23. When It Rains, It Pours...

"There is a sacredness in tears.  They are not the mark of weakness, but of power.  They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues.  They are messengers of overwhelming grief...and unspeakable love." 

~Washington Irving 

Well.  I think this is the longest time since I started blogging that I haven't published an entry.  But let me shed a little light on the reasons for that - first of all, it's that miserable time at school called "reading period."  Reading period?  Doesn't sound that bad, right?  It might not be...if it weren't for the fact that the sole purpose of reading period is to prepare for the rather daunting exams that cover an entire semester's worth of work and constitute the sole basis of our final grades in four major classes.  And considering the hype that occurs among a group of ultra-competitive, sleep-deprived, just-barely-graduated-from-college, stressed and overly anxious first year law school students operating on little real world experience, I guess I shouldn't be that surprised when my classmates act like this is the most important thing they've ever done.  On the other hand, considering my perspective on the true meaning of the word "miserable," this is nothing.  I've had to learn to tune out the frantic conversations and excited chatter that surrounds me as I try to escape from the law school building at the end of each day in peace without being bombarded by information about what everyone else is doing to cram for these exams.


The other rather major reason is that after suffering from two kidney stones already this semester, I thought I might, by some unfortunate stroke of luck, have yet another one.  The pain and discomfort got bad enough that I finally caved and went to the nearest urgent care facility a few days ago to get checked out.  After taking my temperature (a whopping 103 degrees) and noting my racing pulse (150 beats per minute), the physician told me there was nothing she could do and sent me on my way to the dreaded ER.  After taking note of my symptoms - nausea, vomiting, uncontrollable shaking, and lower right abdominal pain - the ER doctor ordered various blood tests and a standard cat scan (which also included some not-so-pleasant, not-so-standard component procedures ...I"ll spare you the fun-filled details).  After all was said and done, the doctor returned to my room about an hour later to tell my mom and I that he had some good news...and some bad news.  The good news?  That he knew exactly what was wrong with me.  The bad news?  The cat scan indicated pretty conclusively that I had appendicitis.  My heart sank.  As he explained the details of the condition to me and, ultimately, my immediate need for surgery, the tears began rolling down my cheeks.  I cried because I dreaded being in recovery from an invasive surgery while trying to studying for four huge law school exams.  I cried because I was in severe pain and shaking violently from a fever that continued to spike over 103 degrees.  And I cried mostly because I wanted more than anything for my husband to be there with me to hold my hand and tell me that everything would be okay.  As I lay there on those uncomfortable, starchy hospital sheets, my mind took me back to the summer of 2005 when I took not one but two trips to the ER with what the doctors thought might also be appendicitis...but turned out to be inflamed bowel syndrome.  Jon, exhausted though he was from having been up at at work since before 5AM, sat diligently by my bedside while we waited for hours for the doctors to come back and tell us that there wasn't much that could be done, besides waiting for the discomfort to pass.  At least this time around, there was something that could be done to fix me and take the pain away.  But, on the other hand, this time around I didn't have my sweet husband's face to wake up to when I came to from surgery.  That is something that no one can ever fix.


I had the appendectomy on Friday night and, fortunately, because my appendix hadn't ruptured yet, the operation was slightly less invasive that it might have been otherwise.  I'm at home now recovering, and I'm lucky enough to have my mom and good friends here with me to help me rest while still focusing for short periods of time on studying for those nasty upcoming exams.  But I will never stop wishing that Jon was here too to hold me when I collapse in bed with exhaustion each night.  I wish he was here to celebrate with me when I finish my exams and my first year of law school in a couple of weeks.  And I wish more than anything that I could wake up in the morning to his sweet face just one more time.  That would make exams, the hype surrounding those exams, recovering from surgery, ...and everything else in the world seem so incredibly easy.

22. Dream a Little Dream of Me

"The whole world is a dream, and death the interpreter."

