And Life Comes Back: A Wife's Story of Love, Loss, and Hope Reclaimed (6 page)

At the end of the evening, we finished with the most appropriate benediction: the Ohio State fight song. As I had at so many football games, the faithful bride next to the team’s greatest fan, I stood with victory. With my wedding handkerchief in my hand, I pumped my fist with joy. I cheered him on, sending him off.

Somehow, I must begin a life without him.

Where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. We find God in our human lives, and that includes the suffering. I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me.

—Anne Lamott,
Help, Thanks, Wow

The funeral isn’t the hardest part. The calling hours, the wake, the funeral—all the accoutrements that accompany death—are actually a cocktail of drugs. People gather around, they bring food and flowers, they speak memories and platitudes, and they concoct a numbing solution that lulls the pain.

But then they go home, back to their lives, and the worst begins. Empty days line up, one after another, all looking hopelessly the same. Even the most familiar tasks are taxing. Tyler brought me the DVD that came with one of his Christmas toys, one of the gifts Robb had bought, another something I had no idea how to play with. I had lost my capacity to follow directions, let alone to pretend. Tyler said, “Put this in, Mommy. It will show us what to do.”
Yes. Please, show me what to do. Show me what on earth I am supposed to do now.

Time meant nothing to me. The hour of the day, the day of the week, which meal I should eat—these were details that washed away. Why sit at the table next to his empty chair? Why suffer the indignity of eating over the kitchen sink? Why eat at all? I began to understand how one could die of a broken heart. The colors of my life had faded, and I was disappearing with them. I became blank, skeletal, and hollow. I spent weeks in isolation, and my world became very small.

For weeks, when I woke in the morning, there was a sweet second or two when I had forgotten. But it was always short lived, interrupted by the nauseating rush of reality that left me quaking in my bed.
Every morning promised only another day without him. I couldn’t wrap my mind around another day, another tomorrow, another day after that, a forever of not seeing the man I had planned to do my life with. The man who listened well and cared much, served well and loved hard. His smile, his conversation, his laughter—they were gone. I lost much confidence, strength, and security. I lost our routines. I lost the familiar. There became no natural highlight to my day; he didn’t come home from work anymore.

There were side effects I could not predict. I felt safe only at home. As soon as I stepped outside, I felt vulnerable, exposed, on the defensive. The sun was too bright, the sounds were too loud, and everything made me jumpy and unsettled. Everything was too much. Sensory overload. Overstimulation. Like a carnival fun house. This new reality of mine was a terribly unsettling place to be. I became severely introverted, and I only wanted to be at home. Even more, I only wanted to sleep. Sometimes I left the house, frightened as I was, just to make sure I stayed awake and out from under the covers. I would push myself for as long as I could before the stimulation, sounds, lights, and life sent me racing back to safety. This lens of thought seemed impossible for the mom of two small boys. They needed me. I felt compelled to function, and yet my body seemed terrified—even of sunshine. I needed to begin the process of learning my world all over again.

Think of a newborn, fresh from the womb. Everything inside was cozy, comfortable, warm, and familiar, and this sudden, abrupt entrance into a new world is a serious shock to the baby’s system. So how does the baby girl respond? She sleeps twenty hours a day. She wakes
for a while, eats, looks around, takes in as much of this new place as she can, and then she goes back to sleep. With time, those wakeful periods stretch to a few hours, and the naps become shorter as life becomes familiar and predictable. Eventually, she can make it through the day without wanting sleep at all. She has learned her way. But until then, a newborn must sleep and sleep to allow herself time to understand and respond to a new world of stimuli that seems foreign and intrusive. Even sunshine.

My girlfriends stood watch, day and night. They arranged a schedule to keep the wheels of my life moving forward. They bought groceries, cleaned my house, and cared for my children. They made sure I ate, if only a few bites at a time. They bathed me and washed my hair. They helped me to the window to let the sun shine on my face. They slept with me at night, as panic raged and terrors racked my body. They learned the physical realms of grief that I cannot remember; I watched from the eye of my own storm.

My heart had undergone a trauma equivalent to a head-on collision. Had this happened to my physical body, I would have landed in the ICU for weeks. So it was no wonder that my heart could not keep up with the demands of the day or even the decision of the moment. Small decisions incited debilitating panic. My world seemed slanted by thirty degrees. Uneven. Not right. I had to learn it all anew, and I had to start small.

I claimed three goals for each day:

“Welcome to Starbucks, ma’am. What can we get started for you?”

I stared blankly at the menu. The smallest decisions seemed to be the most overwhelming.

“Um, a salted caramel mocha, please. Decaf.”

