be happy again after being widowed, my heart is so broken

This may be premature, but I am marking this done nonetheless. I have achieved a plateau in my grief. It will be with me for the rest of my life, but I’m not thrown around by it like I was before. I have a measure of control now. I know what the pitfalls are, such as the reflex of feeling sorry for oneself and mindlessly persuing the past. I am accepting of how things are, I’m open to how things will be, and I’m starting to leave my life with Wendy behind.

I’m just past the 18 month point in my grief. I have had some severe depression over the last few weeks, but a lot of that, I think, is related to my mother dying.

It’s odd. My mother dying provokes grief for my wife more than for my mother. This is probably common. A widow friend of mine observed the same thing last year when her father died nine months after her husband.

The thing about acute grief is that it’s a massive black star in your soul. Its gravity attracts every bad feeling that normally happens to anyone; every frustration, every rage, every disappointment, every fear reflects back on, and is made worse by, that singular loss.

Because Wendy’s death has robbed me of so much identity (husband, business partner, would-be father), grief has filled in the gaps. I am now, in my head, the Griever.

I know that the best way to move on is to move my grief into the past. I must let go of Wendy, let go of the sorrow, and create a new identity. That’s what I’m resolved to do.

Surprisingly, the whole run-up to Christmas this year wasn’t bad. I have always loved the holiday, and it’s a very public one to be shared with neighbors and friends up until the 24th.

I did find it impossible to write Christmas cards for reasons that are obvious to me now but were mysterious to me at the time.

I spent the holiday with Wendy’s brother’s family and her mom and dad. It was good to be with them, but at the same time, I felt numb.

My mood started going down after that. I went out with friends on New Year’s eve but came home before midnight. I proposed to Wendy on New Year’s eve, 1998, and she screamed yes over the booming fireworks.

I started 2007 with a major set-back in my grief. I’ve made up a lot of lost ground in the days since. I started going to a “young widows” group, which I hope will be helpful. The leader, who was widowed 15 years ago, says the second year is very difficult. “Everyone is over it,” she told me, “and they expect you to be, too, but you’re not.”

She said it took her about three-and-a-half years to get to where she would miss her husband, but was no longer sad. I’ve still got a long way to go.

I’m more than two weeks out of a two-week depression. I’m not sure what put me in or pulled me out. I’m just happy to be here. I want to do the things that will make it easier for me to keep from falling through the trap doors.

Today is my seventh wedding anniversary. My first without her.

So, following the “keeping track of how I’m feeling” entry, I decided to do precisely that. I started carrying a Hipster PDA, and in it, I created a Moodometer template.

The Moodometer is just a table that has columns for date, AM, MID, PM and notes on the day. In the AM, MID, and PM columns, I put in a number between 1 and 9 for how I was feeling during that period. 1 for utter hopelessness and 9 for agape. I chose a scale of 1 to 9 because that puts 5 conveniently in the middle.

The tricky thing about the Moodometer, for me, is that there’s a relatively short window for entering the values. I don’t want to enter an AM value in the AM since what I’m trying to put down a value for the whole morning, not just the moment of my writing. It takes a little reflection, but if I wait more than a couple of days, I don’t trust my memory of how I was feeling. Normally, it takes me about a minute to write down yesterday’s values.

I’ve been doing this now pretty regularly for a couple of months. I’ve even put the table into a spreadsheet and graphed out the numbers. Here’s what I’ve found out about myself:

• I average a little above 5 for all three parts of the day. This is very good for me. 5 is my target, not 9. Whatever goes up must come down. I’m setting my goal for the middle path.
• Mornings are the best for my mood, middle of the day is hardest, on average
• There’s a definite up-and-down pattern. The graph of my moods looks a lot like an EKG.
• Keeping track of my feelings, which takes only seconds per day, makes me much more mindful of how I am feeling at any given moment. That awareness helps me know what to do and helps me spot other patterns. For example, I could feel my mood change at the end of day on Friday from about a 6 to a 2 between the time I left my desk and made it to the office lobby. Why? I figure it’s because weekends were traditionally time I would spend with Wendy.

