Grief is the Stone and I am Sisyphus

They tell you to write about what you know.  Right now, this is what I know best.

I’ve heard others talk about it.  One widower whose wife has been dead for nineteen months had it hit him in the face when he met me, a recent widow who walked white-faced with shock and crying into her first meeting.  C. S. Lewis wrote about it eloquently.

Just when you think you’ve passed through a landscape on this path, you come around to it again.  Something indefinable causes pain to rise up into your throat and burn.  Your chest feels heavy.  Blinking your eyes does nothing to dam the tears.  All you can do is face it.  Your spouse, partner, best friend, lover, companion, the one you wanted to be with for the rest of your life and the one that comes next has died and the memory of those moments, however long it took to get them and you there, replay as if it were five minutes ago.

I work up exhausted from tossing and turning.  I had a slight headache that comes from not being interested in eating enough.  At first I wasn't sure where I was.  I didn't hear the ocean.  No gulls were crying outside the window.  But the feeling that brought me to my knees was being very much aware that I was alone.

He's dead.  It hit me like what I imagine a sock full of quarters slammed into the chest would feel like.  The pain was acute and it radiated, then the ache settled in.  My husband is dead and I saw him die.

I got up and started my day.  I tried to shake it off but I was in the grip of memories from one hour of terror that had happened five months ago.  I went through the motions but my mind saw him, his face, his eyes.  My mind replayed the sounds that he made and that I screamed.   Then it showed me my silence. 
I quilted for a while, took a break and moved to piecing another quilt, took another break and embroidered for a while on a runner for the aisle, for my daughter's wedding.   Through it all I would suddenly be overwhelmed with deep sobs.  I remembered the doctor coming to tell me that though he’d been brought in with a pulse, they hadn’t been able to save him.  And I, again, saw them watching me, waiting for my reaction.  I, again, saw the shock on the doctor’s face when I simply asked if I had killed him by not doing the CPR correctly.

He was the one in the waiting room that reacted.  He was horrified that I was thinking that.  He explained gently that he was good at what he did but that my husband was beyond saving, so no, I had not killed him.  He said that there were some things that were beyond us all.  I remember he asked if I was going to be alright.  I said, “No, never again.”  I know he would never understand what I meant when I said, “I’ll never be okay because the Dragon has died.”  I hadn’t started crying yet, but the doctor walked away looking drained.  

Another day has started with my writing this.  And it’s still close to me, the awareness that my Dragon is dead.  It's not the alone thing.  I am very good at being alone.  I’ve been alone much of my life.  It’s the being without him that's whittling away at me.  I'm not strong, not the “right back in your face,” confrontational strong.  I’ve always believed arguing with someone is not the best way.  Someone has their mind set that they are right, there is no amount of data, no conversation no matter how loud it gets, that will convince them otherwise.

I was born to a mother who wanted a cheerleader.  She got a daughter who was a philosopher.  She showed me pretty much every day verbally and physically how disappointed she was in me.  I learned how to manipulate the truth and her own words to keep from getting my lesson.  I also learned six ways to get around her and have the door to my back, just in case.

I know now that my ex-husband never loved me.  You don’t do those things to someone you love, but he was playing his own weird game of King of the Hill and viciously worried that someone would knock him off his hill.  So I engaged in a game of quiet chess to counter.  Confronting him would have failed miserably.  I had my babies and he had the money.  I ran once but he found me.  These things have to be planned and I was too innocent to know how to get a new identity.  Back then, there were not the resources for running with babies that there are today.  And I screwed up and used the credit card for a motel room. 

He was the same as my mother so I learned his body cues and manipulated him based on the mood he was in.  It was how I got new shoes for the kids, and a home nebulizer for my son, presenting the names of famous athletes who also had asthma.  I even got him to apologize to my son for calling him a sissy for having asthma. 

I’m strong when I have someone to work with, or against.  I can counter maneuver.  I can save my children.  I know how to distract and set myself set up as the target and then work with that.  I did it last Tuesday to get my ex-husband to help pay for my (our) daughter’s wedding dress.  I had to make a promise that was ridiculous so that he felt he had control over me.  The game, for him, is back on now that the Dragon is dead.  But I think it’s a wonderful example of karma that the reason I had to negotiate for his daughter's dress ($330 it was, not terribly expensive) was because he was afraid to spend his money.  His wife, he said, would be furious.  I guess it’s true.  What goes around, comes around.

I can be strong under a set perimeter, but all I'm facing is grief.   I’m looking at however long I have, day in and day out, without the man who came into the shadows and found me.  The Dragon has died and I will always be cold.

I wonder if that is why I started making the quilts.

My beautiful girl, my wonderful daughter, I did break down and call her, crying, telling her I didn't save him.   I had worked on him but I wasn’t good enough.  I hadn’t been able to save him.  I was so afraid I'd done it wrong. He’d had a pulse when the EMT's loaded him in the back of their bus, but hospital had him all of 10 minutes before they gave up.  He was dead.

Bless her heart.  She told me that I'd done all I could, that the professionals had done all they could, but it was not meant to be.  She told me that our Marine wouldn't want to know that I was beating myself up this way.   He’d want me to know that he loved me, adored me, and that though grieving is what I’ll be doing for a long time, the guilt should be laid to rest right now.  She reminded me that he'd always wanted me to fly.

I was so beaten down by my life from before and when I agreed to marry him, he’d promised me that he would teach me to fly.  Not in a plane, but my spirit, to free myself of what I’d been told all my life.  He promised he would show me that I was a good person, that I had a lot to give the world, and that he would be there always to make sure I didn’t fall.  In Marine jargon, he had my six.  All he'd wanted was for me to smile, laugh, talk out loud, and be myself.  Ii could go a whole day with minimal conversation.  I had learned to not be chatty.  Too many words piss people off.  But he loved me and very much liked my thoughts.  So he worked with me, teased me, charmed me.  He made it okay to come out of my shell and be myself.  The more I relaxed, the more he smiled.   He has such a wonderful smile.

He used to say to me that every day we woke up, I was freer than the day before.  He knew I had it in me to fly.  We’d walk the beaches, climb rocks, walk through the hushed ruins of Dogtown, or brave the smaller storm waves that crashed into Eastern Point.  And he’d always venture out a bit on the Dog Bar for just that feeling of braving the elements.  I'd take photographs, so many photos and he was in a lot of them.  He'd smile.  He knew how handsome I thought he was.  He loved it that I would sneak photos of him because attempting to be sneaky meant I had confidence in myself.  He would get cocky and say it was because of him.  And it was.  It was because of his love and approval.  I knew he’d never hurt me, physically or mentally.

He wanted so much for me to fly.

But it’s like C. S. Lewis wrote about.  I’m coming back around to facing a lot of the same emotions from that night.  The pain of seeing him laying there for me to sit with before the funeral home came for him.  The anguish of what his stillness meant.  The horror of his eyes and his rigid body as I tried and failed to make him take another breath, please, honey, take another breath.  But he didn’t.  He couldn’t.

Grief is the stone that I’m rolling up the hill.  I want to get to the top so I can take a breath that doesn’t smell like tears and sorrow and those intense flashes of self-pity.  I want to feel a breeze.  I’m Sisyphus in my grief though I never acted with the hubris that the story associates with him.  I wanted only to be loved.  And I was.  I just should have been more specific about for how long, and who should die first.

I'm not strong anymore and I don't feel like flying.  I don't think I can.  The Dragon is gone and he was the only one I would have flown with, and for.  He would have showed me how. He would have been up there with me.  A Dragon and a little white seagull, we would have been an odd sight to see.