I’ve just come in from shoveling the dense, packy, sodden snow that accumulated outside last week. It’s the heavy kind that fills a shovel every few inches. Lifting that full shovel reminds one of lifting a mid-sized dog. It fell in big heaps over the weekend, nearly fifteen inches by the time it was done. My car got stuck in it twice as, despite the constant clearing, I just couldn’t keep up.

Shoveling snow is one of those chores that reminds me that I’m a widow. Actually, it reminds me that I’m a widow who doesn’t own a snow blower. The driveway at our old house was long and winding enough that it required hiring a plow. The walkways were fairly short and we had a teenaged boy (now away at college) to help. I’ve never had a very good relationship with any machine that requires a pull start, so the thought of purchasing a snow blower now didn’t make much sense.

In the three years since Kevin passed away though, I have purchased other small equipment. After a tornado touched down just ¼ mile from our house, I purchased a small, battery-charged chainsaw. I have used it a few times to cut very small branches and brush. I know it’s a fairly wimpy machine (not even sure it can be called a machine) but using it is still exhilarating and somehow empowering. 

But there’s a fine line between feeling empowered and feeling overwhelmed. Problems that arise--that I know Kevin would have dealt with--or that we would have tackled together, are more than just hassles. They remind, they discourage, they bring to mind the same questions, oftentimes they simply wear me out. I have written about the emotional struggles of being widowed, but there are physical and intellectual challenges as well. I come from a long line of strong women. I am grateful for whatever genetically endowed internal fortitude I have, as it has been called upon repeatedly over the past three years. 

So let me tell you about the strong women:

My great-grandmother on my mom’s side met my great-grandfather when she was twenty-one and he was fifty-four. He had been a Civil War lieutenant and the town’s Post Master. She bore five children in six years, watched one become blinded and one die of consumption, and then buried her husband before he turned seventy. She went on to run a boarding house in a town that had a lumber mill, a cannery, and textile factory, so I can only imagine her encounters with rowdy men. 

My great-grandmother on my dad’s side was a Cherokee woman who I’m told, hid in a cellar during the government-imposed relocation of Native Americans known as the Trail of Tears. She rarely ventured out of the house afterward, fearing for her life. 

My father’s mother married my grandfather at fifteen. She worked with him in the logging camps along the Tennessee-North Carolina border, where she managed the kitchen. Each day, she rose at 4 a.m. to make breakfast and supper for sixty-seven men, including baking over a hundred biscuits. She raised eight children, including a granddaughter. She and my grandfather were married sixty-six years.

My mother, worried that her mother would never understand that she wished to marry and move away, eloped with my father in 1943. Together, they left their families and moved to Detroit, where my dad registered for and was drafted into World War II. At eighteen, and pregnant with my brother, my mom lived on her own in the second floor of a house owned by an Armenian family that didn’t speak English. In 1950, she went to work for General Motors. She worked full-time, raised 4 children, and kept a spotless house. She taught my sisters and me to be independent, to have our own money, and to love unconditionally.

I have often called upon the memories and the strength of these women as I’ve moved through the past three years, knowing that they also suffered losses as great as mine, and kept going. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the thought of one more pep talk to myself makes me want to scream.

I remember in the months after Kevin’s passing it seemed that everything that could go wrong did. In six months’ time, I replaced a hot water heater, a water softener, the heater control on our hot tub (twice), a sump pump, then had major car repairs for both my car and my son’s (which broke down on the freeway sixty miles from home). The furnace went out when it was cold, and the air conditioner quit on the hottest day of the summer. 

After going through so much, I was greatly anticipating spending a quiet summer evening at the home of a neighborhood friend. We would sit on the deck, sip wine and laugh about all of these problems. But when I arrived at my friend’s house, we instead discussed the fact that a black bear had been sighted at the house across the street. We wouldn’t be eating on the deck, and before we could dine at all, I was advised to return home, lock my dog in the house, and remove all bird feeders from the yard. 

A bear. A f#@**&ing bear!

Just when I thought I couldn’t possibly be put through anything more, I had to deal with a bear.

I sat down that evening after dinner and looked to the sky. I told Kevin that if his purpose was to make me realize I had taken him for granted, it had worked! But I was now ready to have a little break from this cosmic joke. 

Other things have happened, as they do. And even the day-to-day takes additional strength some days. I’ve broken down doing the simplest things: unloading groceries, putting gas in the car, mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, and yes, shoveling snow. It doesn’t have to be something big to remind me that I am doing all of these things on my own.

And the big things remind me too, even those things that are planned. When I think back on selling my house, buying a new condo, buying a car, selling a car, helping my son with college arrangements, getting my daughter through high school, and all the other things big and small, I am thankful for whatever amount of fortitude I inherited from the strong women who came before me. 

