. I began encountering parts of myself again: photography, design, curiosity, humor, family, friendship, memory, adventure, reading, the ability to concentrate long enough to finish a book, and the desire to write.

Some encounters felt wonderful. Others hurt terribly.

I continued visiting the homes where Darrell and I had lived. At one of them, I remembered climbing onto the roof with friends to watch shooting stars. Other memories came alive - the children playing, Darrell fussing with his flowers, papaya and banana trees, meals, friends, the little family we had been.

Those memories could now sit beside the painful ones.

I wrote: "It was me, all me."

Reconnecting did not mean returning to the woman I had been before Darrell died. Nor did it mean leaving her behind. I wasn't assembling myself according to a plan.

I was encountering myself.

The woman who could enjoy an old memory was me. The woman devastated by a song was me. The woman picking up her camera was me. The woman who sometimes wanted only the ocean and silence was me.

More of me was becoming available to me without the grief having to disappear first.

Perhaps that is what I most want to leave untouched. Not a formula for reconnecting. Not a list of things that helped me that you should now try.

Just what happened.

I had disconnected without intending to. And, little by little, in ways I hadn't entirely arranged, I encountered myself again.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

What has felt different lately without needing it to mean anything about where you are in grief?

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