Why it took me so long to write this book ...

When I first sat down to write this book, I struggled. A lot. Mostly because going back and re-thinking the past doesn’t work for me. In fact, I try really hard to stay in the present because I usually think ahead five years. But here I was, wanting to go back, and afraid to do it at the same time.

On August 17, 2000 – almost ten years ago – my husband died. Being twenty-six and newly pregnant complicated my grief, and in some ways I felt like I didn’t even start mourning him until after my son was born. I knew at that point I wanted to write about my experience – my journey through grief. I wanted others in my place to not feel so alone in their world when they read my words. And also I knew something about the cathartic and healing power of writing, having journaled for years. So I was committed to writing about that time and tried, however, without success for more than eight years.

At first my grief was too raw. I spent my days staring at the living room wall, and – when I did go out – avoided friendly strangers at checkout counters and swim classes, people who didn’t know he was gone and asked about him. I called credit card companies to cancel his cards and gave away some of his clothes. But I couldn’t throw away his toothbrush or the pregnancy test stick I’d peed on that evening before he died.

I couldn’t write about it then, so I waited and tried again later. I tried again when I’d moved out of state and bought a new house. I purged my emotions into wet clay vessels, and my roommate watched my then two-year-old daughter and six month old son while I ran around and around the block in my Saucony sneakers. I watched the sun flash out from behind trees and counted the seams in the sidewalk. The air was nippy and I composed words in my head to write later.

But later was always later. The words, when I wrote them, weren’t what I wanted. They didn’t express how I found myself holding my breath for no particular reason. They didn’t articulate how it ached when I had to call my mom to tell of my infant’s first laughter because I couldn’t tell my husband.

And then I fictionalized it. And a door opened. I wrote of someone else’s pain and mine lessened somehow. But I wanted to tell my story, so I stopped.

I needed to begin again. It was time. Time to write our story. But I had to go back to do that. I needed to re-open the wounds and examine the pain in all its concrete sensory detail. And I was afraid.

I was afraid of the pain that I knew must accompany that trek. Afraid of how I’d be with my family while I was excavating my memories. Who would care for my children while I was in the past? Who would be a companion to the man I was married to now? Wouldn’t it hurt him to see me crying over Rob? How would me going back to Before affect my relationships in Now? Would it threaten the serenity and happiness we had?

My two year old is eleven now. She’s learning Japanese, stays up too late at night reading, and draws when she wants to express herself or be alone. She’s in a ballet class now, but will go back to swimming and riding horses this summer. She loves magic, music, nature and American Dolls.

The baby I found out I was pregnant with, the night before Rob died, is nine now. He whoops when he walks and is an expert scientist, especially regarding sharks and snakes. He loves the ocean -- and all the creatures in it – ninjas and sandboxes with running water nearby to make trenches and waterways. He hates people who litter, loud noises and taking his supplements or trying new foods.

Paul -- the man my children call “Dad” -- fed my son formula in bottles, changed his diapers and played “Tickle Monster” with him. He cradled my daughter in his lap when she was little and read to her at night and they both called him “Big Hairy Guy” for laughs.

So, would it be worth it to go back? Could it shatter the Now? Those questions plagued me and stunted my writing. I couldn’t even start.

This is perhaps why I have not written the story before now. The potential for hurting the people that I cared about was so monumentally in front of me.

Because what would happen was this: I’d remember a flash of memory and go to write it down. While I was there I’d fester and cling to shards of recollection and agonize over not the way things used to be but the things that would never be. And this was where the present got tricky. How did I stay pleased with my life and my new marriage while I lamented over my dead husband never walking my daughter down the aisle at her wedding?

And then digressions bleed through, like, I struggle over saying “my” daughter. I want to say “his” daughter. Rob’s. But then flash to “our” daughter. But that couldn’t be right because the man I’m with now, Paul – the one that has raised her since she was three years old – has adopted her. So she’s our daughter – Paul’s and mine. Not my late husband’s. Not anymore. But how can I say that?

Even now I have to ask: Where does he go in my life? Where can he fit? He must be allowed to stay in some form.

