61. "Too Soon? Too Soon?"

"If you ask me how I'm doing, I would say I'm doing just fine.
I would lie and say that you're not on my mind.
But I go out and I sit down at a table set for two,
And finally I'm forced to face the truth:
No matter what I say, I'm not over you.  Not over you."
~Gavin DeGraw, Not Over You

Until last week, I felt very alone in the guilt and regret I've been saddled with for a while now.  The guilt and regret have nothing to do with anything I did or didn't do during my husband's lifetime - they have to do with what I did after I lost him.  I committed the cardinal widow sin that the rest of society loves to gossip about - I started dating again too soon.  I didn't stick to the "wait at least one year before making any major changes rule."  Nope, not me - I made a handful of life-altering decisions in the first several months, and getting into a new relationship at around the seven-month mark was one of them.  In my defense, I know there's been far worse; the first example that comes to mind is the widow who hooked up with her Casualty Assistance Officer the night after she buried her husband.  But I know I shouldn't compare - everyone has their own way of dealing with this nightmare, and it's not for me to judge.  Plus, comparing my situation to her's is really just an attempt to make myself feel a little better.  Looking back on it now, I cannot fathom how I thought I was ready to date again after only seven months.  I'd been happily out of the dating pool and on monogamous dry land for several years when I lost Jon.  During the seven months that followed his death, I could barely get myself out of bed to brush my teeth, get dressed, and go to work.  Why did I think that opening my heart to someone else when it was still bleeding, broken, and crying out for my husband was a good idea?

Jon = My Forever Nemo :)

Here's the kicker, though:  The man I started dating wasn't some random guy I met at a bar and decided to go wild and crazy with.  I suppose I could have gone that route, but the whole drowning-one's-sorrows-in-one-night-stands approach was never my thing before I met Jon and it certainly hasn't become my thing since I lost him. This guy was a good guy, a mutual friend, and he was on the very same deployment that claimed Jon's life.  Jon even designated him as the person he wanted to accompany his body back to the United States if anything should happen to him, so I know I spoke to him at some point during the two weeks of funeral preparations and memorial events but the details from that period are very hazy and I can't recall what was said during the conversation.  For some people, I understand that the idea of becoming involved with someone so inextricably linked to the situation would hit far too close for comfort and might even seem wrong.  But mutuality in friendship as well as grief caused us to gravitate towards each other and talk for hours about the things we couldn't share or admit to anyone else.  He was going through his own issues, not only in dealing with Jon's death, but also in continuing to face the loss of other friends and co-workers.  To put it lightly, he saw a lot of bad stuff on that fifteen-month deployment.  And thus it was through this friendship of mourning that my first relationship since being forcibly deported to "widowland" came about.  In the eyes of some people, it was seven months too soon.  We had this saying back in college, almost like a code that we'd use during that awkward moment when someone brought up something that was probably still a little too raw and touchy for the joke to be funny.  We'd say:  "Too soon?  Too soon?"  For me, however, throwing myself into a relationship long before I was ready probably saved me from a much worse fate.  At that point, I was sleeping the days away, drinking (a lot), and thought constantly about suicide.  With his help, I managed to pull myself out of that dark pit, and I relied on his encouragement to fight tooth and nail to stay out whenever I started to slip back down there again.  So even if the relationship didn't work out because we wanted different things and I wasn't in love with him, I will always be grateful for the fact that the worst blunder I made at the seven-month mark was trying to find love again.

A picture a friend sent to me after I discovered all
the crap my last boyfriend tried to pull

Since that time, I've tried my hand at dating on two more occasions.  I learned a lot from the second guy, though we weren't right for each other and it didn't work out.  The third was a mistake, pure and simple.  I have no good excuse for going down that route with that last guy, other than the fact that I was hurt, vulnerable, and looking for any and all distractions to avoid dealing with the fact that the love of my life was gone.  I invested a lot of time, energy, and money into that relationship, hoping to make it into something that was worth fighting for.  The extent to which I misjudged him still horrifies to this day and makes me wonder what happened to my sense of reason and good judgment - how the hell am I supposed to be a good lawyer if I fall hook, line, and sinker for someone's lies and manipulation as I did with him??  I was an open book, and told him exactly how I was feeling and what I needed to hear - and guess what?  He repeated it all right back to me and I foolishly thought it meant he was a kind and compassionate person.  I think I was also afraid that if I was going to take the plunge into the dating world after losing my husband, I'd better ensure it was worth the risk.  When it didn't work out, not only did I feel like a personal failure, but I also felt I had somehow insulted the sanctity of my marriage.  The fact that Jon is not the last man I kissed in this world breaks my heart.  

