The View From Hell Here

I’m not very good at this. What is “this” to which I refer? Well, possibly it’s widowhood. Or possibly it’s the idea of regularly sharing my thoughts and feelings in a blog. Actually it’s both. But, like much else these days, I tell myself it will be a good thing, so just get on with it.

I have now been widowed for thirty-four months. In many ways it seems a lifetime ago, and yet, yesterday as I counted the months since my husband’s death, it felt as though it couldn’t possibly be that long, nearly three years. When I think about it as an actual event that happened I am still mostly in disbelief. How can this be our fate, I wonder? How can my husband, my best friend, the father of our two children, not be here with me? Where has he gone? Perhaps he’s just on a long trip. Maybe this is all a bad dream and I’ll wake up. No, those are not feelings that occurred only in the first weeks after his death, those are feelings that still come up even today.

Each milestone event that happens without him, each big decision I have to make on my own, are all reminders that he’s gone. I find it terribly difficult to look at childhood photos of him, or pictures of us as a young couple; much more so than pictures of us later. The urge to go back in time, to warn him that he doesn’t have much time—that life will be good, and then it will be unthinkably bad—is so great I have to look away. 

That’s why I write this blog. Because much of life doesn’t make sense, but even more of widowhood doesn’t. It’s not just what life throws at you, but what you seemingly consciously believe, feel and act upon, that are sometimes just not rational. The writer Joan Didion called it her “year of magical thinking”: this disbelief, this hopefulness for something you know can’t happen (that he’ll walk through the door at any minute), this irrational thinking that is often so much better than facing reality.

In this blog, I hope to impart some of the experiences I’ve had over the past two-plus years, in hopes that my words and feelings will be understandable to those who share this fate, or those who are just beginning a similar journey. Nothing about it has been easy, despite having many loving family members and friends to support me. Whatever insights I’ve developed have been the result of wading through difficult days and sleepless nights. And I lay no claim to the insights as original or wholly mine. In addition to family and friends, I have had the benefit of a wonderful young widows’ grief group, along with private counseling, that has helped me, through our common experiences, to understand many of my feelings.