Autopilot

One of the things that I'd learned in a social psychology class back in college is summed up in a simple statement: Robots Are Good. Our teacher explained that this means that most of what we do in our day-to-day lives is done on autopilot. Here's a couple examples of that. When was the last time you had to stop and think about exactly how you go about tying your shoes? If you're like me, I learned to do that as a kid and, ever since, it's just something that I do. I don't have to think about it. I don't even really have to pay attention to it. I take hold of the laces and then—magic happens—and my shoes are miraculously tied. Most of the time when I”m doing that, I'm thinking about something else entirely, like what else I need to clean up in the sink or which load of laundry needs to be done next or wondering what work will be like. No real thought or attention necessary.

Here's another one. How often during the day does someone ask something along the lines of “How's it going?” or “How're you doing?” When was the last time you had to stop and think about the answer? With a lot of people, it happens when one or both are walking by. There's not a lot of time to give much of an answer, and some we don't really want to tell what's really up. So there's an autopilot response along the lines of “Doing all right” or “Fine, you?” Depending on who's asking, the answer may be more or less formal. But most of the time there's not much thought that goes on with that. Heck, when thought does come up with that, it's usually when someone we like and trust has asked, and there's stuff on our minds that we've wanted to talk about. That's not usually the case, though, so the autopilot gets us through.

I'd run across another idea from a psychologist I talked to. He said he'd read up on some research that says that the brain keeps changing throughout our lifetimes. The nerve cells make new connections as we learn new information or habits. They also break connections for things that aren't true or aren't parts of our lives anymore. During a fairly normal life, those changes are small enough that they don't really mess with the rest of how the brain works, so we don't even notice them happening. At most, it might be if we're having to learn a new computer program or process, spend a lot of time on it, and then feel a bit scattered afterward. That usually doesn't last long, and either getting some rest or doing something familiar will help smooth that out again.

However, when there's a really big, traumatic change, the brain's got to do a lot more work to adapt. In the case of losing a spouse or a child who's still at home, that's a major change. They're the people who we use to help define who we are and what our lives are about. I can't help it's something similar to someone suddenly being blinded in an accident or losing a limb or being paralyzed. If you've never done so, stop and think about one of those people around you now, the ones who're there pretty much every day and affect a major percentage of your life, especially what's important in your life. Maybe they're not huge everywhere, but they affect almost everything. Your kid might have nothing to do with your job or where you work, but I'd bet there are a fair number of days when you've got to think about what time you need to be out of the office to pick them up or get something for them or be home for a birthday party. If it's your spouse, odds are you have the same thoughts about an anniversary or a date night or figuring out who'll cook dinner or even just remembering what you were asked to buy at the grocery store. The effect on our lives is pervasive and it's a great deal larger, deeper and more profound than we tend to realize.

When they're suddenly gone, all of those neural connections associated with them need to get rearranged. Remembering what my wife's favorite foods were is no longer useful if I'm stopping at the grocery store. Thinking about what time I need to leave work to maybe she and I can spend time together suddenly serves no purpose. Being aware of what her work and sleep schedules are so I know when to be quiet at home isn't a useful function anymore. If anything, all those serve to do after her death is remind me she's gone. And so the brain has to rewire all those connections.

When it's a massive rewiring that needs to happen, one of the things that goes on at the same time is that the autopilot doesn't work so well. See, the autopilot is using a lot of the background resources we don't usually realize are getting used. It's similar to how your computer is able to keep the clock accurate (or at least in theory does so) that you check in the corner of the screen. On the other hand, if your computer's having to do a bunch of other stuff at the same time, say running a major virus scan and defrag your hard drive AND update your operating system, all of a sudden those automatic functions don't work so smoothly or well. Things freeze or skip or jump. With a computer, it's always only doing one thing at a time, so it can put things on hold until it's got time to get back to them.

Our brains don't work like that, though. Our brains run lots of processes simultaneously, and the parts running one process are often interconnected with parts running at least one other, often more. So if one thing is getting scrambled, it makes another part shudder or jump, too. When it's all working well, there's enough redundancy that it's covered and we don't even notice. On the other hand, if the brain's having to do massive rewiring of connections, then all of a sudden that autopilot doesn't work so well anymore. We find ourselves walking into a room and not remembering what it was we went in to get. One day, I got to my office and realized I'd forgotten to put on a belt (which doesn't exactly look good in an office setting). I'm sure my cat didn't mind the one morning I was so scattered I fed him three times. On bad days, I know that my wife and I had a long time together and there are a lot of memories as a result...but I can't get most of them to come up at all.