“You bet, ma’am. Coming right up.”

We exchanged a few common pleasantries.

And then I said, “Could I tell you something that will seem intensely vulnerable? And yet I need to say it.” His hands were still, and he looked intently at me.

“Yes, ma’am. Of course.”

“I’m a writer. I come here often to write. I sit at that corner table. Perhaps you’ve seen me?”

He smiled and nodded. “Oh, yes. Yes, ma’am.”

“I lost my husband, quite suddenly, very tragically, a few days before Christmas. This seems to be the only place I can come on my own. This Starbucks. I’ve written here before, and I’ll write here again. In fact, I’m here to write today. I wanted you to know. I can do that here. Thank you.”

His face softened. “You’re welcome, ma’am. It’s an honor to have you. And may we buy your drink today?”

“Yes, please. My husband would love that.”

At that corner table I began to write again. Sometimes I copied whole chapters from the book of Psalms into the pages of my journal. Sometimes
I copied one verse, over and over, letting the psalmist pray the words over me. Sometimes I wrote my memories of Robb, of our family. Most always, I blogged. I had been blogging for five years by then, so the discipline was familiar. In fact, it was nearly the only aspect of my life that felt the same. Many counseled, advised, and even requested that I put such writing on hold, at least until I had survived it. “Live it, then write about it,” they said. But I couldn’t seem to separate the two.

I wrestled with their suggestions: To write or not to write? To revisit the trauma with words or only in my mind? To get through this month or to write through it? But how could I get through it if I didn’t write through it? For whom would I write? Is it for the invisible you who might read it? Is it for me? The tangible me that spills and wants the page to catch me? Is it for the therapy of sorting the words, stringing them together, emptying my mind, pouring out my heart? Is it about the writing? Is it about the reading? Writers write to be read. Do not painters paint so their work may encourage and inspire? Do not inventors create to solve a problem, perhaps not just their own? Writers write to be read. Is that okay? Is it permissible? Is it humble? It felt so messy.

Some said to me, “You should wait three to six months before you see a counselor, before you begin therapy.” I guess there is a theory that one’s mind should recover from the trauma before healing can truly take place. But what was I to do until then? Just sit in my blindness until somebody set me free to start putting the pieces together?

No. I began therapy right away. This became one of my best decisions, and the final verdict on my questions about writing came from
Jana, my therapist, who holds my deepest respect and all of my story. She said, “Tricia, get writing. Trust that need the way you trust your appetites. Just like you eat when you’re hungry, please write when you’re stirring. When you feel like you’ve written enough, or if you feel like you’re writing too much and pushing too hard, then give yourself a break. If it’s helping you, lean into it. Get writing, girl.”

This is how I will live.

There is a belief that death announces itself, that the dying know the time is near. I long to ask him.
Did you know, love? Did you know you wouldn’t be with us for Christmas?
It seems as though he knew; he left nothing undone. Even tasks that had been unfinished for years, he crossed off the list. House projects. Wall hangings. Repairs. Paperwork. All of it done. And he left helpful notes.

After the boys had gone to bed on Christmas Eve, as they waited for sounds of reindeer hoofs on the rooftop, I carried a stash of gifts from the hiding place in the basement. I found a box tucked alongside gifts for the boys. Written boldly on the tag: “For Tricia. Open on Christmas Eve.” He never labeled gifts that way. Years before, he had devised a clever coding system that only he knew, all in an ingenious plan to avoid the added tags on gifts solely from him. He would have set my gift aside with a small sticker on the bottom, a nearly invisible signal. Instead, he had set my gift in the basement corner alongside the boys’ so it could not be missed. This year he had labeled it so clearly, as if someone else might need to deliver the gift on his behalf.
Let there be no question. This gift is for my wife, and I know when I want her to
open it.
The box was wrapped, tagged, and perfect. Inside, I unfolded red satin pajamas. I held them to my face, breathed them in. He knew my lines and curves; they fit me perfectly.

On Christmas morning the boys opened remote control cars, battalions of army men, a helicopter, and a spaceship. As I began the search for batteries, I found them on the first try—in the junk drawer with a Post-it note on top. In Robb’s scrawled handwriting: “For the Boys’ Toys. Christmas morning.”

A few days after Christmas, the UPS man made a special delivery to the front porch. Inside, I found a brand new Wii. In the middle of December, Robb had received a cash bonus on a business trip and had called me from the airport. “Baby girl, I’ve decided to spend it on one more gift for you and the boys. I’ve ordered a Wii! It should arrive a few days after Christmas, so keep an eye on the mailbox, baby girl. There will be one more present coming your way.”

It was as if he knew.