There is no going back

I just need to write. The last few weeks have been very hard. It feels like the reality of our new life has slapped me in the face and I find myself yearning for my old life. The one with Jake in it, living in the bright Arizona sun, working out the future we had planned together.

I am 36 years old and feel like my life is over. I know I exist to care for our children, but it seems the meaning, goals, and direction for my life died with Jake. I feel so adrift and lost that it is hard some days to even identify myself.

Maybe that is a product of the loss of your spouse. The Bible instructs Adam to cleave to his wife and that they two would become one flesh. I think Jacob and I did that. We left our father and mother and set out on our own life path- together.  And even with the thoughtful plans that we outlined before his death, talked about and tried to prepare for, there really is no way to prepare for the identity loss that comes with the loss of your partner and spouse. Some days I do not know who I am because so much of me, what I liked, what I wanted, what I did with my time became intertwined with Jacob and he with me. I don’t know how it works in heaven, but does he feel the same way? Like just a half person without me by his side? Some days I selfishly hope so, that it’s not so glorious up there that he just gets on fine without me, not even noticing a difference.

I have appreciated C.S. Lewis’ book “A Grief Observed” for its candid and honest exploration of ones feelings after the loss of a spouse. There is so much truth in his words and I will share many of them here.

He states, “The death of a beloved is an amputation. Getting over it so soon? But the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off is quite another. After that operation either the wounded stump heals or the man dies. If it heals, the fierce, continuous pain will stop. Presently he’ll get back his strength and be able to stump about on his wooden leg. He has ‘got over it.’ But he will probably have recurrent pains in the stump all his life, and perhaps pretty bad ones; and he will always be a one-legged man. There will be hardly any moment when he forgets it. Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different. His whole way of life will be changed. All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off. Duties too. At present I am learning to get about on crutches. Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg. But I shall never be a biped again.” 

I think what kills me, as it did when Jake was sick, is thinking ahead. The future is painful, unknown and bleak. A brother in law once told me that my life would surprise me, but honestly I’m not a big fan of surprises. I cannot imagine what is in store and all I see immediately before me is a great hole where Jake used to be in our lives and me trying to keep our babies from falling into it. I know that our children are my main responsibility, but that alone at times feels heavy and overwhelming and never ending. Parenting isn’t a box you can just check off. It is a day after day pursuit.

I struggle to know what I am supposed to be. I used to be a wife and mother. Then once Jake got sick, in addition to wife and mother I became a nurse, an advocate, an accountant, a therapist, etc. I existed to hold our family together and keep our life functioning under impossible circumstances. We were living a life or death scenario day after day for 27 months. Living that way is terribly difficult, but it was also incredibly clarifying because in a world inundated with distractions we were able to see decisively what matters and what does not. 

And for the last six months after Jake’s death I have had very tangible, real, and consuming things to do. Get our house ready to put on the market, sell our home, pack and move, unpack and move in, settle Jake’s affairs, find new doctors, schools, lessons, and activities for our kids. I have had to do lists pages long and found great purpose in these tangible pursuits.

But a few weeks ago I seemed to cross the last big things off of my lists and opened up a new phase in my life that I can’t yet identify. I am still a mother, but as I have tried to remember how to just be a mother, with nothing else more pressing weighing down on me I find that I can hardly remember that time, what it felt like and what I did. I spoke with another widow friend about her desire to “go back” to who and what she was before her husband died and her identity changed, but she cannot. She is not the same person. There is no going back.  Accepting your new reality is a genuine mental and emotional struggle.  It takes a lot of thought and time and effort and heart changing work to accept your life for what it now is and to know that it will never again be what it was.

Lewis compares himself and his wife to two intersecting circles and finds, “But those two circles, above all the point at which they touched, are the very thing I am mourning for, homesick for, famished for. You tell me 'she goes on.' But my heart and body are crying out, come back, come back. Be a circle, touching my circle on the plane of Nature. But I know this is impossible. I know that the thing I want is exactly the thing I can never get. The old life, the jokes, the drinks, the arguments, the lovemaking, the tiny, heartbreaking commonplace.” 

The other night as I lay on the bathroom floor crying, drooling, and groveling on the mat I tried to make an image of what this pain feels like. The only thing that came to mind was having a hand held cheese grater run slowly back and forth across my insides, peeling off in aching layers each fiber of my heart. It is an ache so acutely painful that sometimes I just don’t want to feel it. But then like those ocean waves I have come to know it crashes down on me and I am powerless to restrain it. So it pounds me to pieces, thrashing relentlessly as I am tossed to and fro and end up finally strewn on the beach gasping for air.

And then I just lay there. Once the crying has subsided, and the pain has dispersed, and the ache is contained I just lay there numb and spent and so worn from the process. Dreading when it comes again but knowing that it definitely will.

It’s as if the life I lived completely evaporated from under my feet. Everything I knew is gone- my spouse, my home, my friends, my security and I am in a new place with new people and new responsibilities and sometimes I wake up and think “Whose life is this? It can’t be mine because I do not recognize it.”

I don’t know what is to be done. I think this is just the grieving process. It just is. Reality. The course is set. We had such little control. This is the fallout from the nuclear bomb that exploded in our lives almost three years ago. And no amount of wishing, hoping, praying or pleading can change or hold back the dust that spreads over everything, layering the remnants of our shattered lives.

And so I live in the ashes.

Lewis observed, “For in grief nothing "stays put." One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral? But if a spiral, am I going up or down it? How often -- will it be for always? -- how often will the vast emptiness astonish me like a complete novelty and make me say, "I never realized my loss till this moment"? The same leg is cut off time after time,” and “Aren't all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won't accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?”

Paul similarly stated to the Romans in chapter 8,

16 The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God:

 17 And if children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint-heirs with Christ; if so be that we suffer with him, that we may be also glorified together.

I know that the only think holding me together, getting me up in the morning, helping me face the day is Christ. I could not do this without Him.  I have been the recipient of His most tender mercies over the last six months, extended to me often by the gracious hands of loving people willing to listen to and follow His promptings. I have never been abandoned, even in the darkest hours. I have clung to the Savior and He has held, cradled and guided me each day since Jacob died.

C. S. Lewis stated, “I need Christ, not something that resembles Him. You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box. But suppose you had to hang by that rope over a precipice. Wouldn't you then first discover how much you really trusted it?” 

I am grateful to know, through experience, that the rope Christ offers will and does and will always hold.

He is the sure foundation.

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And I offer Heleman’s plea to his sons as a starting place for all of us, “And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation; that when the devil shall send forth his mighty winds, yea, his shafts in the whirlwind, yea, when all his hail and his mighty storm shall beat upon you, it shall have no power over you to drag you down to the gulf of misery and endless wo, because of the rock upon which ye are built, which is a sure foundation, a foundation whereon if men build they cannot fall.”