I don't know of any way to help hurry or smooth the process along. I wish I did. It just helps sometimes to know that I'm not really losing my mind. In a very real sense, my brain is knitting itself back together, bit by bit.

I just wish it didn't take so long, or hurt so much. But that's better than the alternative...to never heal at all.

Who Am I Now?

One of the things that doesn't often get recognized about losing a spouse is that grieving the death is only one part of the process. There's a ton to deal with in there, and it can take a long time, especially when it's sudden or there were unresolved issues or conflicts. In the case of a suicide, both sets of aggravating factors are there. There's anger about what they did and what we're left to deal with. Often, there's question about what we did (or didn't do) that might've played a part in the choice they made. We wonder why we weren't enough, or why they didn't ask for help. Sometimes, there's wondering what's wrong with us that we'd choose someone who'd do that or wouldn't see it coming or wouldn't be good enough to stay and try for. And those just scratch the surface.

A whole other dimension to it is when we get to the point of having to figure out who we're going to be now. When you get married to and live with someone, a decent-sized chunk of identity gets based around that relationship, around having that person around in your life. It's pretty much inevitable, and, for the most part, it's a good thing. From that comes learning how to compromise, how to think of what's important to the other person, how to look at what's good for the relationship and not just what we want at any given time. It creates the tension, sometimes, of the conflict between what we need and what the other person wants. We get the chance to learn how to communicate, how to hold our own boundaries, how to figure out what it is that is really important to us. Those are things we don't always have to learn, especially not in that kind of intimate and consistent context.

And suddenly that other person isn't there anymore.

On the one hand, it can create freedoms we didn't have before. We don't have to think about what plans someone else might have for a given evening. We don't have to consider how he or she might react if we're going to go hang out with a friend they didn't like. We don't have to stop and figure that finances have to get discussed before going ahead to do something. Even simple things change. We don't have to pay attention at the grocery store to get the kind of soda or lunch meat or toilet paper that they preferred. We can play the radio on the station we want, as loud as we want, when we want. Or, just as valid, we can have it quiet when we want it quiet. But that freedom can be scary at times, too. The longer we were with someone, the more time we had to develop the habits around their needs and preferences. If there were things they took care of, the freedom to make those choices for how to do it now are coupled with the responsibilities, too. It might not seem like much to decide whether to pay a bill right on the first or to wait a few days until the paycheck's come in to cover it. Added to all the other things, though, and even those little extra responsibilities can quickly feel overwhelming.

It can take a long, long time to figure out how we want to do things, how we want them to be, how we want to be ourselves. It's a pretty major shift to go back to just thinking of what we want. In areas where we'd decided they weren't all that important and made some significant compromises, we might not be used to even thinking of what we want. Suddenly faced with that option, we can find ourselves drawing a blank...and then feeling fucked up in a new, special kind of way. Aren't we all supposed to know what kind of music we like? Where we'd want to go for a trip? What kind of job we want to have? Where we want to live? Those things that are “normal” suddenly feel alien, and sometimes leave us wondering what the Hell else is wrong with us that those answers don't just pop into our minds when the question comes up.

The psychologist John Bowlby wrote about something like that in describing the model he put together for grief and dealing with loss of loved ones. The third stage, which he called Disintegration, is where we have to go through the process of dismantling all the beliefs and habits built up around having that person in our lives. By extrapolation, the bigger a part of our day to day lives that person was, the more work there'll be to do there. The final stage, which he called Reintegration, was where we start building new beliefs and habits to replace those we had to let go. He gave rough estimates of how long each could last, and the final one was projected to take at least as long as the others, if not longer. It was the one where the guess was most tentative, acknowledging just how much there could be to that process.

