Part 1 (Grief Sucks) — Part 2 (No more Goonies)
Here is my second installment of “Things you think about after your wife dies.” Hope you enjoy… but not too much. That would be weird.
11) Death is everywhere.
Houseplants die. Campfires die. Fashion trends die. Friendships die. Light bulbs die. Dreams die. Cars die. Cellphone batteries die. And apparently, anyone younger than me now “dies” whenever they laugh. It’s official: There are no more Goonies in the year 2019—no matter how hard you try, everyone has to say “die.”
12) Depression and happiness are super weird things.
They’re positive feed-back loops, so far as I can tell. If you’re happy, you do more happy and healthy things. If you’re sad, there is never a level of sadness where your body recognizes that it should stop and says, “Let me stop being sad and do stuff to make me feel better.” Instead your body decides to stay inside, sleep more, binge on ice cream and watch Netflix till the cows come home. Your body says, “I’m sad. Let me do things that make me feel worse.”
13) You can’t run away from problems… but grief disguises them really well!
A lot of people thought I ran away so many times (to Mexico, to Europe, across the country…) because I was trying to get away from grief. But don’t think for a second that us grieving people are so stupid. Nothing could make me forget everything I miss about my wife, even for a minute. Plus, I feel I’ve totally come to terms with losing her. In reality, there were a million other things I had a blast running away from. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
14) People rock.
I’ve been known to give people a lot of flak for not being as rely-on-able as I would like them to be during my grief-stricken existential crises. But tragedies can bring out the best in people. And then you remember the world was never that bad to begin with.
15) We like to talk about ourselves more than we think.
I always thought I was a pretty quiet and humble guy, content to keep any and all business to myself. But then I lost Cassie, my confidant. For some reason, even on the days I had done absolutely nothing, I found myself just praying that someone might ask me what I did that day. And for some reason, it’s a desire that isn’t satiated by talking to my dog… turns out dogs are disappointingly poor listeners.
16) Having a lot of stuff sucks.
Don’t have a lot of stuff because other people have to deal with it when you die… which is not cool. There are a lot reasons I try to organize things now (IF I organize anything). But the number one reason is because I’d be a total jerk to people if they have to sort through it all when I die.
17) No news doesn’t mean good news.
Sometimes it does—I’ll admit that. And most of the time you randomly check on a grieving person they will be alright—or alright enough to say they’re alright. But in between the weeks that you decide to sacrifice those valuable 30 seconds of your time to text “How are you?” there were lots of moments where we felt less than okay and wished someone would just text anything—a “hi,” a “how are you,” a random meme, a picture of your pet doing something ridiculous—literally anything.
18) Our culture puts romantic love on too high of a pedestal.
This really stands out for people grieving a spouse because of the unwarranted counsel we get on the topic. People seem to believe that the gold standard for “moving on” from the loss of one partner is to move on to a new partner. It isn’t. No matter how you phrase it, telling a person that they could replace the old, dead person with a new, living person will not make any widow(er) feel better. (It also suggests that people can’t be fulfilled if they’re not in a relationship… which I also take issue with. But that’s a different story.)
19) Old people are better than young people.
Specifically when it comes to things like: keeping commitments, communicating feelings, sympathizing with someone experiencing grief, hugging sad people, making tasty comfort food, and so much more. Because of the diverse age demographic of my supporters, I can safely say: old is gold.
20) God is not imagined.
When processing the loss of his wife, C.S. Lewis wrote that marriage helped him understand that “God” is not made-up based on unfulfilled desires for love and relationship. That was because, even at the moments in his marriage when he felt entirely satisfied—socially, emotionally, physically, mentally—he still had a yearning for something greater and spiritual. “If God were a substitute for love we ought to have lost all interest in him.” But that was an argument against old-school psychology.
A newer psychology of atheism holds that “God” is a social construct born from communal experiences. In my experience of losing Cassie—the person who brought me to belief, who kept me tied to a church, who was Christ to me, and whose job at a church literally depended on my belief in God—I only felt more connected to that same God. Even when I was the furthest (physically and emotionally) from every friend who is a Christian, I still felt inexplicably compelled to have some religious ritual in my life, even without the social context.
Not sure I’ve learned that many lessons from grief… but stay tuned from more!