Oh, and if you think the genealogy detailed above is impressive, you should also know that Elvis and I are cousins!

As in earlier posts, I want to preface this discussion by saying that I understand people’s hearts are in the right place. But sometimes the impact of their words on my head and my heart is not what one would anticipate it to be.

In 1993, NBA star Charles Barkley was scolded in the media for proclaiming that he was no one’s role model. Specifically, when he was asked by a reporter to atone for certain behavior off the court, Barkley responded:

"I'm not paid to be a role model. I'm paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court."

He later went on to immortalize this phrase in ads for Nike.

At the time, I disagreed with Barkley, and felt that his response was an easy way in which to justify his lack of self-control.  As the mother of a one-year-old son, I was especially attuned to the debate, wondering as I did who he would eventually choose for his role models.

Fast-forward twenty years, and I have a new understanding of Barkley’s frustration. Unlike Charles, however, I don’t feel I can go around demanding that people not view me as a role model. I tend to back away from the discussions and keep the frustration to myself. It wasn’t until a meeting of my widow’s group that I realized I was not alone in my discomfort with such conversations. 

These accolades usually come after I talk with someone about what has happened in the three years since my husband passed away. Yes, I finished my Master’s degree—something I promised my husband I would do. I sold my house and moved myself and my two children into a new home. Also because I committed to Kevin that I would, and it was too difficult and costly to stay. I purchased a condo for the time when my daughter and son have left our nest and I am completely on my own. I have kept my job and kept my children in school and extra-curricular activities. We love each other, we get along most days, and we keep moving forward together.

For this, I have been called strong, brave, courageous, gutsy, and even told I have “pluck.” I am honored that people see me in this way, but I don’t feel it is accurate or even appropriate. I certainly don’t see myself in this way at all. I am simply doing what I have to do in order to get through the day. Outwardly, I smile and am mildly deferential when offered this sentiment. But inside, I’m bristling.

I did many time-consuming, sometimes-healing projects in the aftermath of Kevin’s illness and passing. In looking back, they were most certainly done in order to honor Kevin’s memory. But they were also done as a way to keep me so busy that I never had time to grieve. And the more exhausted I was at the end of the day, the more likely I was to sleep through the night. They weren’t acts of bravery or strength; they were, more accurately, acts of defense or denial of my situation. It was me doing what I had to do to get through this time. None were acts of heroism or virtue, but instead, were simple, yet very tiring, acts of self-preservation. They fed my need to keep up the sense of diligence developed from three years of life with a cancer patient, or, as the writer Emily Rapp has called it, the “addiction to dread,” that caregivers begin to live for.

Add to this the fact that the "public me" is quite often not like the "private me" who still has bouts of crying, of angry yelling at the universe, and even the occasional kick of the dog (who somehow still comes back to me and kisses my face), and you can hopefully see how difficult it is to accept accolades.

A dear friend recently asked me what has been the hardest thing I’ve dealt with in the past three years. After thinking for only a minute, I answered more honestly than I previously had, and said, “facing and being alone with my grief.”  That is the truth. And that is not a sign of strength. To me, it seems much more a sign of weakness. 

I have another friend who is widowed, whom I greatly admire. She too, has maintained a career, family and household despite the loss of her soul mate—so many of us do. At the time of his sudden passing, she spent several weeks in bed, not answering calls or going out. 

Some might say she was being weak, not getting on with it; hiding under the covers rather than facing her grief.

But I believe the opposite to be true. She is my hero. She did face her grief, in all its debilitating, suffocating, energy-zapping, daylight-robbing heaviness. She faced it and lived in its midst for long, frightening days and longer nights. She did not put it aside, telling herself that she would deal with it another day.

In the midst of the Charles Barkley ruckus, fellow NBA player Karl Malone said the following:
“We don't choose to be role models, we are chosen. Our only choice is whether to be a good role model or a bad one." 

I suppose this is true of the widow that gets herself up and moving forward each day, although I certainly wouldn’t call myself “chosen.” More like “left-behind.” I’m in a life that, God knows, I didn’t ask, nor ever plan to be in. And I would give anything to have my old life back. But it is still difficult for me to take the acts of simply moving forward and declare them to be acts of bravery by those who observe them. Especially since I know that many of those who have classified me as a strong role model would behave in exactly the same way, and do it equally well, were they to be in a similar situation.

We each deal with grief in our own way, and no one way is better or more correct than another. As grievers we each, in our own way, try to make the best of this new role into which we’ve been thrust, even on those days when we feel, more than anything else, that it simply isn’t worth it. Call it strength, adaptability, or simply getting on with it, it’s just what we do.