This all got highlighted for me earlier today in, of all places, the shower. See, in the latter years, my wife had developed sensitivities to any kind of chemical or synthetic scents. It meant that I ended up switching to the natural shampoo and deodorant that she could tolerate (and I didn't find too annoying or offensive or flowery). She'd also gotten increasingly irritable about noise in the house, especially anything that was unexpected. One of the things that meant was I stopped singing in the shower (which I'm sure some would say was a kindness to humanity, but that's an issue for another post). It hit me today that I could buy a different shampoo if I want to. That raised the question for me of whether I'd kept buying the natural, herbal stuff after she died because I prefer it or if it was just the habit of those old compromises still playing out. I also found myself singing in the shower, at least for a bit. I couldn't do it in the goofy voices I once enjoyed, or intentionally mangling the lyrics for comedic effect. But at least I could sing a couple things that I liked and, for the first time I noticed, was able to enjoy it. It brought up some of the other stuff, too, like some guilt about enjoying singing now and wondering if it had really been worth it to give that up. But it was a step in the direction of working those issues out for me.

I still am not sure where I want to live. I still am not sure where I might want to work. Hell, I'm still not sure about the whole dating thing. I just have to believe that, like many of the other things I've faced, that as I keep working on it, things will get clearer. Until they do, it helps to remember that this is a long, uncomfortable process. I don't get to dictate when I come to resolution on some of these things. I just get to do my part, look at my stuff, and trust that I'll eventually get and then be able to see the progress.

Hard Questions

One of the many difficult things that come along with dealing with any suicide is that hard questions just come up. Sometimes they're ones that other people ask, either intentionally or not. Sometimes they arise from things that other people say. Sometimes they come from things we see in movies or TV shows or read in books. Sometimes they just seem to spring from some sadistic/masochistic dark corner of our minds. Regardless of the source, there are a lot of them that come up. Some are specific to the relationship with the person who died. There are some different questions if the person who committed suicide was a parent or a sibling or a spouse or a child. And, then again, there are some that are universal, regardless of who it was.

Like a lot of other things having to do with grief, there's no way to predict when they're going to pop up. Some things are predictable enough that they'll bring some of those questions to mind. Other things allow those questions to blindside us. Sometimes they've come from the most unexpected, apparently miniscule events or items. That's true with a lot of things that end up blindsiding us. I never would have thought that walking through a grocery store she and I went to twice, three times at most, would have me feeling unreal, watching the aisles stretch and bend, and not sure if it was more appealing to just curl up into a ball and keen or to haul ass out of there as directly as possible, regardless of what or who might be in the way. The same is true with those questions.

From what I've figured out and heard from talking with other folks in similar circumstances, there are basically two ways to deal with those kinds of questions. The first one, and the one I see most often taken, is to shove them away when they come up. The questions are discounted immediately as pointless or not helpful or not worthwhile. The consistency here is important. They get no time and attention. As soon as the person realizes they've come up and they're starting to wonder again, the big steel door is slammed shut on them. You know that door. It's the one that seems like it'd hold off the Hulk indefinitely. It's always the hope that it'll keep the questions locked up forever, but they have this sneaky way of sleazing out again. Still, when the door's slammed on them, they're gone for awhile. The hope, I think, is that if that happens enough, eventually those questions will just run out of energy and stop coming back around. This seems especially worthwhile and important with those questions where there just aren't solid answers to be had, or even enough information to be able to come up with a decent guess. Some of the folks I know seem to be very good at making that work for them.

Sadly, I'm not one of those people. So I've taken to going with option number two: answer them. Instead of trying to avoid the questions or lock them away, give them as much consideration and focus and energy as is needed in order to come to an answer that will finally satisfy. In some cases, that means coming to an answer that I can live with, even if I don't know for sure what the RIGHT answer might be. One of those I looked at really hard was whether or not there was something I could have done to prevent her death. I had to accept that I hadn't known what she was planning, even though I'd known she was anxious and angry and depressed and desperately unhappy. Without knowing what she was planning, there was nothing I could do. But what if I had known? Was there anything I could have done to stop it? Sure there was. I could have gotten her hospitalized, at least for a little while. Of course, they couldn't have necessarily stopped her, not if she really had her mind made up to die. And, even if she didn't do it in the hospital, what would say that she wouldn't do it again in another day? Or a week? Or a month? I couldn't make her want or accept help, despite how often I tried to offer it and make it clear that I'd do everything in my power to make and keep it available. If she didn't want the help, if she didn't want to look at or work on what she'd need to, then there really wasn't anything I could have done to keep her from killing herself.

