My children's grief

My children and I are extremely close: far closer than we were prior to their dad and my husband dying.  We came to depend more on each other over the last few years because we were all each other had.  I became both mom and dad to my kids – there when they were lonely, there when they were scared, there to provide the butt kicking they needed to get their homework done or their piano practiced.  And there to make all of the screw-ups in parenting that are inevitable.  It was all me.

I think I have a greater insight into my children’s emotional lives as a result than a parent in a two parent household. And I have tremendous sympathy for the normal every day emotional roller coaster that is pre-teen childhood.  That said, I know I will never understand their experience of grief.  Certainly I don’t understand it the way someone who has lost a parent would, and maybe I have even less insight than a stranger would.  Their grief doesn’t look like my grief.  It is so profoundly different that at times I am at a total loss in how to help them deal with it.  Adult grief and childhood grief are not the same.

When he died, it was a profound life changing event.  It shaped everything for me from that day forward – good and bad.  I cried, I talked about it, I found solace in people and activities around me.  It was sharp, it was deep and it went through the pattern I have read in so many books: numbness followed by an even greater feeling of loss and then a long slow battle back to some semblance of normalcy.  I did not see that pattern in my kids. 

When he first died, my kids seemed to continue moving through life okay.  My daughter left the day after her dad died on her scheduled school trip to Washington D.C.  It was her choice to go and she did okay.  My son went back to school a day or two later and he was okay.  They were both affected by it certainly – my son didn’t want to leave to go with his grandparents for a day at a festival – in part because he didn’t want to leave me alone – felt a responsibility for taking care of me.  He was more clingy than he was before, my daughter became less clingy and more independent.  But their lives continued. 

I had expected to see them cry frequently – they didn’t.  I had expected them to want to include memories of their dad in celebrations of anniversaries or holidays – and while they took those suggestions and were ‘good with it’ they didn’t seem to crave it.  I had expected to see the haunted look on their faces that was on mine, but it wasn’t there. I had expected their lives to go on a temporary hold the way that mine did – and theirs didn’t.  It isn’t as though they didn’t cry – it just wasn’t what I had expected.  Their lives seemed to continue in a way that mine couldn’t.  As if in my adult grief experience – life as I had known it ended, and I had to start again.  For them, it looked more like life continued – just with a giant piece missing.  I had read that for children grief was a more drawn out, slower process.  And certainly that is what I have observed in my own kids.  That missing piece will go with them – continue with each new success that they have that they can’t share with their dad, and with each new failure where they can’t run to him for safety and security. 

For me, I will always love him – will miss him on some level, but I also don’t want my life to return to where it was.  I do not crave him returning.  My life is in such a different place than it was 4 years ago, that it would be inconceivable for me to picture him coming back into it.  But for his children, that isn’t the case.  Without that profound break in life that I experienced in grief, their lives are still missing a piece.  I see it when my son is upset practicing piano – he will go find his dad’s photo and stare at it as he cries over the piano piece.  I see it when my daughter is angry at me and yells ‘Dad wouldn’t have made me do that’.  But I really don’t know what their emotional experience is like.  I ask – I bring up their dad and missing him, however, both kids indicate that just makes them feel worse when we talk about it.   

Perhaps it is also the difference between losing a parent and losing a spouse.  My parents are both still living so I don’t know what losing a parent feels like – and of course losing a parent as an adult will be very different than losing one as a child.

I am an outsider in my kid’s grief.  It is a shared event, but our inner lives aren’t shared.

Widowhood

I recently welcomed a friend into the club of women you don’t want to join – widows. She is the second friend of mine who has followed me into the parallel universe of having lost a spouse to death.  One moment you are living your life, and the next you are frozen.  Life keeps going around you, but you are stuck – like a rock in the center of a stream while everyone else keeps moving around you.  There is an odd moment when you look around you – maybe in the grocery store – when you look at everyone else and wonder how they keep going when the world has stopped. It is a strange place to be, time has ceased to mean anything and you are gripped in a paralyzing numbness unable to comprehend things going on around you.

Our society doesn’t handle death well.  In other cultures, death is more visible, it is an inevitable part of life.  Widowed women or men dress in particular clothing, can be seen wailing in public and it is accepted. But in our society, we hardly see it.  We don’t see the impact on families, and especially when it happens to someone young, we seem completely ill prepared to deal with it.  When I was first widowed, one of the most striking things to me was how reluctant I became to tell anyone.  It was almost as though in my mind there was a stigma attached with saying ‘I am widowed’.  Women at the park with their kids would easily mention they were divorced.  There was no surprise. However, if I mentioned I was widowed, shocked silence would be followed by awkward apologies.  We simply don’t know what to do around the death of someone’s spouse when they die young.  I suspect it is different among older women since it is so much more common. I generally avoided ever mentioning it.  I think most people around me to this day believe I am divorced with an absentee ex-husband who doesn’t visit the kids because I don’t know how to say I am widowed.  Four years later and I still don’t know how to say those words easily.

