My Grief

Nearly ten weeks have passed, and grief is complex. It feels like living in a house after its most important piece of furniture is gone. Everything else remains – the rooms, the windows, the dishes, the yard, the laundry, the calendar – but the whole place feels different now. I am still myself. I look the same in the mirror. My voice, shoe size and music preferences haven’t changed. But I walk through these familiar hallways, and something is different. The weight I carry has shifted. Grief is heavy.

Grief is sadness. It is longing. It is shock. It is so many things I thought I was prepared for due to the very long lead-up to Doug’s death. But I now realize you can never be prepared for grief rising up from an ordinary moment and taking the air with it.  

Doug is gone, and that sentence is still too large to take in all at once. I say the words and understand them. I can organize papers around it, make phone calls, and answer people because of it. But understanding is not the same as absorbing. My body seems to know before my mind does. I am often tired, but tired is not quite the word. Tired sounds like sleep might fix it. This is deeper than that. This is internal; the kind of fatigue that lives behind the ribs and in the bones. It wakes up with me and sleeps next to me. It is the exhaustion of years of watching, tending, anticipating, adjusting, losing him by inches, and then losing him all at once.

For years, my coming and going was organized around Doug’s care. His needs gave shape to time. They became the scaffolding of my life and a kind of private prison. I resented parts of it. I wished the care need would end and that Doug would miraculously recover. I longed for freedom with a desperation I could barely admit. But caregiving through dementia also deepened my love for Doug and it gave me a job, a role to inhabit, a reason to keep moving. Now the assignment is over, and I am standing in the strange open space it left behind, unsure what to give myself to. I am suddenly retired and feeling unmoored, bobbing at sea.

Time may be one of the oddest parts of this season. I have time, but I do not always know what time is for. I have space, but I do not always know how to enter it. There are things I could do, things I should do, things I once wanted to do, but I feel uncertain about what matters now. After so many years of being required, desire feels unfamiliar. Choice feels almost too open. I find myself asking small questions that take up more space than they should: What should I do today? What is worth my energy? What will help me heal? What is simply a distraction? What part of me is returning, and what part of me is gone for good?

I cry sometimes. I don’t cry other times. Grief is not obedient; it doesn’t follow a set of rules. Some days, I can speak of Doug plainly, smile at the memory of his antics, and enjoy looking at photos. Some days, I can move through the morning with tea, errands, and exercise and feel almost steady. Then abruptly something small undoes me: an empty chair, a trinket, the wrong kind of silence, the sudden memory of his hand, his face, his hug, the way he belonged in a room without needing to announce himself.

My memories of Doug are rarely with dementia, which feels like a mercy. Dementia narrowed him, stole language, altered our marriage, and made me a witness to a long vanishing. Now, unless I choose to remember those years directly, I remember him whole. I remember the man before the disease. The husband. His presence, competence, humor, and confidence. The person who knew me in ways no one else did. Dementia does not get to be the only keeper of his story. It was part of what happened to him, but it was never the whole of who he was.

So, here I am. I am grieving, but I am also living. That feels important to say, even if I say it softly. I have a couple of simple trips planned and a few events on the calendar I find myself looking forward to. Even getting on an airplane feels like it will be an event all by itself. It has been a while since I packed a bag and stepped into motion to somewhere.

I get outside, enjoy my yard, notice plants, dirt, weather, the practical kindness and intrinsic spirituality of green things. I am grateful it is Spring and not Winter. The yard asks something of me, but not too much. It gives me work I can see and beauty I do not have to explain. I am also exercising, trying to remind my body that it is still here, still mine, still capable of strength after all the bracing.

This is what it feels like to be me right now: emptied and not empty. Tired and still moving. Sad and peaceful. Uncertain and content to be here in the world. I am ten weeks into a life I did not choose, carrying a rooted love that did not end simply because Doug’s body did. Gradually, like a foal finding its legs, I am discovering how to belong to my own days again. Loss moves beside me in its complicated way, reminding me Doug will belong there too—one day at a time.

Karen