~Yiddish proverb

From time to time, I have this dream.  The last time was the night of April 11th.  The dream is almost identical each time, with just a few minor variations.  The date is always sometime before April 7th.  Sometimes I find myself in the present; other times it's back in 2007.  Jon is there with me - alive and well - but somehow I know in the dream what's about to happen and it's my responsibility to tell him that he's going to die on April 7th.  I study his face as he processes the news and it makes my heart soar to be able to see him so clearly...but, at the same time, my heart breaks to know that it's only in my dreams I'll ever see his sweet face again.  Is it just my subconsciousness wishing things could somehow be different?  Is it my refusal to accept what I cannot change?  I never truly understood until I lost Jon how impossible it is to fathom the unfathomable.  From a young age, we're taught to solve all the world's problems, learn from our mistakes, and apologize for past indiscretions - there is always something more we can do, and few things are completely irreversible.  Death, however, is one of the few exceptions - death is as real and as final as it gets.  No matter what I do or how hard I try, I remain helpless and unable to change anything surrounding the reality of my husband's death.  For someone whose type-A, OCD-like personality has always controlled just about every aspect of my life, this reality is a rather difficult pill to swallow.  


Several of my classmates asked me recently if I'm okay.  I guess I must look sad.  I've been told a few times now that even when I smile, the smile never quite reaches my eyes.  Plus, it's never been too hard to figure out how I'm really feeling - my poker face (if I ever had one) needs an awful lot of work!  Most people ask how I'm doing in passing, as they tend to do in striking up casual conversation, and I usually give them the obligatory "oh, I'm fine" response.  A few days ago, however, one of my friends sat down in the chair next to me and asked how I really am.  I don't know why, but when I opened my mouth to answer, I couldn't speak.  I just burst into tears, right there in the middle of the law school hallway.  Luckily, there weren't too many people around at the time...but even if there had been, it wouldn't have mattered.  These kind of messy situations don't bother me nearly as much as they used to...after years of apologizing for the discomfort that always seems to hang over any conversation involving Jon's death, I find I have no more room in my life for awkward silence.  The right answer is always the honest answer...and at least my answer was honest, right?

On the other hand, there's a reason honesty isn't always easiest policy, especially when it comes to being honest with myself.  And if we're being honest here, the truth is that I'm exhausted.  My emotions are like a yo-yo at the moment - up one second and down (sometimes way down) the next.  It's as if I expected something to change or be different after the 5th anniversary of Jon's passing...but nothing has changed and nothing is different.  He is still gone, and I'm still here.  I keep coming back to the simple fact that I chose him.  I chose him to be my husband, to have and to hold, forever and ever.  We don't get to choose much in this life, but I chose Jon and he chose me.  It doesn't get much simpler or more beautiful than that.  A fellow widow joked with me the other day about inventing a time machine to go back to those happy times before we lost our husbands when life was still the fairytale we dreamed of as little girls.  I told her to let me know as soon as she finished inventing it - I'd pay any price to use it for just one day.


What I didn't choose was to find myself here alone with more time to think than I know what to do with.  "Enjoy being single," people tell me.  Or, "just get out there and meet someone else!"  At this point, it shouldn't really come as a big surprise that I don't want anyone else.  I have tried - and we all know how well that's worked out.  Dating has turned out to be been my worst (well, maybe second-worst) nightmare - the men I've dated have either taken me for all I have to give (trust, money, love, you name it), or the emotions involved just haven't compared to what I felt and still feel for my husband.  Seriously, how can some people be so cruel and heartless?  How can they know all too well what I've already been through and promise they'll never give me cause to shed any more tears and then use me for their own selfish purposes?  It's despicable.  I really don't understand how people like that sleep at night.  When I tried to reach out and comfort him during a rough time in his life, my last boyfriend (let's just call him "DS") told me that he didn't give a "rat's ass" about what I've been through...oh, and that people in general "don't give a shit" about me and what happened to Jon.  I just never thought he would be one of those people.  A few days ago, I caught up with a mutual friend who mentioned she'd spoken to him and that he said he was glad to no longer be in contact with me.  For a moment, I was literally speechless.  He is glad to no longer be in contact with me?  Why, so he can move onto some other vulnerable, unsuspecting girl while continuing to keep up the appearance of the perfect, happy family with his wife and kids?  Good thing he's setting such a great example for those poor kids to follow...I shudder now to think of everything I did for him in light of all the lies he told me and the woman (or women?) with whom he cheated on me while insisting to my face that honesty and fidelity were among the most important values in his personal moral compass.  Moral compass?  Um, what moral compass?  I'm sure I made many mistakes in the context of our relationship...but when a person constantly makes you feel paranoid for having suspicions that turn out to be 100% founded, who's really the "crazy" one here?  How can someone living a double life based on a twisted web of lies look at himself in the mirror and continue to insist that he's a good person?  It honestly makes me wish I'd never bothered with this whole dating thing.  Where has it gotten me?  I've now seen some of the ugliest parts of the human psyche (from which Jon always protected me while he was alive), and at the end of the day, it just makes me miss my husband more than ever.  If anything, I feel like I've somehow been unfaithful to Jon through these relationships that don't hold a candle to my marriage.  I guess I'm still like a naive teenager in assuming that people's intentions are inherently good - I couldn't live with myself if I did the things that DS did to me over the course of our relationship, but as it turns out, not everyone feels this way.


