GriefHope

Help for today & Hope for tomorrow

Why is a woman looked upon with suspicion (or worse, pity) when she [fill in the blank] by herself.  I don’t mean to assume a victim mentality, but why is it ok for a man to dine by himself, see a movie, or, God forbid, go into a bar and have a drink by himself?  Why is a woman incredibly pathetic or looking for trouble when she does the same thing? 

I am so bored.  Down to my very bone marrow.  Is that completely awful?  I know – I’m supposed to be mourning and don’t ever doubt for a moment that I am.  Every minute of every day.  Twice on Sundays.  But the snow is beginning to melt and people are emerging from their winter hibernation.  I look around and life is happening everywhere around me.  People laughing, talking, fighting, going about their lives.  They’re out for walks, they’re riding their bikes; they’re outside sitting at tables drinking coffee or sipping wine.  They’re celebrating milestones and making plans.   I feel like I’m treading water.  I have to keep moving my arms and legs or I’ll drown.  I keep moving them, but I don’t get anywhere.  Like I’m waiting for something and I don’t know what that is.  It’s an incredibly lonely place to be. 

Shortly after my husband’s death I was bombarded by a number of very dear, well-meaning people asking me questions and urging me to make decisions.  “Are you going to sell your house?” “Are you going to keep working?”  “You should move back to” the small town where we raised our two boys.  “Why don’t you come and stay with us for a while?”  No, no, and hell no.  What I really needed was time and space.  These people love me and they just wanted to support and nurture me during the difficult times I was facing.  There were just trying to help, but it didn’t help.  Trust me, there were plenty of decisions to be made all at once.  But these sorts of things were not among the urgent ones.  “They” say that you should not make any major decisions for a year after a loss like mine.  Seriously?  Have “they” ever experienced a loss?  Do “they” even know what that means?  There are a TON of decisions to be made.  Would he have preferred to be an organ and tissue donor?  Yes.  I know he had a card.  What kind of service would you like?  HellifIknow. Music?  Cremation? What to say in the obituary?  What to tell his kids.  

What do I tell the boys?  How do you tell someone something like this from the back of a pickup going down the highway in the middle of Montana or North Dakota or wherever the hell we were?  Unfortunately, I couldn’t reach my younger son, so I had to send his pregnant wife to hunt him down and deliver the bad news.  Not the ideal way to receive this information.  My older son described my style as “ripping the band aid off.”  I guess I didn’t know how else to do it.  In all fairness, I was in shock and there is no good way to tell my son that his father has just inexplicably died.  So, I had to sit and listen to his grief with my cell phone clutched to my ear.  Just waiting for it to pass enough so that we could make plans.  What I really wanted to do was stop the truck, get out, scream out to the heavens, “how DARE you?”  Roll around on the ground and kick my feet.  This is not right.  I wasn’t there.  I haven’t seen him for 8 days and now I will never see him again!!  But no, I had to take care of business from the back seat of my father’s pickup truck.  With an audience.  On a cell phone.  Awesome. 

And now what.  I have started to go out and do things that I want to do by myself.  It annoys me when the ticket seller at the movie looks behind me, as if to identify my companion, and asks, “Only one?”  Yes.  Just one.  Didn’t I just ask for one ticket to Move XYZ?  What about it?  I see movies that I want.  I go out to dinner occasionally when I want and walk in and boldly request a table for one.  Yes, that’s right.  It’s just me.  I can’t decide which is more humiliating; having them remove the other place settings from the table so that it is obvious to all who pass that I am dining alone, or to leave it and have it appear that I have been stood up. 

Screw it, I’ll sit at the bar. 

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