And so he does. A black and white photo of him feeding my infant daughter hangs on our upstairs wall; a flower he gave me and I pressed long ago is framed and holds a place on our living room altar; and he lives on in my journal, my dreams and my memories. And that is enough. It has to be.

So now that I’ve finished the book, I feel like an epic section of my life is over. I still have days where I miss Rob. In fact, I just went to the Azores on a recent vacation (a place he had visited as a teenager and where he still has family) and I got teary-eyed thinking how I wished we could’ve gone there together; or when I went in one of Lisbon’s huge cathedrals during that same vacation, I lit a candle for him and cried, knowing he would’ve loved seeing it.

My “Grief” days, or “I Miss Rob” days, aren’t overwhelming anymore -- or honestly very often anymore (a statement which at one time I would’ve been loath to say.) And despite those days, my life is rich and full.

I remember him with fondness and love. I cry at movies when the husband dies. I write about him. I dream about him. I tell my kids stories about him. We talk to his mom every week by phone, and we fly to visit her every summer. He is still very much in our lives and sometimes we still cry about him, but those times are fewer and fewer between.

It didn’t hurt those around me to write this book. Turns out, it even brought us closer.

I hope you enjoy the book and that, somehow, it makes a difference in your life.

Namaste,

Valerie

Grief Shadows OVERVIEW

Three state troopers came to my front door at five o’clock in the morning and told me my husband was dead. He had fallen asleep driving on his way back to the National Guard base on Cape Cod.

I just saw him four hours ago. Smelled him. Kissed him. And told him we were pregnant. And now, all at once, I was a widow. My daughter was a toddler and I had one on the way.

I was twenty-six years old.

But how could I be a widow? Widows were old, with white hair and sensible shoes that cushioned their bunions and who waited for people to visit them in assisted living homes. Or maybe they were fifty-five and had lost a spouse to cancer. Someone with grown children. Not pregnant, like me. Not with a toddler who’d never heard the word death.

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

Grief Shadows holds the reader’s hand and explores both the dark and light places I found during my grieving process – showing them that they aren’t the only ones. Others have done this before. Others have come out the other side. Those dealing with grief will feel less isolated, as if they’ve met a fellow traveler.

Grief Shadows is a memoir and shares my spiritual and emotional journey back to wholeness, reaching out to those who are searching for that connection.

I wrote of my horror, my sadness and then how I moved through life without my husband. I sludged through the muck of mundane to cancel his credit cards. I picked my way through horrific minefields, just waiting for the one thing that would send me into a catatonic state: Would it be picking out the coffin? Would it be telling my daughter that her daddy is never coming home? Or what about giving away his clothes? Throwing away his toothbrush?

Throughout the book, I wove in old love letters written by Rob, some of our family snapshots, and newspaper clippings of the accident.

A key element to my healing process was redefining myself and, conversely, remembering who I was. All the labels I had once associated with --mother, wife, friend, student -- were stripped from me in a matter of seven minutes. That’s how long the state troopers were in my house. Yes, I was still a mother, but now I was a single mother. Yes, I was still a friend, but not to the same people as before the accident. Grief changed me, and my relationships to other people necessarily had to change along with me. Here was an opportunity – albeit an unwelcome one – to grow and redefine who I was. To remember who I was underneath all the labels and layers. To discover the person I wanted to be after this tragedy.

The other theme woven through the chapters is that grief had never fully left me -- always seeming to shadow my experiences. But the intense pain did yield, and grief – soon enough – became something manageable. Something I wore with grace, like an accessory: a watch that was my grandmother’s, a scarf my mother bought me, or a necklace my daughter made.

I cried in cars, went to water aerobics, decided to move cross-country and delivered my baby. I found art and pottery, and journaling became a lifeline for me. But before I moved to Oregon, I started the strangest trek of all – seeking out a spirit medium. And then there was the dating.

Somehow this seemed worse than the spirit medium.

But it worked. I dated, I moved on, I doubled back, I cried some more, and I learned how to ride the grief bursts. I joined a new family and we created our own hybrid of hearts – understanding along the way how not to feel like I was betraying Rob by being with another man.

Grief Shadows is more than a legacy of memories; it’s a way to reach out and

connect to other grieving souls – to let them know they aren’t alone.