Thankfully, I can now laugh at many of the ridiculous lies and fabricated stories DS told me.  Although my family and friends continue to despise the guy for what he did, the anger and resentment I carried around with me a few months ago has faded.  The only thing that continues to sadden me is the fact that people like DS do in fact exist...and I doubt it's the last time I'll encounter one of them.   There are, unfortunately, some bad people out there, and in all likelihood, most of them will never change.  These people live long and prosperous lives, unaffected and untouched by tragedy, and face few, if any, consequences for their actions while continuing to manipulate and inflict pain upon others.  And then there are people like Jon - someone who could not possibly have been a better, kinder, or more selfless person and who was taken from us much too soon.  It just doesn't seem fair.  But I guess that's why we have that infamous saying:  life, as we learn the hard way, is not fair.  Good things happen to good and bad people alike.  I'm not sure if I believe in karma.  I'd like to...but it seems like a little too neat and tidy of an explanation in a world in which nothing is neat and tidy - besides being unfair, life is as messy as it gets.


My brother-in-law told me he also had a dream about Jon on the night of April 11th.  It was a similar dream to the one he has maybe once a month.  In it, he finds out or somehow becomes aware that Jon is dead and he cries and cries and sometimes screams and feels like he's drowning in a terrible, unimaginable nightmare.  When he wakes up, he realizes that the nightmare is in fact a memory - it's the memory of how he felt when he found out his little brother had been killed...and that feeling is no different or less devastating today than it was five years ago.  He may have other things now that distract him on a day-to-day basis, but the memory of the moment life changed forever is never far from his mind.  As he opened up and related the details of this dream to me, I literally cried with relief - it assured me that I'm not the only one who still loves and yearns for Jon constantly, no matter what else has happened and no matter how much time has passed.  As the years go by, I'm sure there will be other people who will hurt and use me..and there will undoutedly be many more days when I open my mouth to say I'm okay and can't get the words out past the tears.  But despite whatever life may throw at me, I will always be able to see Jon in my mind and in my dreams.   There he will be...and there I will find myself once more by his side.  And maybe, just maybe, I'll also find some peace and comfort in what happens next.

21. A Dull Shade of Gray

"I will not fail you, my love. I will continue on the path we shared and I know you will be there to help me, as you always were. And when we meet again at the journey’s end, and we laugh together once more, I will have a thousand things to tell you..."

Today I need to do some venting. I'm tired, beyond stressed, and have now officially completed more law school than 5 years ago when April 6, 2007 was, unbeknownst to me at the time, my final day of my first year, take 1. It feels weird. Not good, not bad, just weird. Someone noticed my rings in class this morning and asked me if I got engaged. When I said no, that they're from my husband, she said, "oh, you're already married - I didn't know that!" I approached her after class and let her know the reality - it's getting easier to explain, and I was even able to do it without tears. But I'll be honest, it really sucked. It sucked even more when my "friend" (who was sitting next to me at the time) said, "well, you put your rings back on - what did you expect?"

Call me crazy, but sometimes I wish I could go back to those first few weeks when friends and family were always present and Jon's name was still fresh on everyone's lips...when it was okay for life to revolve around the fact that he was so conspicuously absent...when the flow of cards and letters and emails and flowers was constant and the world hadn't forgotten it was suddenly a lesser place without him. It's so difficult to talk with people I meet now who never knew him (and who will never knew the person I was back then). They don't - can't - understand the ten million things that made him so special and so easy to miss. So that's why sometimes, on days like these, I wish I could relive that time before everyone went back to their nice, normal lives...and before I discovered that some of the friends I assumed I could count on would let me down, while some of the people I would never have expected to stick by me went above and beyond.