It wasn't a short process to really look at and consider all of those things. It wasn't easy. The end result, though, was an answer that has held solid since. Even after finding journal entries that she'd kept in computer files indicating she'd made at least one other previous attempt shortly after we got married that I never knew about. Or learning that she'd been suicidal for at least a couple of years before we even met. Those things hurt to learn, but they didn't shake the answer that I'd been able to come to.

One of the hard things about taking that route is how it apparently looks to others. See, if you're not looking at those questions, then they're not hurting you. They're not tearing at your self-confidence or your self-esteem. They're not ripping at your heart, threatening to wreck the good memories that are still there. Other people don't have to watch you go through the uncertainty and discomfort of looking at all those different options. Hell, they don't have to see you wondering just what you're going to come to as an answer, maybe it being an answer that doesn't make you look so good. Maybe it's going to be an answer that shakes what little solid ground, metaphorically speaking, that's been found upon which to stand. That's hard for other folks to see. It's difficult enough for them to see us hurting from what's happened. For a lot of people, it's close to impossible to see that maybe there's a point to more discomfort and distress as we're dealing with this. That can make it even more challenging to go about seeking an answer when the people around us are saying we shouldn't bother, shouldn't waste the time, shouldn't torture ourselves any more.

It's not about torture, though. It's about coming to a place where we can find some stability and peace, regardless of whether it's finally locking the questions away....or answering them. At least well enough to move on and live with.

Lines To Be Crossed

Thee are a lot of things about dealing with the death of a spouse that are hard. Learning how to cook for one, or one less. And that's assuming that one's not having to learn how to cook! Figuring out how to keep on top of all the things in the home: cleaning, laundry, bills, etc. Learning how to not be part of a couple again, especially in social situations. The list is sadly horrifically long.

One that is bound to push buttons is going through and clearing out their things. For some people, it's too hard to face, and things end up getting packed into a spare room or a storage unit on an indefinite basis. Even for those who can do it, it often gets put off for a long time. One of the reasons for that is all the reminders that come up with looking at what had been theirs. They were things they used. They were things they bought. They were gifts we gave them. They were things they liked and picked up. Sometimes they used or wore them, and sometimes they were things they ended up not liking as much once they had them. Some of them are things that we think we might use at some point. Others are things that we want to keep for the memories they can bring up. And some of them aren't worth keeping, because we wouldn't use them or it would be too hard to keep getting reminded when we see them.

I went through a lot of her things pretty quickly. One of the biggest reasons for that was I wasn't sure I'd be able to stay in our house for very long at all. I wasn't sure if I'd have to get an apartment or if maybe I'd be moving out of state, and the less I'd have to pack and figure out where to put, the easier that process would be. If it hadn't been for that, it would've taken a lot longer to do. I also didn't get through all of it. The first several times going through her things, I was able to stand doing so for only about an hour. After that, I would be numb and unable to think straight and lethargic. It's amazing how challenging keeping track of computer solitaire can be at that point.

More recently, I had some more things to go through again. It'd started feeling like it was time to get it taken care of. I was surprised at how hard some of those things were to look at and to let go. In getting that finished up, I got to talk to another fairly recent widow who I've gotten to know. She shared an idea that seems to make a lot more sense of it all. One of the things she pointed out was that in general there are things that belonged to our spouses that we didn't mess with. My wife had her office and her room, and I wouldn't have dreamed of going in and looking at, much less moving or using. Those were hers. I didn't have any need to mess with them, and I certainly didn't want to violate her privacy. I'd had too much respect for her to do that, and she'd always shown me the same kind of respect and courtesy.

Only now, she's not here and I'm having to clean up the mess that was left behind by her taking her life. It doesn't change the habit, though. We were married for over a decade, and had lived together for awhile before that. It was a long time to get those habits in place, and even more time to get them well-seated. Part of being able to do that is requiring me to violate those habits. I have to go through things I would never have gotten into before. I have to clear out things that belonged to her that just don't have any real meaning or value to me now, even though they did to her. So it make it even harder when I'm having to go against years of patterns and habits to get through this kind of catastrophe and clean up the mess again.

