Sideswiped

When I was told my husband, Rob, had died in a car accident, I thought the troopers were kidding. Some morbid deranged candid camera. Can you blame me? Maybe it was wishful thinking. Please let this be a joke. I just saw him four hours ago and told him we were pregnant again.

My mother-in-law wailed in incomprehensable Portuguese and paced and pulled at her summer robe. She picked up the phone and put it down again. And picked it up again.

"The number. I can't remember the number." She was crying and gasping.

I knew she meant Gerry, my sister-in-law. Fernanda spoke on the phone in words I didn't understand. I reached for a chair and sat down. The troopers -- three of them -- were still there. I didn't look at them.

Aubrey, my twenty-two month old, cried from her crib. I wrapped Rob's robe tighter around me and floated down the hallway. She stopped crying when I picked her up. Her heart beat and her skin was warm. I held her fast to me.

Fernanda reached for her to comfort the blissfully ignorant, but she clung to me instead. I know I looked at the troopers now, but I don't remember their faces -- only the blue uniforms.

One of them asked if they should wait to leave until someone could come and be with us -- the bereaved.

(It's funny ... it wasn't until August of 2000 that I even knew how to spell bereavement -- and now I was one of their ranks.)

I said, "No. My sister-in-law is coming," though how I knew this was a curiosity.

I was told months later from an acquaintance of an acquaintance of Rob's that one of the younger troopers must have been grappling with his own mortality because he -- strangely -- felt angry with me during his call to my house.

Maybe he wondered why I wasn't with my husband that early morning before the sun came up. (Rob had been driving back from our house to the army barracks in Cape Cod to complete his shift of National Guard A.T. [annual training].)

Perhaps he was confused at my lack of affect, my absence of emotion and tears. (Truly this aspect of my grief would continue to haunt me for months, as well.)

But when Aubrey cried and I returned to the New England parlor that we rarely used, with her in my arms, the reality of what the young trooper was there for hit him with a force that sickened him for a long time. All judgment gone, he recognized that this could be him. This could be his baby.

They left. I called my boss and told her I couldn't open the salon that morning. She was the first person I told that my husband had died.

Fernanda, Aubrey and I went downstairs and waited, with the lights on.

We heard the garage door upstairs. The feet scrambling downstairs.

"Valerie?! Mom?!"

Gerry and Lena, my sisters-in-law, burst through the doorway. One look at them and the tears came.

It wasn't a joke.

Here's the Wind - Up! (the pitch comes later)

Valerie Willman

http://www.valeriewillman.com

http://valeriewillman.blogspot.com

http://insaneparentsunite.blogspot.com

Grief Shadows: Young, Pregnant and Widowed

Nine years ago, three state troopers came to my living room at five in the morning and told me my husband had died in a car accident. He'd fallen asleep driving.

We had a 22-month-old daughter and I'd just told him four hours earlier that I was pregnant with our second child. And now I was a widow.

When I was acutely grieving, I looked everywhere for a book that would help me. Amazon.com, the library, my local bookstores. Nothing was there. In all my searching there were two books that eased my pain a bit. One was "I'm Grieving As Fast As I Can" filled with case studies and interviews of other young widows and widowers. The other was a book of letters one woman wrote her husband for one year after he died. This one, in particular, was the only book that held my hand and showed me what direction to face. I felt a little less isolated when I read it, like I'd met a fellow traveler.

Grief Shadows: Young, Pregnant and Widowed is the book I needed then.

Linked essays chronicle the tough decisions I now had to make alone and the isolation I felt after the death of my husband.

They address things like: who to give his clothes to, not being able to throw away his toothbrush, telling my daughter that her daddy was never coming home, picking out his casket, trying to decide whether or not to view his body and moving cross-country and discovering art as a healing tool. And how to start dating again.

Grief Shadows moves beyond the days and months after my husband died, and travels to more abstract -- yet still relevant issues, like dealing with guilt and grief in a blended family.

Grief Shadows is not just a monument or a legacy of memories, it's a chance to reach out and connect to other grieving souls. To let them know that they aren't alone and that the intense pain does yield and that grief -- soon enough -- becomes something of an accessory that can be worn with quiet grace -- even while it doesn't fully leave you.

I see this book in a number of places in the bookstore. Memoir, Self-Help, Parenting, or Healing and Grief Recovery.

A Plug for Journaling

Dear Friend,

I sit in my home office thinking of love.  Of two trees entwined together, growing and living and supporting each other -- even beyond death.  Because when our physical bodies die, something else happens to them. They go somewhere else, they exist somewhere else. Where? Does it matter? All that matters is they are not with us anymore.

And it hurts.

Really badly.

How do we make the pain stop? Do we really want it to? Will that mean they are less real to us -- our dead loved ones? Will that mean we didn't really love them if we can somehow manage to "move on"?

When my husband died, my whole reality split apart. I didn't know who I was anymore without his anchor. I didn't fit in with my friends and even my family anymore, because they were mostly his. Friends he'd made before me, the family he was raised with. Not mine. I didn't belong with anyone.

And I was pregnant.

And 25.

The only widows I knew of were old.

I went to the bookstores to connect with anyone in print that had experiences like me. I found two books that helped. Not exactly a resource list.

My friends and family loved me and helped me in ways that they knew how:  bringing food, providing childcare, listening, checking up on me, inviting me over for dinner so I didn't eat alone. But they all had lives of their own, and grief that they had to process as well. I couldn't expect them to help me with mine when they had their own to work on.

And so the support dwindled. Not out of well-meaning "you should be over it by now"'s, (though there were a couple of those) but just because it dwindled. People started picking up the pieces of their own lives that they'd put on the shelf to help me and about three months after the death of my husband, I started looking outside.

I looked for someone or a group of someones to help me through my grief where my family and friends left off. And I thankfully did.

I used to cry in the car where no one could see me -- though I found that not particularly safe, as I couldn't see well through the tears. I discovered that group work, at the time, wasn't for me. I wasn't ready to share my story with a group yet and I wanted to work one on one with someone I trusted. 

Journaling was a lifeline for me and I could not have lived through my grief, let alone grown through it, without my journaling. Journaling became a way to meditate and connect to whoever was listening and carrying me through my pain. I didn't know any gods to pray to, I didn't have the support structure of a church or congregation where I belonged. It was just me and my writing.

I found that I was ready to talk about three or four months after Rob's death. But that may be different for you. Everyone grieves differently and on a different time table.

Feel free to comment here or send me a private email if you need some direction.