An acquaintance of mine mentioned recently that he thinks it's good I'm no longer trying to date or pursue other relationships since I clearly still have what he calls "Jon issues." Ha. Jon issues? What the hell does that mean? And when exactly will I ever not have these "Jon issues?" The irony is that this guy is in the Army - when I chose to withdraw from law school and begin serving on active duty after Jon's death, I did it in part because I thought people in the Army would understand a little better than most how it feels to have lost my husband in combat. But the reality is that the Army is just a mirror image of the rest of society on a smaller and more magnified scale. There are wonderful, thoughtful, insightful people serving in the Army. And then there are thoughtless, selfish idiots too. Sometimes I think the Army has actually made things a little harder in separating me from my family and throwing me in among peers with whom I don't seem to belong and who deal with death through crude, inappropriate humor. They don't like to talk about or acknowledge the fact that this unfortunate reality can happen to anyone - no one is immune from it. So, in essence, being in the Army hasn't necessarily made things any easier. It's just given me a reason to drag myself out of bed in the morning - something else to focus on besides the fact that life without Jon is bland and, on most days, a dull shade of gray.

Before I started dating the third and final guy with whom I attempted to find some version of happiness, I remember he asked me how I felt about the fact that he had two kids (one of whom was only 14 years younger than I am - yeah, I was never too thrilled about that...). My question for him was, "how do you feel about the fact that I'm a widow?" I asked because it's amazing how many people have this preconceived bias against us for something over which we had absolutely no control - sure, they'll date someone who's divorced, separated, never been married, or any combination thereof. But widowed? Oh, no! Not that! Stay far, far away! Guess what - it's never going to be as simple for us as going to a bar and striking up a casual conversation with someone about where we're from and what we do for a living. We come with a lot of emotional heartache (or "baggage" if you prefer that term). But what people don't seem to realize is that being a widow is not a curse - if anything it should be seen a God-send. A fellow widow once told me that, in her humble opinion, any guy should consider himself lucky to end up with a woman who has lost the love of her life - we know what it means to love madly and deeply, and when we promised "forever," we bargained for nothing less. We know what it's like to have our worst nightmare become an inescapable reality and to wonder every day thereafter how much time we have before it's too late to say "I love you" to our family and friends one last time. But that's not exactly something you can effectively convey to someone after knowing them for all of 5 minutes - it doesn't go over too well when your opening line goes something like, "oh hi, my name is Jenna. I'm a widow. But don't be scared, it's okay. It just means I know the meaning of true love!" Uh huh. Right...

And now I need to try to focus on the work that I just can't seem to get myself to care much about in light of all these other concerns clouding my mind and detracting from my focus (or, at least, what remains of it). It just doesn't seem to matter the same way it did 5 years ago when my biggest source of anxiety was my upcoming final exams...who knew that April 6th, 2007 would be the last time those exams would even enter my stream of consciousness for the foreseeable future? I'm going to try to focus on the positives, like the wonderful weekend I spent with friends who understand the gravity of Jon's loss and the gaping hole that remains in his absence. Amazingly, the tears didn't hit me on Saturday, April 7th until I was lying in bed alone at the end of the day and and realized for the millionth time that I'd never hear the beating of Jon's heart beneath my cheek again...ever. I don't know how she knew I needed her, but when my best friend came through and crawled into bed next to me, talked to me about Jon until 3AM, and was still right there right next to me the next morning, I knew I was exactly where I needed to be. The next day - Easter Sunday - I said a special prayer of thanks for the angels in my life who make all the gray seem a shade or two brighter.

20. 5 Years: Half a Decade: 1,825 Days

Theodore Roosevelt (on the death of his wife):  "The light has gone out of my life."
~February 14th, 1884


Me (to Jon):  "Baby, no matter how long I live, you have to promise that you'll live one day longer so I never have to go a day without you."
~Date unknown

~Jonathan David Grassbaugh:  August 18th, 1981 - April 7th, 2007~

Today marks 5 years of doing that very thing I said I'd never want to do.  5 years.  Half a decade.  1,825 days of living without Jon.  For how long it feels on days like today, it might as well be a lifetime.


