Grief elbows you into corners. It makes you sit uncomfortably with emotions, memories, regrets, decisions, and actions. It forces you to ask yourself the difficult questions: did I love well? did I love enough? did I say what I needed to say? did I waste time? did I ever—even once—get it right? And then ask why: why did I waste so much time? Why did I get mad about those stupid little things? Outside of grieving a terrible loss, we never force ourselves to go through this much introspection, and why would we put ourselves through it? Rarely do I come out of it giving myself any kind of benefit of the doubt. No, I mostly just add to the doubt. Standing in that metaphorical corner where grief has pushed me, I am metaphorically knee-deep in doubt, like a metaphorical pile of dust swept up from a long-neglected metaphorical room.

I have learned that grief is about loss; about not seeing this person ever again, or hearing his voice, or kissing him goodnight, or even picking up those socks he left on the floor. Or not asking his opinion, or telling him about my day, or finishing his sentence, or asking him, yet again, to put his dirty dishes in the dishwasher.

Yes, grief, especially of a spouse, is also about a lost relationship. It brings into strong focus the good and the bad of it. It is about lost opportunity: the chance to apologize, to try again, to get a do-over. It’s about coming to terms with how you lived together, realizing that it can’t be fixed or improved upon or made better or given another chance. I try to cut myself some slack. We were both in it together, I remind myself; neither of us experts. We were both so young. Our marrige wasn’t perfect, but it was better than many. We lasted. We talked things through. The clichés come to my mind so often I think I should turn them into cheers—cute little rhymes I can say to myself when I’m feeling most vulnerable. Give me a B. Give me an R. Give me an E,A,K!

I also try to give value to this loss, to make it meaningful by understanding that I’ve indeed learned from all the experience and reflection. And I know that I have. Again there is a multitude of clichés about not sweating small stuff, understanding that life’s short, and valuing every day. 

But aside from that, what do I know that I would perhaps take into any future relationship? Quite a bit, actually. I’ll share only one thing here. It is the most important nugget I’ve discerned from hours of contemplation. That is that I would make sure that I am always the kind of partner I want to be. If there is something, anything, about a relationship that makes me unhappy, it needs to be addressed; same for my partner.  What I realize most about any of the really difficult times Kevin and I experienced is that, thinking back, I didn’t really like myself or my response during those times. Not liking myself made me unhappy, an emotion I quickly shared and that only made things worse. So often Kevin thought I was unhappy with him, but really, I was unhappy with me or with how I reacted to a situation. In the moment it’s difficult to be objective, and nearly impossible to be objective about oneself. But looking back (and I cannot say that I have the “benefit” of being able to look back, because nothing about this situation is in any way beneficial) I realize that I was unhappy about me, about where I was emotionally or what I was saying or doing. I wish I had understood this many years ago. I know I would have been much happier, and I know now how important that is to the total equation.

I recently finished Paul Lisicky’s lovely memoir The Narrow Door. It is the story of the parallel losses of Lisicky’s relationships with his best friend, the writer Denise Gess, when she died from cancer, and with his partner M due to a breakup. I have filled the book with pink Post-Its to highlight lines that I particularly understand or with which I agree. I am not surprised that many of them are about grief and reactions to cancer, illness, and death. On many of them I have written one word: "yes!" He gets it and articulates it so very well. It is the extraordinary wonder of literature that his truth is mine; that he and I, having never met, but having gone through similar events, have these same exact experiences and thoughts. 

What surprises me though, are the three or four notes that I’ve placed in the chapters about his  breakup with M. Is the subject matter all that different, I wonder? Best friend, lover, partner, husband, death, grief, regret, analysis. I realize how they are all bound together for me. Kevin's death was not only the loss of my best friend, but also the ending of my marriage. I am left to grieve both. To try, like Lisicky, to understand how both friendship and love ended too soon. While Paul Lisicky grieves the loss of two people, I grieve the loss of one, but of the same two relationships. I hope that Kevin and I got it right, and I try to come to terms with the times I and we didn’t do so well. 

To that end I examine and scrutinize, turning the memories over in my hand, asking those questions of “did I,” “did we” and “why.” Not in an effort to fix, because it’s too late for that, but because grieving makes it impossible for me to avoid doing so. I want to believe we mostly got it right. I want to hope that our time together was good, that Kevin’s short time here was made better by our marriage. For me, it is how I grieve, it is a part of the inescapable need to appraise this life, his life, and our life together.

I remember the second or maybe third time I went out with Kevin. We ended up at his apartment, with a bag of Fritos and a six-pack of Stroh’s Signature beer. We had both attended college classes that day, then worked an eight-hour shift at the Hyatt hotel. It was closing in on midnight and I had a class the next day at 8 a.m.

