Q: Losing my husband is my worst fear. I can't imagine! How did you survive?

Hello, From the Other Side #1

Welcome to the “Hello, From the Other Side” series, a (non)advice column from someone who's been there and (currently) lives to tell the story. This is one person’s perspective to help shed light on the grief experience and to help others feel less alone.

Please note that I am not a therapist and I don’t have any real expertise, but I have experience. Lots and lots of experience.

Q: Losing my husband is my worst fear. I can't imagine! How did you survive? - Worried about future fears

A: Dear Worried,

I'm going to answer this question in two parts. In part 2, I will talk about how I actually survived (and continue to survive).

But before we get there, I'd like to address the phrase, "I can't imagine." I've heard this from countless people over the years. They often say it with a look of horror before changing the subject to something more palatable. And you're right, you can't fully imagine. No one can really know what it's like until you're in it.

But the truth is, you probably can imagine, at least a little - you just don't want to. And I get it. No one wants to imagine losing their life partner. No one wants to think about, even for a second, what that life looks like. We like to avoid. It's one of our greatest human qualities - our ability to avoid.

And because you are here and you are curious, I hope, for the next few minutes, you will not look away. You will not change the topic. You will not avoid.

I hope for the next few minutes, You will imagine. Because only in imagining can you even begin to understand or empathize with my life.

You ready? Deep breath.

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Imagine you wake up in an empty bed.

You reach your hand over, as you’ve done every day of your adult life, but all that’s there is a slight indent in the mattress where another body used to be. You are exhausted because sleep - like grief - comes in waves. 

You lie in bed and have to convince yourself to get up. Convince yourself to not waste your life. Convince yourself to make your person proud. Usually, you settle for convincing yourself to make it to the coffee maker.

Coffee in hand, you check social media and your email. Maybe someone has sent you a note of condolence. You always appreciate these notes, but you never know how to respond. Or you are too exhausted to respond thoughtfully. So you don’t. You add it to your mental to-do list for another day (“write thoughtful and appreciative response”). You look at your Facebook memory of the day - hoping your person posted on this day and you get to remember another piece of them you normally wouldn’t have remembered. Usually, they are reposted articles from the New York Times. But sometimes, they are personal inside jokes, like a photo of your dog taking a shit next to a “No Dog Pooping” sign. You both love and hate these moments. You both smile and cry at those moments. You screenshot them and put them in a folder for safekeeping in case Facebook decides to one day implode.

You debate doing normal adult human activities, like eating breakfast, showering, or getting dressed. On any given day, it’s questionable whether any of these things will happen. On a day when all three occur, it will feel like a fucking miracle.¹

You try and figure out your future. Now that you are a single-income household, you have to accept the fact that you can’t rely on your business alone and you need additional income in order to maintain your life. You realize that your little entrepreneur soul is probably going to have to get a 9-5 job. This thought, combined with the fact that most days you can barely eat breakfast, shower, and get dressed, depresses you. On a good day, you’ll avoid this by daydreaming about a future business idea that excites you. On most days, you just avoid altogether.

A familiar song comes on. It makes you think of your person. Either you smile or cry (oftentimes both), but it forces you to lose your concentration. And now, whatever you were hoping to accomplish today, probably won’t get finished. This happens about 20 times a day. You tell yourself you should turn off the music, but then it’s quiet. Too quiet. And through all your grief and loss, music is still your one constant companion and you just can’t stand to lose that too.

You check the mail. You used to love checking the mail. You loved the possibility that on any given day, someone may have thought of you and sent you a letter. Now you dread the mail. It almost always involves communication from creditors, vultures trying to buy your home, hospice surveys, medical bills, student loan bills, attorney bills. You feel overwhelmed and angry. On days you feel strong, you tackle this pile of papers. But usually, you put it off for another day.

Maybe you’ll leave your house. Either because you have to or because you are attempting to avoid being the isolated hermit you instinctively want to become. Either way, you will inevitably see someone you know. You will smile and say hello and they will smile back - the kind of half-smile of pity. Well-intentioned, they will ask, “How are you??” You will have a split second to decide. Do you answer honestly or do you say I’m doing "fine" and quickly move on? It usually depends on how much time you have and how exhausted you are and whether or not it is okay to cry in whatever public space you are in. Usually, you lie. Then feel guilty. Then commit to never leaving the house again.

On the drive home, your car is rattling. It needs an oil change and new brake pads. You are pissed you have to do this alone. This is absurd because even when your person was alive, you still took care of your own car. But you are looking for reasons to be angry. So you focus on the noises in your car and the fact that you don’t have a man to take care of that for you. Your feminist self dies inside a little, but you don’t care. You just want to be angry, so you let yourself go there.

You start thinking about dinner. You used to cook. You used to love to cook. But now cooking requires going to the grocery store. And seeing how your city is “the biggest small town in America,” you know there is a high probability you will run into someone you know. And wanting to avoid the half-smiles of pity, you avoid the grocery store completely. Plus you don’t know how to shop - or cook - for one person. So you buy too much and it goes bad. And your person used to care about the wastefulness of food and would be upset at this. So you feel more guilt and you don’t shop. And dinner, which used to be a shared experience of love, is now one of guilt, dread, and loneliness. You settle for over-priced delivery from a generic restaurant that carries no weight or meaning.

Some days you’ll meet up with friends and watch a movie or grab a drink. You’ll probably drink too much because even with your closest friends  - even through the fake smile on your face - you will feel alone and in a thick layer of grief. Usually, you’ll bail and go home early. But sometimes, you’ll connect in an authentic way, where for a brief period of time, you don’t feel so alone. Sometimes you’ll have a genuinely joyful experience with people you love. You will laugh and talk and it will feel incredible. And then, once again, feel guilty. Even though you know you deserve to be happy and your person would want you to. But you feel guilty because you are human and you miss your person and how is it possible to have a single joyful moment when they are dead?

You get ready for bed. This is the hardest part of your day. Even with music, there isn’t enough noise to drown out the deafening silence of their absence. You crawl back into the king-size bed you picked out together. You loved this bed. Now you hate this bed. You curl up in the corner where your person used to sleep, taking up the tiniest fraction of your too-big bed. You’ll toss and turn for hours. Eventually, you'll get out of bed and walk aimlessly around. You will distract yourself with booze or television until exhaustion takes over and you fall asleep on the couch.

You wake up and do it all again.

Part 2: How Did I Survive?

One day. One hour. One minute. One freaking breath at a time.

There’s no skipping ahead. There’s no bypassing grief (although I did a pretty good job at attempting to avoid it for a while). There’s no collecting $200 as you pass go.

The only way out is through.

I had a post-it note on my computer that read:

“You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” - Samuel Beckett

That’s how it felt. Every single day. “You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.” The constant internal battle of not knowing how to survive, not being able to survive, and yet, somehow surviving anyway. One breath. One minute. One hour. One day at a time. That’s how I survived.

Have a question for a future column? Ask it here. (while I ask for your name, in no way does it need to be your real name. In fact, I'm a huge fan of creative, made-up names. Let's think back to the old advice column days: signed, "lost and lonely in Louisville" or "wallowing widow from Wisconsin")

1. Now imagine adding kids to the mix. That is not my life, so I won’t dwell on it here, but imagine all this and little ones who depend on you for things like eating and breathing and overall tasks that keep them alive.