It's disturbing how death gets rid of a degree of privacy that we'd had in life. We'd shared a home. We'd shared a bed. We'd seen each other naked. We'd told each other a lot. I know I'd told her as much as my closest friends and family, and sometimes more. She'd told me that she had told me things she had never told anyone else. Even with that level of openness and knowing each other, though, there was a degree of privacy and a sense of individual space that had been present. Now, in dealing with her death, even that has had to go away.

It's just another unexpected element of a painful, confusing, and long process.

Endings And Beginnings

Endings and beginnings are themes that permeate dealing with the death of a spouse. It starts, pretty obviously, with the endings. It doesn't matter if you knew it was coming or not, if there was the chance to say goodbye or not. Death is the big ending, at least in this life. (Oh, Lord, help me avoid anything else so cheesy this post!!). Sure, there's the idea that the spirit or soul goes on, that we'll be reunited with our loved ones after it's our turn to go. But, at least in this life, we will not get to see them face-to-face, to hear them, to hold them close again. Add to that, our lives as married people have come to an end, too. If we had kids or grandchildren, then there's the shift of no longer being part of that unit, either. And the person we had been sharing a bed with is gone and so we're no longer a companion for falling asleep or a lover for sharing intimacy. A lot of things are no longer going to be what they were, if they're even going to ever be again.

And then, on the flip side of things, there are a whole lot of things that are beginning. We're getting to do things we either have never done before or haven't done in a long time. For me, it's meant having to remember how to keep track of the bills and make sure they're all paid. Ariel was much better at that than I was, and she did it flawlessly. Given how much else I did, I was good with her taking care of that part of our lives. Not any more. We get to learn what it is to be single, and maybe a single parent or grandparent. Maybe we get to learn how to cry or how to be angry or how to be afraid...perhaps in ways we never knew or even dreamed of before. Maybe we get to go back to work. We get to get used to saying we're single or widowed, depending on which we can deal with right off. We get to deal with noticing people who are attractive and having to learn to not automatically squelch or dismiss such thoughts because we're married. Maybe we're not ready to get into anything yet, but there's no longer that commitment holding us back from anything with someone else.

Endings and beginnings, both are scary. With endings, we have to face letting go of things we've loved and treasured. With a spouse, a lot of our lives and likely at least a decent chunk of our identities have been tied up with them. It hurts to think that any chance for the good times is now gone. For me, it was hard admitting that, even though the good times had been getting fewer and farther between as her depression escalated and her mental health deteriorated. The new beginnings bring....God only knows what. It could be good stuff. After the pain of the loss, though, the idea of dealing with more hurt or confusion is very often overwhelming. It gets very tempting at times to just curl up under the covers and wait for the bad things to pass us by. Even if it means missing out on good stuff, there are times when that option seems awfully tempting. Sometimes we need awhile hiding from those scary new experiences before we're ready to face them, and it has to be with little ones at a time. Sometimes we surprise ourselves with what we're ready to deal with. Regardless, it's always a challenge.

In our calendar year, the one day that most symbolizes endings and beginnings is New Year's Eve / New Year's Day. It's the end of a year. All of the opportunities and events and possibilities of the year are coming to a close. At the same time, we're also facing the opening of a whole new year that could be bringing almost anything with it: New fears. New hurts. New losses  Resurgence of forgotten/repressed anguish.. Chances to do better. Blessings of love and friendship. Unexpected gifts of grace of all kinds. Unknown possibilities and potentials. See, it's easy to write those out in nicely separated categories, good and bad. In dealing with it from the perspective of this kind of loss, though, they almost always show up more like this:

New fears. Chances to do better. New hurts. Blessings of love and friendship. New losses. Unexpected gifts of grace of all kinds. Resurgence of forgotten/repressed anguish. Unknown possibilities and potentials.

What's really hard is that, from an evolutionary standpoint, we're wired up to be more aware of threats and dangers than good things. As a survival trait, that's a good one. If we're not aware of threats, or at least not aware in time, then we're either hurting or dead. For those who're parents, I'd betcha just about anything that you'll wake up more quickly if you hear your kid crying than you will if you hear your kid laughing. When we're already hurting and reeling, even fairly minor things can seem like threats. As for more major issues...forget it. The prospect of driving to a new grocery store can take on the proportions of seeing the Death Star cresting over the horizon. That's where we are for awhile. It makes it more than a little difficult to really celebrate New Year's. It's not that we intentionally go looking for the threats or more depressing ends of things. That's our neurology doing what millennia of evolution's designed it to do, keep us aware of potential threats so we can stay alive.