We started talking about stuff that made me think this wasn’t going to be a short-term relationship—how impossible it was to get along with our parents, plans for the future, how we would raise kids, whether we believed in God, what we wanted to be doing when we turned thirty. I remember telling him that my biggest goal was to live life with few regrets. “They’ll eat you alive,” I think I said, trying to seem deep and introspective.

I’m not sure how well I’ve done at living the kind of life my twenty-year-old-self wanted me to live. Regrets are tricky, sly creatures that sneak up on you when you think you’re doing fine. I have my share of the usual regrets—not keeping in better touch with friends, not learning earlier how to budget and save, not getting back to grad school earlier, wishing I spoke better French. When it comes to our marriage, I find regrets to be moving targets. I regret some choices or situations when I’m grieving, but those same things seem less worrisome when I think rationally. There are times when I regret renovating our house. It was a significant accomplishment. But, in the end, we should have spent the time and money sucked up by our house projects on family travel. Perhaps, I sometimes think, we should have waited a while to marry, taking the time to better establish ourselves in our individual pursuits. It could have made me better prepared for the life I’m now living. 

But these are regrets as viewed through the rearview mirror, borne of tragedy, and with hindsight as my guide. They are the kinds of regrets about which I can only say there’s nothing to be done about that now.  

I’ve considered the impossible-to-change regrets lately as I read Atul Gawande’s book, Being Mortal. My reading of the book was followed by a lively discussion at my local bookstore. Being Mortal is Gawande’s look at our inability to understand and properly care for the dying, be they elderly or terminally ill. The medical community has a natural conflict, with their first priority of keeping someone alive when, perhaps that is not what’s really best. In the chapters on terminal illness, Gawande points out instances where the decision to avoid attempts at prolonging life actually led to better quality of life for the time remaining. I can only say that it is easy to proclaim with a healthy voice, the desire to “end it” if you ever were to find yourself extremely debilitated by disease, but more difficult to do so in the midst of that situation.

Kevin and I talked many times about how we both would never want to be kept alive on ventilators or feeding tubes. As the Terry Schiavo tragedy unfolded we both made sure the other understood this. But once we found ourselves in the midst of our own tragedy, it wasn’t so easy. After two spinal cord surgeries, the second of which was mishandled and led to formation of a hematoma that nearly killed him, Kevin was left a quadriplegic. Rather than say it’s time to stop, he instead implored me to keep fighting with him, his only real request of me during that time was that I never give up on him.

So I didn’t. 

My regrets don’t have to do with prolonging Kevin’s life. I am grateful for every second he was here. But the choice to continue fighting meant that we were in battle mode every second. It meant that, when hospice told me he only had a few days, I couldn’t go to him and tell him that we needed to say our “I love you’s” and “goodbyes.” It meant we marched on, side-by-side, rather than face-to-face, toward an inevitability that neither of us could accept by putting words to it. We continued battling disease until one of his tumors ruptured and he was gone within minutes. 

I do regret that we didn’t have some quiet minutes between us; that our choice to keep going prevented us from a peaceful end.

Being involved in grief and widows groups, I have learned a few things. I have talked with widows whose spouses died suddenly from accidents or heart attacks, and those who, like Kevin, suffered for years with heart disease, cancer, or Parkinson’s. Rarely in my conversations have I found someone who didn’t have regrets about the way things ended. I hear lamentations like, “I knew he wasn’t coming back to me, so I said it was ok to turn off the ventilator. Now I wonder why I did that. I feel like I killed him.” Or, “I told him it was ok to let go, so he did. He slipped away. It was peaceful, but now I hate myself. Why did I tell him it was ok and not to keep fighting?”

I suppose what I’ve learned most of all is that is that there seldom is a truly peaceful end, one that is not fraught with sadness and grief and tinged with flecks of emotions like guilt and regret that color the situation impossible. I think, too, sometimes we all look for regrets, or at least for things we feel we should have done better or differently. It is perhaps, all tied up in wanting, more than anything, for the outcome to have been otherwise.

I’ve also reconciled (the opposite of regret?) myself to the knowledge that Kevin died the way he needed to: fighting; trying to keep disease, despair, fear, and death, at bay for just another day. He needed that. Had I said anything to him to signal my acceptance of the end, well, I can’t even begin to think of the terror it would have caused in him. I know I would also regret having done that, so how to resolve? It just isn’t possible. I suppose letting him battle on was my small gift to him, bequeathed unknowingly, that I now must live with.

So while it might have been good for some of the patients in Being Mortal to accept the end, we need to understand that this was their choice. As admirable as it is, it isn’t everyone’s. It certainly wasn’t Kevin’s.