I miss my husband so much that it physically hurts.  My only consolation in overcoming the physical pain is that the mind, cruel though it might be at times, works in mysterious ways to remind us of the things we thought were lost forever.  Over the past few weeks of intensive grief processing, I've added to the list I thought I finished a few years ago of Jon and I's memories - the list includes everything from silly things he'd say to make me laugh to trips we took and songs we sang.  It's my way of making sure I don't forget the things I treasure most in case my mind ever does fail me and, with it, I lose the memory of his laugh or the sound of his voice.  Some of the memories that have come back to me make me smile...others bring me to tears.  Some of them have surfaced at the oddest times, like in the moments of half-consciousness before I wake up in the morning or in the middle of a conversation about something entirely unrelated.   I like to think of them as small gifts from Jon, as if he were right here looking over my shoulder, telling me, "hey, babe, don't forget about that time..."


There have even been moments where I swear I can feel his presence, like the other morning while I was out walking my dog, Nicki - as I passed one of the trees in my neighborhood that recently sprang into bloom, hundreds of little white petals blew over me in a sudden gust of wind.  At the same moment, I looked up toward the horizon and caught a glimpse of the rising sun, still warm and full and glowing in the early morning sky.  It was absolutely beautiful - I literally got chills.  It's moments like that when I think to myself, "that's Jon.  He's still here."


Two days ago, on what was "Gold Star Wives Day," Jon surprised me with another incredible gift.  I'm usually so obnoxiously neat and tidy that I always know exactly where to find everything in my house.  But while I was reorganizing a closet in my office, I came across several SD storage cards that I thought had nothing on them...until I discovered that one of them contained not one but four mini videos of Jon during his R&R at Christmas of 2006.  I'm talking about 10 whole minutes of video of Jon walking and talking and smiling that I didn't even know I had.  I literally ran around my house like a crazy woman, laughing like a hyena, and yelling "thank you, Jon!  Thank you, God!!"  48 hours later, I'm still flying high on the joy I felt at having found those videos - during a week that is usually so miserable, they were exactly what I needed.  And I have no doubt that Jon knew it too.

Jon and his co-workers on 7 April, 2007, approximately 1 hour before Jon's truck got hit

One night long ago when Jon and I were snuggled up together on the couch watching TV and flipping channels, we came across a program that was still relatively new at the time but has since achieved critical acclaim:  Baghdad ER.  The episode featured a Soldier who had been severely injured in Iraq, so much so that he had to have both arms and both legs amputated.  Jon told me if anything like that ever happened to him that he'd want me to let him go because he couldn't live like that.  Selfishly, I told him I could never do that.  If his mind and whatever remained of his body still functioned, even at a bare minimum, I told him there was no way I could make the decision to let him go.  There are many moments now when I wonder what might have happened if things had turned out differently 5 years ago and he'd lived...but barely.  What would I have done if confronted with that impossible choice, knowing full well what he wanted?  I wasn't forced to make that decision - maybe that's a blessing.  But to have seen his face just one more time or touched his hand while there was still life flowing through him...that would have been the most beautiful blessing of all.


5 years without you, baby.  5 years since I lost the love that made life worth living.  Oh, how my heart aches for you - I miss you with every single fiber of my being.  On the day of our wedding, the minister quoted the mystic poet Rumi, who once said that, "the minute I heard my first love story I began looking for you, not knowing how blind that was.  Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other’s souls all along.”  Jon, you may be physically gone, but you are in my soul as you always have been, and there you will always stay.  And as I vowed to you on that day before our friends, family, and God, "I will love you and only you, now and forever."  The days here on earth without you may be long, and they may be hard...yet, every day is one step closer to being with you again for all of eternity.  Always and forever, my love.

19. Gold Star Wives Day

For my sweetheart on this Gold Star Wives Day.  These are the lyrics I re-wrote to the song I Wonder by Kellie Pickler, © 2006.

Up There In Heaven

Every day I think about you

I wonder if you’re up there somewhere thinking about me.

Trying my best to carry on

But, baby, I don’t feel so strong

Now you are gone.

