The trip to Lubbock was hard both physically and emotionally. The physical part is easy to deal with. It’s a mental game. So long as I don’t get so tired to be dangerous (to myself and others), it’s just something to overcome. The emotional part, though, is not so easy.
Some might say just deal with it. If they did, I would be tempted to tell them to “stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
I’m not sure what I expected of this process of grieving. I’ve never experienced this kind of loss. Yes, I lost my mom and dad years ago. That was plenty hard, but neither unexpected nor handled alone. Wife was there with me through that process. I was secure. This time, though, I lost the person I’d spent nearly 45 years with. The depth of that relationship was substantial. Although I tried to prepare myself for this time, my preparations were horribly insufficient.
Wife so loved road trips. Neither of us enjoyed the preparations, wherein Wife’s tendency to obsessive-compulsive behavior was brought out. (Everything that could have been done since the last trip but wasn’t now has to be done before we leave for this trip.) But once that was all dealt with and we actually left, we enjoyed seeing things, stopping to putter a bit, and trying new places to eat. But mostly we enjoyed talking and listening to music.
Those last two things defined our relationship. We loved words and music.
I don’t know why, but for some reason this trip was particularly hard. I brought my iPod along this time, instead of just listening to satellite radio. I recently discovered The Civil Wars from their track on Phil Madiera’s Mercyland. The refrain from that song haunts me:
Oh won’t you take me from this valley
To that mountain high above
Oh I will pray, pray, pray till I see your smiling face
I will pray, pray, pray to the one that I love.
I was singing along, trying to learn the lyric, and hit the phrase till I see your smiling face… and I lost it. The wave of grief rose up and buried me, leaving me sobbing as I drove.
While Wife was in her Summer 2012 chemotherapy testing to determine whether her lymphoma remained chemo-sensitive, I captured a couple of informal portraits of her. They were good enough to print and frame. They are on the wall of my house, now, where I can look at her smiling face. When I get a beer, or a whiskey, or even just a coffee, I raise my cup to her portrait in salute and remember her, remember us, remember the good times and the hard.
I want to be over my grief and I also don’t want to be over it. To be done with it seems to signify that I’m over her death. I don’t want to be over her death. I want her life to have so much significance that I’m never over it. Indeed, her life was that significant, at least to this old man.
I suppose that means I want to complete my grieving so that I can move on to whatever God has for me next. I don’t want to be over her loss, but I need to know what’s next for me. Where am I to put myself to work where I can create meaning for myself and others. That’s where I want to be. That’s what I want to figure out. I do not think it is where I currently am.
I gave myself a year to deal with this process. Everything I read tells me that it takes a year or two to recover (not get over) the loss of a spouse. I’m not very patient, though, sometimes. I long to get through this so that I can get on with whatever is to be next.
Perhaps that’s the clue to the entire thing. Part of the process should be figuring out what’s next. I am accomplishing the things I set out to do after Wife died. My finances are recovering. My initial purge of my house is nearly complete. There needs to be a second purge, but that one will not be nearly as difficult as the first pass. Much of the paperwork that languished is also complete.
That means I’m running out of projects to work on that were set out a year or more ago. It’s time to work up some new things to work on. I think it’s time that some of those things be the things I want to work on. It’s time to think about playing music again, about upping my photography game to the next level, about working on the what’s-next-for-me game and where that is going to be.
I think that’s part of what this roadtrip was about. It was an opportunity to openly grieve (no one was there to watch — men in our culture prefer to grieve privately), to process that grief, and to think about what is complete, what is yet to complete, and what is next for me. I worked on the first two quite a lot. It’s time to give the last element some thought.
I’ll leave you with the lyric to From This Valley. It’s a wonderful song.
Oh the desert dreams of a river
That will run down to the sea
Like my heart longs for an ocean
To wash down over meOh won’t you take me from this valley
To that mountain high above
Oh I will pray, pray, pray till I see your smiling face
I will pray, pray, pray to the one that I loveOh the outcast dreams of acceptance
Just to find pure love’s embrace
Like an orphan longs for its mother
May you hold me in your graceOh won’t you take me from this valley
To that mountain high above
Oh I will pray, pray, pray till I see your smiling face
I will pray, pray, pray to the one that I loveOoh, whoa oh, whoa oh oh
Ooh, whoa oh, whoa oh ohOh the caged bird dreams of a strong wind
That will flow beneath her wings
Like a voice longs for a melody
Oh Jesus, carry meOh won’t you take me from this valley
To that mountain high above
Oh I will pray, pray, pray till I see your smiling face
I will pray, pray, pray to the one that I loveOh I will pray, pray, pray till I see your smiling face
I will pray, pray, pray to the one that I love