A TERRIBLE-BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURE

The First Year
A Companion to Twice Widowed

After You Read

Coming home from Europe felt like running into barbed wire. I had experienced moments of beauty, curiosity, and enough light to imagine that something in me could still respond to life. Then ordinary life did what ordinary life sometimes does: it arrived carrying more than one thing at a time.

There was the mountain house Darrell and I had shared, and the need to leave it. There were finances I now had to understand. There was my father declining. There was work I desperately wanted to keep alive. There were other family needs and losses. Then my own body demanded attention.

I was grieving Darrell inside all of it.

Grief Does Not Arrive in an Empty Life

My grief for Darrell did not have an empty life in which to unfold.

Life kept arriving. Each new circumstance brought decisions to make, problems to solve, people who needed something from me, and things that simply had to be done.

For a while, being almost superhuman felt unavoidable.

I don't mean that I actually was. I mean there seemed to be no room not to function. Things had to be handled, and I was the person there to handle them.

Sometimes what looked like strength was necessity. Sometimes I had access to remarkable capacity. Sometimes I was simply doing the next thing because the next thing could not wait.

Grief was becoming cumulative.

One loss could contain other losses, set new ones in motion, and then be joined by circumstances that had nothing to do with the original loss at all. They did not become one grief. But they occupied the same life, drew upon the same body, and required something from the same person.

Still Functioning Inside the Chaos

What continues to surprise me about that year is how much I could still do. I packed. I moved. I worked. I dealt with practical problems. I fought for my nonprofit. I became absorbed in historical storytelling again. Even while I was ill and could barely speak without coughing, working with Alison could make me feel alive.

Functioning did not mean the chaos was not affecting me. I was functioning inside the chaos.

That distinction matters to me because competence can hide what a person is carrying, including from the person herself. I had energy for what had to be done for a long time. Then, eventually, I did not.

Nothing about that made the previous strength false. Capacity can be real and still have limits.

Meeting Myself Under the Load

I was learning things about myself too.

I had returned from my travels with a kind of calm I had not known for some time. Then life seemed to shatter it almost immediately.

I felt resentment. Anger. These were not feelings that had dogged me through my life, and I didn't particularly like meeting them in myself. But there they were, no matter how I tried to push them away.

There was so much that required something from me at a time when I was already carrying so much. Some of it was simply what life required. Some of it felt deeply unfair. And sometimes I resented having to keep treating what everyone else needed as urgent when my own life had been shattered too.

Looking back, I don't think those feelings told me who I had become. They told me something about what it was like to be me under these conditions. I was encountering myself in circumstances I had never lived before, simply meeting more of myself. I didn't yet know what I would eventually make of that.

The Myth of the Ordinary

Near the end of that first year, I wrote a list to Darrell of the curious things I had learned. Some were funny. Some were painful. I knew I could be frightened into panic. I knew I could be embarrassed by weakness. I knew I was not invincible. I faced these things with courage - for now. I knew connection mattered to me. I knew ordinary minutes could matter more than grand theories.

And there was something curious - and even encouraging - about realizing that I had endured all of this and was still halfway intact.

I thought the utter chaos was finally over.

For good.

There was almost a whew in it. I think some part of me secretly believed I had earned a reprieve, although I could not have said it that way then. Surely life could not ask much more of me now.

After so much turmoil, I wanted what I called the sanctuary of the ordinary.

I wanted life to stop escalating long enough for me to inhabit it.

I assumed it finally would.

A Quiet Truth to Carry

A Scribble of Your Own

How much am I actually carrying?