I look in the mirror and all I see

Is an empty space where you used to be.

Do you know how much I miss you every day?

I hope the weather’s nice up there in heaven,

With sunny skies and angels running free.

I pray one day I’ll make it up to heaven,

And that you’re waiting there for me.

It feels so empty in our home.

You know I hate to be alone

Without you here.

Still can’t believe what they had to say

When they came by our door that day

And said you were gone.

And I took that flag, I held it tight.

I know you’d say it’ll be all right,
But when they took your life, they took away mine too.

Oh, I hope the weather’s nice up there in heaven,

With sunny skies and angels running free.

I pray one day I’ll make it up to heaven,

And that you’re waiting there for me.

Just move on.

That’s what they say.

But it’s so hard to do,

‘Cause I love you.

Well, I hope the weather’s nice up there in heaven,

And just in case you’re up there missing me,

One day I will make it there to heaven,

And we will be together

Oh, we will be together,

Yes, we will be together eternally.

18. A Glimmer of Hope?

"Grief knits two hearts in closer bonds than happiness ever can; and common sufferings are far stronger links than common joys." 

~Alphonse de Lamartine

Ok, folks.  I know my posts have been pretty down over the past few weeks.  And I bet if there are any recently widowed ladies out there reading what I write, you're probably thinking, "great, I can sympathize with just about everything you're saying...hell, you took the words right out of my mouth.  But if you're in this much pain 5 years after the fact, then where the heck does that leave me?"  Bottom line, I understand that "encouraging" probably isn't the word anyone would use to describe how I've been feeling recently.  In fact, for a moment or two there, I wondered if blogging was actually making things worse since it makes me confront the deep, dark, scary emotions I've been avoiding for the last few years.  Trying to explain to the people in my life why I feel like I'm only experiencing the full force of these emotions now has been particularly frustrating because I think some of them see what I'm doing as counter-productive and maybe even self-destructive.  I get those confused, quizzical looks that I can tell really mean, "um, ok, not sure I buy this.  Aren't you just making things worse for yourself by reliving all this stuff?"

But guess what?  Here's what's absolutely incredible about slogging through the mud of all that crap and feeling on some days like the fog is never going to lift.  For weeks now, I've literally been praying to God and to Jon every day to please help me with all of this - to please help me achieve some kind of inner peace to make it a little more bearable.  At the same time, I've been mentally processing the advice that comes at me from all directions, reading about the day-to-day struggles of other women who find themselves young and widowed, trying to focus on the mounting pile of school work for which I've lost all enthusiasm and focus, and, in general, just caring way too much about what everyone thinks.  And here's the beauty of all of it:  for some unknown reason, I suddenly feel about 10 pounds lighter in terms of emotional stress because I finally don't care as much what everyone else thinks.  It's my life - not their's.  I've always done things in both my personal and professional life because I think it's what I "should" be doing (exception being, of course, my marriage to Jon - that wasn't a "should," it was a "must!").  I've relied for my happiness on others and I've worried incessantly over all the things I can't control and caused myself tons of unnecessary stress by freaking out about what everyone else around me says.  I've always assumed I'd get to a point where I'd "achieve" enough to finally be allowed do what I want to do.  


I have no idea what caused this sudden change.  Ha, maybe I'm bipolar or something - wouldn't that be ironic?  But, I swear, I wouldn't doubt it after feeling like such an emotional yo-yo lately!  Is it the fact that I started running again?  My meds finally kicking in?  The end of a miserable semester being in sight?  Upcoming visits with family and friends on the horizon?  Or maybe the amazing 2-hour conversation I had with a widow the other night that made me laugh like a hyena?  I literally haven't had that much fun on the phone in months, and the relief I experienced at how "normal" it made me feel was like the high you get from a drug.  I guess it doesn't really matter what caused me to feel this way.  All I know is that it's happening during that horrible week during which there are usually no "good" days.  Believe it or not, if someone asked me the dreaded "how are you?" question today, I might actually tentatively be able to say that I'm "good."  I'm still not "okay," and I never will be because Jon is gone.  That's just fact.  But for now, I'm good.  I love my husband.  I'm not basing my happiness on some unfulfilling, mediocre relationship with a guy who's just not worth my time.  I don't care what people think, and I know the world is not going to end if I don't do as well on my exams at the end of the semester as I'd like under "ideal" circumstances (whatever those might be).  And I'm okay with all of that.  

