Five Years Later

Lyrics:  And if you knew him/ You would understand just why/ As I remember him/ I cry.

This past week I entered another widow’s life.  Renown author, Joan Didion, wrote in poignant detail about the death of her husband of forty years and the year that followed in, The Year of Magical Thinking.  She discerned movement from grieving to mourning.  It’s been five years since the Rose Man died and I will always mourn the loss of him but I no longer grieve.  Didion describes grief as passive whereas mourning is the act of dealing with grief.  I suppose there’s still an element of magical thinking in my mourning; that he’s proud of me, proud of my accomplishment in purging the basement of its collection of over-abundance, and how I’ve continued to care for his roses.  In February, I pruned all 68 rose bushes by myself and they thrive.  (I have to remind myself that the same entity that created roses also created weeds.)

Time guides mourning.  Time is the school in which we learn.  You assume responsibilities that were his and wonder why we didn’t take care of certain things before he died.  I’ve often joked that I have a PhD in denial.  Everyone is going to die; we know that, and he had a terminal health condition, renal failure.  Still, it never occurred to me that I wouldn’t bring him home from the hospital that time.  I always had before, many times.  Grief was there.  Deal with it!  And you do.  The minister tells us that “Grief is a gift we carry,” perhaps an even better definition of mourning.

There was a lot of grief attached to the waste in the basement and it was time to let it go.  My sweet helper read me like a book.  There was the happy and energetic discovery of a special something that she knew I would choose to keep, at least for now.  Then, there were those items that carried grief because they had belonged to a loved one or a loved-experience in the past.  This was an energy of possession wherein you didn’t possess the item, it possessed you.  Let it go.  It was emotionally exhausting and spiritually liberating.

The mourning period continues.  Tears still want to surface when I listen to Nancy LaMott sing, As I Remember Him, but I remember him doing the soul work of caring for his roses and my heart smiles.

Lyrics:  And though I loved the boy for just a little while/ It was so wonderful/ It was so beautiful/ As I remember him/ I smile.  (Lyrics by Portia Nelson)