The Balm of Phone Calls

One night I was lying on the couch in the dark watching television. Aubrey was asleep in her crib in the next room, the bedroom I alone shared with her now. It seemed I was doing a lot of this tv watching in the dark thing lately, staying up way past when my head normally hit the pillow. It dulled the senses and for a second I could forget the worst of the pain.

But mostly there was no forgetting. In the quiet times after Aubrey slept, I remembered. I remembered Rob’s face after not shaving for a day or two. Scruffy. I remembered when he’d stroke my hair and face. He was so tender. I remembered that when we were dating and still living in the barracks at the base in Colorado, we’d walk in the nighttime and find places to sit and snuggle. Find private places where he’d get all shy, or he’d sing to me, or tell me his darkest secrets in Portuguese. I remembered his laugh, and the chest hairs that would peep out from above his tee shirt, and that when he got sleepy, he’d get extra snuggly. Or that when I walk away to do something, he’d pull me back to him for a kiss or a hug.

Sometimes he’d think of song lyrics just to sing to me, or play for me. It was like reading me poetry.

The show was a re-run but I watched it anyway because I didn’t want to go to the bed alone and know that he wasn’t down the hall playing his online computer game.

The phone rang. I needed to pick it up because Fernanda wasn’t home from work yet – it was maybe only 9:30 in the evening. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but I didn’t want the ringing to wake Aubrey. I lifted my fae from the arm of the couch.

“Hello?”

It was my Aunt Mary from North Carolina. Her husband, my uncle, was the only one of my family members that could attend the funeral.

“How are you doing?” she asks.

“I’m fine, I guess.” I quietly clear my throat. It’s been a couple hours since I spoke last.

I remember when my dad called me right after Rob died. A day or two later maybe. I was pacing the blackened parlor room where my happiness was stolen. The computer screen my only light in the sleeping house.

“You’re strong,” my father said.

“I don’t feel strong.”

And another phone call a couple days after that. Again, in the parlor. Why did I haunt this place? A place I rarely hung out in before Rob died? Was it because this was the last place I’d seen him alive? And therefore closer to him somehow, in this room?

This time the call was from my uncle Phil. It’s a call I remembered long after all the other words of condolences were given to me. Long after the neighbor rang our bell and handed me a musical water globe with two doves in it “for your little girl” and a white business sized envelope of cash collected for me from all the neighbors that I’d never met in the two years I lived in that house.

After a few beats of silence over the phone line I say,

“I don’t know what to say.”

It was honest. I actually didn’t know the man but he was one of my favorite uncles and the only family member, it seemed, that tried to keep in touch with me – save my mom and grandmother.

His answer was truthful, too. And poignantly perfect.

“Neither do I. But that doesn’t matter. You won’t remember what I say anyway. You’ll just remember that I called.”

My heart paused, swollen with love and relief.

So now it was his wife calling. Someone he married when I was a young teen and whom I knew even less about. I think I’d met her twice.

“Are you praying?” she asked.

I closed my eyes and quieted my sigh with effort. She was Catholic, too. It seemed I was surrounded in unwanted waves of Catholism, everyday holding myself apart a little from almost everyone I knew in Massachusetts and out. Not wanting to be preached to -- or converted -- in my weakened state, to a religion I felt was filled with frivolous hypocrises. But at the same time desperately wanting connection and a warm soul to lean my aching head on.

“I’m trying.” I gave in and bowed to the love and peace I knew my aunt was trying to offer me. “It seems I’ve forgotten how to though.”

It did seem … relieving, to be able to spill your angst at the feet of a diety that claimed to love you with no conditions – except the hundreds the priests threw at you.

“Have you tried praying to your husband?” she asked.

I was silent.

“To Rob?” I asked, thinking I must have misunderstood.

“Yes.”

As far as I knew you could only pray to God, through Jesus’ name. Anything else was, well –

“Isn’t that blasphemous?”

Aunt Mary laughed. Her dad was a bishop, for Christ’s sake!

“No.” I could hear the smile in her word. “If it helps, do it. It might lead you back into prayer to God. Get you used to praying again.”

We said good-night and I hung up the phone, thoughtful.

I turned off the tv and sat in the dark for a few moments.

“Rob? Can you hear me? I miss you.”