Who knows how long it will last?  But for now I'm going to ride the euphoric wave.  And hope that I don't come crashing down anytime soon.

Happy days - Jon and I during his R&R from Iraq (Christmas, 2006)

17. I Am Rich

"It is so curious:  one can resist tears and "behave" very well in the hardest hours of grief.  But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer...and everything collapses." 

~Colette

As we approach the dreaded anniversary of the day I lost Jon, I often find myself on edge and, at times, inconsolable, as I reflect on yet another year without my beloved husband.  This period of anticipation leading up to the date of his death is sometimes worse than the day itself, but I realize that there's nothing I can do to stop it, whether I'm ready to face it or not.  Time marches on, and sometimes it's a blessing, but other times it feels like a curse.  I'm so afraid that people will say "oh, 5 years is such a long time.  You must be over it now, right?"  Ah, if only they knew...


I think I've learned a lot of what not to do over the past five years.  I've made mistakes - both big and small.  I've burned some bridges and thrown away some opportunities.  I've strayed a few times from the path of what I believed in and I've kicked myself repeatedly for failing to think things through before rushing impulsively into several ill-thought-out endeavors.  I still don't have any of the right answers because there is no right way to deal with any of this.  But here's what I do know.  Grief is not an illness.  There are no shortcuts to getting through it or getting over it or accepting it.  Anyone who suggests any of these things in trying to reach out to those of us who have loved deeply enough to experience it belittles our heartache and ignores the inherent permanence of our pain.  There is simply no magic phrase that can provide comfort at the times we want the ground to open up and swallow us whole.  To suggest that "time heals all wounds" or that "you have to close the book on one chapter before beginning another," or, worse yet, the dreaded "you'll move on" flies in the face of all reason for someone who lives with a gaping hole that cannot and will not ever be filled.  My father-in-law claims he lacks a way with words, and yet the only rationale sentiment I've heard uttered over the past five years on the subject of grief is something he told me not too long ago.  He said that eternity is a very long time; the here and the now is all just a drop in the bucket.

"It" doesn't get better.  I've just had to learn, through much trial and error, to mask the pain and put on a happy face around people who don't get it.  There have been times when I've gotten as low as I think I can possibly get...and then the phone will ring and I'll pick it up, and when I hear myself sound incredibly normal, I'm honestly quite impressed.  "Wow," I think, "considering the fact that I was literally pleading with God just seconds ago to end this misery and take me now too, I guess I put on a pretty good show."  Kinda funny how you can long for this life to be over one moment and then jump into autopilot mode of "oh hi, how are you?" the next.


On the day of my wedding, my mom, in mourning the loss of her first-born baby to marriage and a life away from home, lamented to me, "that's the last time you're going to say that," and "that's the last time you're going to write that!"  The "lasts" that occupy my thoughts now - like what Jon must have been thinking and feeling during the last few moments of his life, without ever knowing that they were, in fact, his last moments - redefine the meaning of the word "last."  Was he thinking about the work he had to do when he got back to his office?  About what he would have for dinner at the chow hall that night?  Maybe about trying to call me when he got back to the FOB since I'd missed his call - his last call - the night before?  It seems so cruel, so unfair, to think that one second he was sitting quietly and unsuspectingly in the back of a truck...and the next, life as he and I knew it changed forever.  I wish so much that I could have been with him and held him close to me in his last few moments.  I wish I could have somehow willed him to live with my commitment to the vows I took to love him, and only him, forever.  I wish he had just been injured...or at least that he'd lived for long enough for me to tell him goodbye.  I wish I could take his place and give him his life back.  He had so much good left to do, so much promise and potential for the future.  The world is a lesser place without him in it.  


And therein lies the most important lesson I've learned throughout all of this:  I've learned that there is no "replacing" someone who is, in a word, irreplaceable.  There will be many other people who will undoubtedly come in and out of my life, but there will never be another Jon.  I am rich, and not because of any form of financial wealth - I am rich because of the memories I have of a man who made me who I am and loved me for everything I'm not.  I am rich...because I knew someone who was so hard to say goodbye to.