Reflections at the End of Summer

Summer is such a jumbled season in a temperate zone.  Everything is growing in a race to set root or seed before the sun turns away from our hemisphere, so tending to the yard is a first-order chore.  People are more active in summer too: friends are visiting and festivals are happening as the longer daylight hours implore us too to get out and grow.  Between the yard work and the extra social activities, summer went by so fast.  I visited friends in Montreal in mid-July and suddenly it was Labor Day weekend.  And now we are firmly in September, days away from summer’s official end.        

I’d never been to Montreal before.  It’s a beautiful city although it was hot as hell during my stay which is not what I envisioned for this northern metropolis.  It was great fun to spend time with friends whom I had not seen for over a year, but Ken’s ghost was there too.  Because while it was my first time visiting Montreal, we were in its province of Quebec 38 years ago, when Ken asked me to marry him.  With the associations from our past and knowing how pleased he would’ve been to explore the city with our friends, the normal weight of his absence felt heavier than usual.

Thanks to a friend from church, I made it out kayaking this summer for the first time since all of those trips in Ken’s final year, as he tried to fit in the fishing he sensed he was going to miss out on.  We pass someone fishing in a paddle kayak and my heart stops, since I know Ken hoped to get one someday so he could maneuver the boat with his feet and keep his hands free for fishing.  I ask the man how he’s doing, because Ken made inquiries of every fisherman we’d pass while hiking, biking, or kayaking, and now I feel obligated to continue that custom.  I also got out for a few bike rides, and here too Ken is on my mind, seeming close behind me, where he typically was on our rides together.

I was so pleased to welcome old friends at the house several times this summer but no matter how hard we laugh there is always at least one moment when I ache that Ken is not part of the group.  When they leave, there is no one left with me to recall funny things that were said or comment on how good everyone looked.  And I am grateful to have visited new places with friends, but always see things he would’ve loved…like a red-headed woodpecker in West Virginia last month…and long to share those moments with him.  These entrenched behaviors of our marriage stubbornly linger in my brain.

I reread The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion this summer.  It’s a memoir of the first year after her husband suddenly and unexpectedly died.  I read it about five years ago with mixed feelings.  It improved on this second reading, and now with the perspective of a widow, there were some things that really hit home.  Mostly, I identify with her ruminations about mourning becoming self-pity.  Her worry haunts me as I navigate friendships: are people sick of hearing me talk about Ken and how much I miss him?  At gatherings, since almost everyone in my social circle is married, I tend to be the only single person unless someone’s husband is out of town.  Everyone else is there with their spouse and I feel like I have neglected to bring mine.  Even when I gather with my girlfriends, there are frequent references to their husbands and I feel out of place since I can only share marital experience from the past.       

When does mourning become self-pity?  Since Ms. Didion’s book only covered the first year of widowhood, I don’t think she had to worry about it.  The first year is mostly an exercise in survival, nothing that I would consider self-pity.  The second year too, I found it difficult to be anything but self-absorbed as I came out of the fog of the first year and realized that no one was coming to rescue me.  But now in this third year, even I am starting to wonder if there is something wrong with me.  I had it my head from an article I read long ago that 2 years is the amount of time it takes to “get over” the death of a spouse.  The language of grieving has evolved since the decades when I read this tidbit, and while I recognize now that no one ever “gets over” trauma, there is a nagging sense that I’ve become bogged down in my grief.

My therapist gently prods me that self-compassion is a vital resource and for the second time in three years, she reviews the Dual Process Model of grief with me.  Because of popular depictions of the “stages” of grief, many of us think about grieving as linear: as time passes, we progress through certain phases and we eventually find acceptance and peace.  But the Dual Process Model depicts grieving as a constant oscillation between living in loss, and living in restoration.  And we seesaw back and forth between these two opposite scenarios as the months pass, sometimes daily, hourly, even in the minute.  Two and a half years since Ken’s death, while I have learned to attend to life’s changes and put myself out there in a world which I still don’t quite understand (restoration), I frequently segue back into the loss, and feel the sadness and cry the tears, and work to process the difficult emotions.

Summer is for making memories: vacations and staycations and even our routines, which seem more special when the living is easy.  Consider that drinking coffee outside on the patio is a step above drinking coffee anywhere inside the house.  It still feels uncomfortable for me to make memories without Ken, his absence like an empty spot in an old photo.  With the start of fall, we hold endless summer in our hearts as we look back on all of the blooms in the season of growth.  But there is room for endless grief too, even if it is not as beautiful as a mountain sunset or as calming as the murmur of ocean waves.

I am not going to stop missing Ken or stop looking for ways to stay connected to him.  Aside from the pain inherent in this, he was a good man and we were a good team.  Tonight I will go out to commemorate our wedding anniversary and plant myself firmly on both the loss and the restoration sides of grief: probably get a bit weepy as I reminisce, while I enjoy a fine meal out on my own.  And I’ll remember to grant myself some self-compassion for dealing with his absence as best as I can on this most meaningful of days.