I cried off and on through each of the long episodes about the climate crisis and what smart, dedicated folks around the world were doing to restore whatever had been destroyed or lost. When I finished streaming the last of the series, I cried my way through a Nature program on PBS, about the heroic efforts a few years back to save the wildlife, including the most adorable koalas, after the devastating fires in Australia. One thing I can say I’m learning about grief in my first years of widowhood is this — grief has opened my heart even wider to the deep and vast sorrows in the world.
The first weeks and months following the death of my beloved husband, Richard, I couldn’t bear to watch or read anything remotely depressing. I would pick up a book from the stacks of expectant novels and memoirs piled atop the pine bookshelf, scan the description on the back, and set it down. Or I might start a novel and find an abandoned child or a sick wife, shake my head, and say, “Nope.”
As time passed and my daily bouts of sobbing lessened, I discovered something extraordinary. Losing the person I loved most in the world and allowing myself every day to mourn that gigantic loss transformed me into a person I never imagined being — a woman who could face the darkness the Buddha taught was the essence of life. To put it mildly, I was not this sort of person in my past life. The last thing I cared to hear about was news of someone getting a debilitating diagnosis or suffering in any way.
Backing up here, I will explain. Before getting as old as I am now, even when I was a teenager, I had, metaphorically, tissue-thin skin. There’s probably a genetic component to this but the environment in which I grew up certainly contributed. I’m referring to the fact that my mother drank. She drank every night alone in the den, tall glasses of iced Seagram’s Seven whiskey and ginger ale. One after another of those drinks went down as the night wore on.
My father drank, too, which also contributed to this thin skin. But he was away from us a lot, serving in the Air Force, even for a time in the Vietnam War.
I’m not sure how or why alcoholics can turn their child’s emotional makeup into a sponge that soaks up other people’s emotions and unhappiness. That’s just what happened to me. When you lack the armor to fence out another person’s misery, especially if that other person happens to be your mother, you do whatever’s necessary — move to a different state and get an unlisted number (before cell phones are invented) — to cut yourself off from the source of all that sorrow. If you end up, as I did, being the sole caregiver for the person you love most in the world, you somehow find a way to ride the rollercoaster of fear and sadness that assaults you with every wrenching side effect or bad test result.
My husband, Richard was diagnosed with stage four cancer after experiencing unexplained back pain for several months. I was the obvious person to care for him, since there was no one else. We were a childless couple by choice. I had no close family. He was the eldest of three sons, the sibling most likely to be a helper rather than the one needing help.
Before this terrible diagnosis entered our lives, I had never taken care of anyone. I’d hardly owned any pets. Growing up with a depressed alcoholic mom and a frequently absent dad, I had travelled through much of adult life before meeting Richard as a woman who needed care for herself.
After Richard’s smart and kind oncologist retired, his second oncologist referred us to palliative care, for handling his pain and other medications. At our first meeting with the palliative care doctor and social worker, the social worker recommended that I join the support group for people caring for loved ones suffering from serious illnesses.
It’s no exaggeration to say that the caregiver support group saved me. The fact is, no one outside of folks struggling to keep from sinking in the leaking boat of caregiving wants to hear anything about your loved one’s side effects or your fears of losing him or her or the sleepless nights or the pounding heart or the rush to the emergency room at two o’clock in the morning. The folks in that leaky boat do want to hear all those things. The reason they do is because they’re experiencing the same things. Hearing they are not alone helps. Learning that you have found a remedy for something helps even more.
Four and a half years of cancer care, plus hearing about the suffering of my fellow caregivers’ loved ones, readjusted my emotional makeup, somewhat akin to a revolution. Yes, there were times I felt I had reached the end of my caregiving rope, when I couldn’t find a frayed piece of twine to grab onto and keep me from drowning. There were times I sat in the fat red chair next to the window that looked out on the backyard and cried, not wanting Richard to know that in those moments, his caregiver desperately needed care and she couldn’t tell him because he had so much to deal with, the pain and discomfort from the cancer and chemo and everything he was losing from his life, which before cancer had been so wonderful.
One of my fellow caregivers coined the metaphor, the rollercoaster, to perfectly capture the lives we were living, as we and our loved ones faced the unpredictability of illness. My husband got blood tests every three weeks and PET scans every few months. Each time he received results, I held my breath, while we looked at the numbers or read the report. For most of the four and a half years of Richard’s cancer treatment, the results were good, showing the chemo was doing its job. At those times, the car in which we were riding flew as high as it could and we thought we were the luckiest people in the world.
But on so many days, out of the blue, some side effect hit, or something happened that made me think, this is it, the dreaded sign that we were nearing the end and Richard was going to leave me. Near the end, the signs were too obvious to ignore.
Three years have passed since Richard took his last breath. The therapist I saw after becoming a widow likened grief to sea glass. At first, when the loss is new, the edges of the glass are sharp. If you run your finger gently along the glass’s side, you will feel pain, as it tears open the skin and you watch the wound bleed. Over time, the ocean acts on the glass, smoothing the edges. You still carry the sea glass of grief but the pain isn’t quite as sharp.
I cry when I watch Ken Burns’ series on the national parks for the third time. I cry because I love being out in those beautiful places, as I used to be with Richard. I cry because I know exactly what John Muir felt when he found God in the song of a Yosemite waterfall or the smooth feel against his palm as he rubbed it against glacier-smoothed rock.
Most importantly, I cry because my heart has learned that great loss only happens when you know great love. Once loved, a heart such as mine easily cracks open to embrace the wonder of this life. That wonder includes the darkness, which lets me experience the tiniest bright stars, only visible when the night sky is clear and very dark.
Patty Somlo’s books, Hairway to Heaven Stories (Cherry Castle Publishing), The First to Disappear (Spuyten Duyvil) and Even When Trapped Behind Clouds: A Memoir of Quiet Grace (WiDo Publishing), have been Finalists in the International Book, Best Book, National Indie Excellence, American Fiction and Reader Views Literary Awards.