Though I avoided telling those around me, it didn’t mean I didn’t feel a lot of irrational anger towards those who were still happily living their lives.  I remember the one morning I was driving behind someone who lives in my neighborhood with a license plate that reads glfwdw (golf widow).  I had seen that license plate many times before, but after Gene died that license plate made me irrationally and overwhelmingly angry.  She was still married.  Her husband simply played golf on the weekend.  How dare she refer to herself as a widow?  At the end of the day, she still slept wrapped in someone’s arms.  Absolutely irrational.  I sat out one day at a birthday party for a friend’s child where the women were talking about their marital problems.  One was describing how irritating she found it when her husband unexpectedly came home during the day for lunch as it was so disruptive to her schedule.  The other woman agreed and said it was so disruptive when her husband worked from home.  And I had to choke down the urge to tell them to stop whining and start appreciating each day they had with their loved one. 

Though I struggled with fitting myself into the world around me, I still I found myself not wanting to be defined by my widowhood.  It was almost as if I believed by mentioning my status, I had a giant letter W on my forehead.  It became as big a part of my identity as being a mom or being a college professor.  And perhaps that as much as anything kept me from admitting my situation in social settings.  I got creative in how I described my late husband – would refer to him as my children’s dad (as if we had never been married).  I even once or twice called my late husband my ‘ex-husband’ even though that denied who he was to me and denied myself the status of having been in a committed, caring, loving marriage.  Why is it so hard to say my ‘late husband’?  I give many personal examples in class, and this becomes the trickiest situation for describing my marital status.  I have really shied away from students knowing my life story even as I use personal examples in class.  I cannot tell you why I find that to be the case – why would I feel there is a bigger stigma attached to being widowed than to being divorced?  Do other widows feel that way?

Making excuses

In the last couple of weeks, I have found myself listening to women who are making excuses for their partners: apologizing for their behavior – explaining away their bad deeds.  And the odd thing is these are not un-liberated women – women married to dominant, overbearing men.  Instead these are liberated, strong, feminist women.  And yet, they are still making excuses for their male partners.  In one case, the partner in question had said something insulting to me.  I had hoped/expected an apology from him – but this did not happen.  Instead I received two e-mail apologies from his significant other, explaining that he must have been tired when he said what he said, that he must not have realized it was offensive, that he was kind hearted and would never knowingly offend someone, so he must have said it by mistake (and yes, she had heard what he had said).  But never did I receive an apology from him.  This didn’t bother me nearly as much as receiving apologies from her.  What is that? If he is being a jerk, so what?  Let him be a jerk. Why is his significant other apologizing for him??? This is a woman who is a die-hard feminist.  Why do strong, feminist women still defend the actions of men?

The second case is considerably more serious.  In this case, the husband in question is on trial for a serious crime. I don’t know if he is guilty or not.  But all involved admit that though he may not have done anything illegal (again I don’t know if he did or not) he did do something incredibly stupid to wind up in the position he is in.  He is married to a very strong, very liberated feminist.  And she is going down with the ship on this.  He will likely be convicted (again, I do not know whether he is guilty or not – nor does it matter – sometimes our judicial system is not fair as it turns out).  If convicted, his wife’s life and that of their children will likely be very damaged (and frankly with the media attention to this, their lives are already irreparably harmed).  Her job will be in question.  And he has lost his.  When released he will be largely unemployable as his job is incompatible with the crime he is being tried for.  She is standing by him.  And while I do admire her dedication – she is paying for this crime as are her kids.  And frankly, her family is footing the bill for the legal fees (not his).  This is a woman who has fought for feminist ideals – fought for women to have the rights that they do today.  And yet, she is allowing this man to ruin her life.  He is not always treating her well.  He is not showing appreciation for her dedication, and yet she makes excuses for his behavior.  “He is under so much stress – that is why he doesn’t acknowledge Valentine’s Day”.   That’s bullshit!  He should be showering her with affection!  She is still there!  She is defending him and making excuses for him to the world and he can’t buy her a lousy box of chocolates????  “It’s too hard for him to go out in public”… Well then by god he should be MAKING her a card for standing by his sorry ass.

These women, in my opinion, are not oppressed by their men.  They are doing it to themselves.  They are putting themselves in the position of subservience by allowing men to behave badly and covering it up.  I know – I was there.  I was married to someone who behaved badly sometimes. I made excuses for him not showing up to family events.  I made excuses when he would throw a temper tantrum in public.  I would make excuses to both the world and to myself when he would treat me or the kids badly.  Being a strong woman and making excuses for someone else seems wrong.  One friend pointed out that marriage is forming a unit, so when ½ half that unit misbehaves, we have to excuse it to the world because it reflects badly on us.  If that is the case, how come I don’t hear men apologizing for their wives???  We just don’t behave badly? 

I know that I am tired of making excuses for men.  And more importantly, I am blessed to be in a relationship where I am not making excuses for a man.  That doesn’t mean he never screws up, or does anything socially awkward, however, I am blessed now to be able to shrug, and let him make his own excuses.  I don’t have to be responsible for his behavior.  Is that because I have found the holy grail of men who can apologize when he screw up?  Yes, that certainly is part of it.  And perhaps starting a relationship at a more mature age also means I am not as dependent on the partnership to define who I am, so the errors he makes don’t feel like my responsibility or fault.  I would wish for all strong women out there that they can stop making excuses for their partner.  If we are apologizing for their behavior, are we truly accepting them for who they are?