Bottom Line: The Moodometer is easy to keep up and might tell you a lot about how you’re feeling and what you can do to feel better.

I had a dream about Wendy a couple of weeks ago. The house was filled with neighborhood kids—she had offered free baby-sitting and the neighbors responded gratefully. She was in the kitchen cooking. She came back to life.

I kissed her and held her close. We realized that because she had died and come back to life, we would have to get remarried as a legal formality. We were discussing this when the dream ended.

That dream happened on a Friday morning. I spent the next three days in utter despair. Usually, the down moods last for hours, but I couldn’t shake myself out of this.

A friend came into an emotional crisis of her own and that took my focus off my own problems. Helping her made me feel better. Last weekend, I volunteered to pull weeds at an environmental center. That made me feel better, too.

I guess I’m learning that helping other people and feeling useful is a way out of my despair.

When I picked up Wendy’s ashes a couple of months ago, the undertaker (they don’t call themselves that anymore, do they?), who’s been a very nice and helpful guy, asked if I was starting to move on with my life. I said no, not really. “Wendy would want you to move on, you know.”

A brief flash of anger moved through me. After all, he only knew Wendy as a corpse. It was a “How dare you” moment, but it was only a moment because, even though he didn’t know her, he was right. Wendy would want me to be happy again.

But now it’s about what I want, and I want to be sad. Being sad feels natural, comfortable. I realize, however, that being sad is unhealthy.

So I’m trying to be mindful about my moods and to not linger in sadness. It’s important to mourn and to accept grief when it comes, but I must consciously turn toward positive thinking and happiness.

I’m currently going to a grief support group. Every week we have home work to do. Last week, the assignment was to make a feelings collage. It seemed a little weird, but I did it anyway.

I looked through a stack of magazines and cut out images and text that described how I was feeling. It was tough, very tough. It took me about an hour and the grief just poured out of me.

The next day I arranged the pictures and words on a piece of poster board and cut out a couple more images. Again, I just sobbed.

But that was the goal of the excercise, to get all these feelings out so I could see them. That, so the books say, is how we heal.

Yesterday, I put on a pair of my wife’s socks.

I don’t think this, by itself, classifies me as a cross-dresser. Wendy used to wear my socks (and my shirts, my sweaters, my hats, my everything) all the time, but I never wore anything of hers. Mostly, she used to wear my hiking socks.

Shortly before she died, she found her own hiking socks. Yesterday, I wore them.

If I may digress for a moment: Marriage, good marriage, is a partnership with defined duties. Wendy used to do the laundry. In fact, she loved to do the laundry and sometimes obsessed over it (I only learned this while reading her journals, which she left to me). Depending on how busy she was, she would give me either a day’s notice, a few hours notice, or no notice when she was going to do the laundry. I could never figure out what schedule the laundry was on. Recently, now that I’ve taken over that household chore (and all others), I have come to the realization that you do the laundry when there’s no more (or no more suitable) clothing to wear. In short, when you’re wearing cobbling together an outfit of mismatched stripes and damaged underwear, it’s time to do the wash.

But, back on to socks.

I wore my wife’s socks the other day and, it turns out, it was a good day. Last night, when I got home, I felt her presence. I felt her love. I haven’t felt it since shortly after she died. It’s marvelous! I dropped to my knees and I thanked her, God, the Universe for this feeling. I cried like a baby but, for the first time in months, they were happy tears.

This morning, I still felt it, and it brings me so much peace. I will hold on to it as long as I can. I think she’s proud of me.

This is by far-by leagues-the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. Making progress is slow and difficult and, it seeems, is lost again in a moment.

I know what I’m supposed to do and I’m doing it. Get help, be patient, go through the grief rather than around it. It takes faith to believe that I’m ever going to be functional again, and sometimes I just don’t have any faith. I can’t imagine that I will ever be whole again, not like I was.