The funny thing I'm noticing, though, is that the longer I survive, the less it seems like my neurology freaks out and makes things into massive threats. It's a slow change. I think it took me six months before doing the same drive in to work on the freeway every morning didn't make my guts clench and my hands shake. And it's not like it's a particularly bad drive, especially driving away from downtown in the morning and not really having nasty rush hour traffic. This year, the holidays hurt more than they did last year. However, even with that, they don't feel quite like the threat they did last year.

It seems like there's only so long we can sit with endings, not trying to suppress or stuff them, before their urgency and perceived possibility for more harm start to fade. Maybe as that happens, it gets less scary to look at what else there might be to come. 

 I hope so.

Dual Core Processor

One thing that dealing with grief has been teaching me is that we have two processes that go on with us all the time. I get to see it show up fairly often, and it's not all that comfortable. I'm doing OK and then the next moment I'm overwhelmed in a swamp of sadness. Or instead I'm sometimes suddenly shaking and jittery and wanting to run or hide. Or sometimes it's finding myself having to fight off being blinded by a consuming rage. It catches me by surprise, and often I'm not sure at first what it was that set it off. Even if I can point to something that might make sense of it, it seems way out of proportion to what it should be.

Yup, there's two things going on. On one level, I'm thinking. On the other level, I'm dealing with feelings. And, to be honest, they both have about equal power to hit me as strongly as each other.

Lots of people I know seem to be of the opinion that thinking is the primary internal function for us. It fits. That's what we're taught. We hear things like “Keep your head” or “Think it over.” We get told that getting an education is the key to success, and education means going to school and learning new ideas and information. Sometimes that learning is assessed by how well we can regurgitate those new bits of information. Give the right definition, connect the date with the event, put the concepts in order. Sometimes it's about applying them, like with math problems. When there's a problem we're supposed to think it over and figure out the right answer. Oh, and be ready to explain it to someone else, which often relies on being able to demonstrate clear, logical thought processes.

Feelings don't get that kind of value or respect. At the same time, they're still used just as strongly in some ways. Just about all advertising is about evoking the feeling that the product or service they're displaying will bring happiness. There's the implication with it that, if we don't have it, we will end up unhappy. Heck, if you think about how much sex is used in advertising, that fits, too. Sex certainly isn't about a rational process. Some feelings are seen to be OK, and others are indications of something being wrong, the person being “less than.” Real men aren't supposed to be afraid. When something bad happens, it's OK, though, for men to get mad and attack the problem. However, a lady isn't supposed to get angry. If someone else is openly sad, people often stand around and don't quite know what to do or how to deal with it. Tongues are either tied or end up tripping as people don't really know what to say, but don't feel comfortable saying nothing. Movies and TV shows repeatedly go back to the idea that falling in love is important and good. For all the good stuff in some of the New Age thinking, there's a lot of it that says that the “bad” feelings (read: “uncomfortable”) are things that should be avoided or shut away...or are signs of a lack of spiritual development.

Guess what, folks. Feelings are just as much a part of who we are as thinking. Just because we're brought up to put more emphasis on thinking doesn't change that. Sometimes strong feelings will end up dragging thinking behind them in their wake. To me, it makes sense to think of them like waves. A small one doesn't really do much to the ability to think, and to choose what to think about. However, a big one—like a sonic boom or a tsunami—will yank whatever's there into its wake. If it's too strong, thinking doesn't really happen until the energy of the wave starts to dissipate. Even if it's only medium strong, sometimes it just pulls the thinking along behind it. And often the assumption is that that's a bad thing.

Don't get me wrong, those experiences are certainly uncomfortable. The times I found myself having to lean against the side of the shower or crumpled up at the bottom of the stairs crying because the sadness roared through me were not fun. The times at work when my frustration erupted like a fireball from an explosion and led to me snapping at people who really didn't deserve it weren't fun. Heh, neither was having to go and apologize afterward. The times where I would be getting ready for a trip and suddenly find myself almost paralyzed with anxiety about the most miniscule or ridiculous things was definitely not fun.

