When Grief Also Means Healing
How do you mourn someone who was a huge part of your life, but who also left you with emotional scars?
I knew him for over half my life. We traveled the world together. We went for umrah (lesser pilgrimage to Mecca) together. We raised my son together — for a while at least.
We were married. It was a tumultuous, messy, complicated relationship. We separated and got back together twice. Our last separation was final, but we both hesitated to obtain a formal, legal divorce, and he asked me to come back, at first overtly and then more subtly, again and again. I knew it was impossible.
No one brought me joy like he did. No one could make me cry like he did. He knew just what would wound me and sometimes just want I needed most. He was my anchor, my knight in shining armor. He was the one I had to escape from. He was the only one who could make me feel utterly worthless.
Since our final separation, he was a dependable friend, an advisor, a periodic nuisance, and the one who loved me despite everything. He never forgot to call on my birthday or my son’s birthday. I will miss that, even though I don’t celebrate birthdays (one of the thousand things he never learned about me), and at the time it was annoying to hear him sing “Happy birthday to you. You belong in a zoo. With… and (insert his name here) too” as if we were both seven year olds.
I will miss being able to call him when there is some family or personal emergency and knowing that he will find a solution or find someone who can help. I will miss him offering to drive me to the hospital and stay with me before surgery and insisting on reading the medical report afterwards.
In case this all sounds rather one sided, he also depended on me for emotional support and advice. He called and talked for an hour when his older sister was close to dying. He said no one else would understand like I did. What he never seemed to grasp was how much I cared for his sister. I was comforting him and my own heart was breaking at the news. She was a exceptional, wise and honest woman — a once in a lifetime person. In his own way, so was he.
His death last week from Covid19 brought me a final release — like it or not. His death has left me emotionally blown like a leaf in a windstorm. There is a great sense of loss, fear- I am now essentially alone in a foreign country, and also emotions I thought I had already dealt with, memories of half-forgotten incidents in our marriage and things he said that pop up, demonic ghosts demanding that I deal with them now or lose sleep… this will all take time to work out. As I write this I just feel emotionally exhausted.
I made myself half sick with worry during his brief hospitalization and then completely sick from grief. Legally, I am his widow now- less than that and somehow more than that. The condolences I’m receiving feel strange and uncomfortable.
My public mourning has been only three days, our tradition, but my healing and moving on will take some time. I am taking each day and each day’s emotions as they come.