It's ironic when I think back now on the occasional nightmares I had during Jon's deployment in which, for some inexplicable reason, I did the very thing I am most opposed to, i.e. being unfaithful.  I would wake up from these nightmares in sheer panic with my heart racing, unable to understand why these awful things were penetrating my sub-conscious when consciously, my biggest (and well-founded) fear was for my husband's safety.  It's bizarre to think that, in a way, these nightmares ended up coming true, only not in a way I could ever have predicted.  The nightmares made no logical sense; Jon and I's relationship was built on trust and fidelity was never even a question for us.  Both of us agreed from day one that honesty is absolutely non-negotiable, especially when faced with the distance and separation that come along with the Army way of life.  Ultimately, when my last relationship ended, I realized that being in a bad relationship is not better than being alone.  They say you don't know how good you have it until you don't have it anymore, but I beg to differ.  It's not that I didn't know how good I had it with Jon - I always recognized how incredibly lucky we were while he was still alive.  In fact, if anything, it seemed too good to be true.  I was terrified that the bubble of bliss would burst and leave behind the sticky remnants of a perfect life in an imperfect world.  

When Jon and I recited our marriage vows and promised to navigate the unknown oceans of the future together, I never contemplated that those oceans would include the tsunami-like tidal waves of the dating world after you've already had the best of the best.  My family and friends have told me not to settle...so I'm not.  I think I've made many important realizations since relationship #2 and catastrophe #3; one of them is that I'm better off now than I was when I dreaded ripping the band-aid off my heart.  I've learned the hard way that I tend to avoid all my grief issues when I'm distracted by a relationship, and so now I'm actively dealing with all those issues instead...whatever that means.  There's no book with a step-by-step checklist that tells me what to do, so I'm still not sure "dealing" with my grief really entails.  For now, however, writing seems to assuage the heartache a little.  As my legal writing professor told us on our first day of class, writing is how we figure out what we think.  Sometimes we think we think something...until we write it down and realize the reality is actually quite the opposite.

I still feel the same way now that I did back when I first plunged into the dating world - I still look for distractions and run myself ragged with an impossibly busy schedule because it's easier than succumbing to the pain of the reality.  And I still think an awful lot every day about how I'd much rather be in a place beyond this world where I could see Jon's face again.  But instead of drowning my sorrows in relationships that acted only as a band-aid in temporarily concealing the hurt, I now depend more than ever on the belief that I'll be reunited with Jon again one day.  It's literally all that keeps me going sometimes.  As I recently admitted to a couple of friends out loud for the first time, I would not be standing here today if I didn't believe that ending your own life means you don't get to go to Heaven.  I can't take that risk - I need to do everything I can in the here and the now if I want a shot at an eternity with Jon.  One of my military fraternity brothers committed suicide while I was a senior in college (in fact, it happened in the very same bedroom that had been Jon's bedroom while he lived at the fraternity house), and as I thanked God for Jon and prayed for his safety each night, I'd also ask Him to please look after Austin.  Given that he took his own life, I was always afraid as I uttered those words I might be asking for the impossible.  But I figured it couldn't hurt to ask and to hope that Austin was in fact in a better place.

I mentioned at the beginning of this entry that until a week or so ago, I felt pretty guilt-ridden about the fact that I started dating soon after Jon's death.  The remedy for all that regret came in the form of an article I read entitled "Why Some Women Start Dating Soon After Husband's Death."  I know, pretty on-point, right?  How could I not read it?  The author starts off by saying that she's been confused by many things in her life, but that by far, the thing that has confused her the most is being comforted by a boyfriend while she cries about her husband.  Ha, yep - been there and done that one!  It is, as she says, "a doozy."  She also says she made it no secret that she started dating what some would consider "early" in her widowhood:  "I've often said that that was because my partner had been ripped from my life, suddenly and without warning, and I wanted that void filled.  I wanted to skip the part of dating where you wonder whether or not someone will call (or in this day and age, text, IM, email, or message in some other way) and the other games we all play, no matter what age we are.  I wanted to catapult right back to where I was - comfortable, sure of my rock-solid relationship, taking care of someone I knew would take care of me.  So while the perception may have been that I didn't "love my husband enough,' and so I immediately started dating, the exact opposite was true:  I loved him so much that I wanted him back without missing a beat.  I wasn't ready to grieve him.  Because I loved him too damn much." (Catherine Tidd, Why Some Women Start Dating Soon After Husband's Death: http://www.opentohope.com/?post=why-some-widows-start-dating-soon-after-widowhood&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-some-widows-start-dating-soon-after-widowhood)

God, if there was ever an answer to my prayers, that was it.  As she goes on to say, the other reason for her decision to date was the fact that she still had all of this love to give - a specific kind of love that was her husband's and his alone.  It was the kind that keeps people together for a lifetime.  And then he was gone, but her love wasn't.  Much like this author, I too was such a fool to think when I first started dating that the love I have for my husband could be given to anyone else other than him.  It can't.  It's all his.  So although I desperately tried and failed over the past few years to fill that void, I'm done with trying to make the distraction of another relationship work for me.  It doesn't work.  For now, good friends, the love of family, beautiful memories (and perhaps some retail therapy?) seem to work much better.