However, there have also been times where going with those emotions have led me to and through things that I don't know I would've looked at or gone to otherwise. She had never told me what she'd want done with her body if she died. I had to go off a best guess based off conversations that only lightly touched on the topic. The place that just felt right to go is hard to get to, with some decent risks of getting hurt if one isn't careful. It wasn't easy, but it's been a decision—based mainly off how it felt—that I haven't experienced any regret about. Plenty of people thought I was horribly mistaken for wanting to read through some of her journal files, that it was just pointless self-torture. It kept feeling like something I needed to do. If I hadn't, I wouldn't have found out how long she'd been depressed and suicidal, or that it had been going on long before we ever met. If I hadn't been willing to go with the nagging feelings of guilt that had come up about whether I'd had anything to do with her suicide, I wouldn't have looked at everything as deeply as I had and come to know that it wasn't about me. Hell, if I hadn't gone with the feeling that I needed to see her body before it was cremated, I probably would've had a lot longer time of having the thoughts come up that maybe it was a mistake, maybe she was still alive....maybe she would come back. Seeing her body, and the shape it was in, was hard, but since then I haven't had those kinds of thoughts come up.

We have both, thinking and feeling. We end up having to learn to deal with both. That doesn't mean trying to figure out how to make one run roughshod over the other at will. It means learning what each one does, how each one works. What each has to offer and where its limits are.

There's just not another way to really get all the way down and out, to find the path that will lead us through the abyss and ready to go on to better times.

Surprise, Surprise

One of the hardest things about working through the suicide of a spouse is how many things don't seem to play out the way that we'd usually expect them to do. Sure, there's plenty of things in life that seem like they don't go the way they should. A movie doesn't turn out to be as good as the previews would've suggested. A recommended restaurant turns out to be not such a great place to eat after all. The date that the friend who set us up raved so much about is someone that...well...we're happy to wish a good life. Somewhere else. Heh....the prize in the box of cereal was nothing but a disappointment.

In general, though, life goes about the way we figure it's going to. We can tell when the car's running low on gas. We know that getting taxes ready is going to be a headache. The grocery store usually has everything we're going to buy. Going to a favorite place usually turns out to be something that we can and do enjoy. Looking at a box of pictures brings up the memories we figure they're going to bring up. Life usually goes the way we figure. The times when it doesn't are times that are much more the exception than the rule. It's one of the reasons why they stand out so much. When things go strange, we're not real sure how to handle them, which is why it's such a shock.

And then there's dealing with this kind of grief. All of a sudden, there are a LOT of things that aren't going the way we're used to or would expect. Driving down a street that we'd been on literally hundreds of times before brings up an unexpected pain so sharp it's suddenly almost impossible to breathe. Opening a drawer in the kitchen looking for a slotted spoon to serve up the food we cooked brings into sight the stainless steel measuring cups we didn't figure that we needed....and it turned out we're glad they anted to buy. All of a sudden, we're crying and missing the things they knew and did well. Looking at a box of pictures of a favorite vacation brings up all kinds of things. Maybe it brings up the good memories along with enough pain to drop us to our knees. Or maybe it's fear of not having anything good like that again. Perhaps it's fear that we might have some good times again...and lose them just as badly. It could be an aching emptiness and sadness over what had been in our lives before and no longer is. Maybe it's rage at the spouse who abandoned us in such a catastrophic, disastrous way.

No wonder exhaustion and lack of energy tend to follow us around. Think about how draining it is when the usual, unexpected stuff happens in life. Even if it's good stuff, it still takes more energy to deal with than the usual, run-of-the-mill events. When the excitement and the high wear off, we crash. When it's things that have gone badly, the effect tends to be even stronger. When it happens more often, then it's a consistent draining effect. They keep coming for quite a while, too. Sometimes they only hit once. Sometimes, the same thing can hit couple of times when we don't expect it or when we'd thought we'd already worked things through. Sadly, the impulse to avoid them just prolongs the misery.

The only thing there really is to do is to ride the ride until it's done. As Winston Churchill once said, “When you're going through Hell...

“...keep going.”