Catching glimpses

I've been blessed with a good memory. When I look at photos of Sandy, I remember when they were taken, and I feel like I'm there again. With her, surrounded by our life, whether it was in Greece or our back yard. I have a lot of photos. It helps that Sandy took the camera everywhere, and occasionally I'd think to pull it out of her hands and turn it on her.

I can also go back in time when I read her words: email messages she sent me, or LiveJournal posts she wrote, anything that captures the context of our lives. I sink into her words. I spend hours rereading anything in her voice, enjoying the vitality and the immediacy of her presence.

I wear her clothing. Her wedding ring is on my right hand, and mine remains on my left. (We called them wedding rings though we never got to have our wedding.) I wear a bracelet that was hers. I read her kindle, watch her favorite TV shows, eat the meals we used to prepare together.

Essentially, I'm soaking in her.

What I crave are video and audio. Every time I find some new source of her voice, it feels like a gift. An audio cassette on which she'd dictated a story she was writing many years ago. A recording of her chorus rehearsing back in 2002. Her outgoing greeting on her cellphone voicemail. This morning, I remembered that we both testified at a public hearing in 2008 that was recorded by a local TV station - I need to install Real Player to see the video, but I could hear the audio. It wasn't just her voice. I was there again, that evening, sitting at a table with her, scribbling notes to each other as we reacted to others' statements.

I may spend the rest of my life living in the past, but that's okay, because it was a good past.

Rebuilding

When Sandy died, she lost her body, but her spirit remains. My body stayed intact - in fact, healthy, but my spirit collapsed.

Now, I am reconstructing my spirit from the bits that were there before, from the parts of Sandy that remain with me, and from new inspiration I'm finding out in the world. So, eventually, I'll have both body and spirit.

How, then, do we get Sandy a new body to go with her lingering spirit? 

She's not that dead

Sandy was a force. If she was in a room, you knew she was there. She changed the dynamics of any group  she entered, even when she didn't say anything. And it was rare that she didn't say anything.

As she died, that force faded. I was even a little bored the last afternoon of her life. As I sat next to her, still holding her hand, I felt restless and reached for my email, read some blogs for the first time in weeks. I felt guilty about it, and mystified, but I realize now that most of what was interesting about Sandy had already started to leave. After her heart stopped beating, I was surprised that I felt no connection with the body that remained. It wasn't her. She'd become so dehydrated, so weak, and she'd lost all of her hair after the brain radiation -- she looked like a parody of herself. Her energy had already gone. It left the building before her body was carried out.

But her energy didn't just disappear. The next day, July 20, as I was putting the trash out, I found a neatly folded, clean copy of The New York Times. Dated June 15. A little background - it was on June 15 that our lives fell apart, that things skewed off the plan. I'd said repeatedly that I wanted to go back to June 15; I wanted our lives back. So it was clear to me that this magical newspaper was a message from Sandy. She wanted our lives back, too, and I should focus on our life before June 15 and not all the trauma that followed. I treasured it, beamed, boasted, and wanted MORE!

Other messages followed in different forms. Small children who sought me out to beam at me, turning 90 degrees to say "hi" while gazing into my eyes. It's not that kids usually avoid me or anything, but these were some extremely personal encounters.  I felt Sandy in them.

When I created her estate account, it went smoothly. But when the nice man at the credit union went to close out her checking account and move the funds to the estate account, he wasn't able to access her account. Nor could the back office. Nor could the IT folks. There was a problem with the underlying software that captures images from driver's licenses for identification - but the problem was only with Sandy's account. She didn't want anyone taking her money!

As weeks passed, she hasn't interacted as much with the larger world to communicate with me. Instead, I feel her in the house with me (or not, when she's gone somewhere else), and sometimes she replies to me with thoughts in my head. I'm sure I appear crazy to some people, but I know Sandy's voice and speaking patterns and they differ from mine. Some thoughts are mine; some are hers.

A few weeks ago, I had a dream in which Sandy was back, and she'd just gotten off the phone with her best friend. I asked whether it had freaked her friend out to talk to a dead person. Sandy looked at me, exasperated, and said, "I'm not that dead." She was right. She's not that dead. Her body is gone, reduced to the ashes that sit in a blue bottle on our bedroom dresser. But her spirit, the part of her that was uniquely Sandy, lives on. I am immensely grateful for that.

Status: Widowed

I was surprised by the sudden isolation I felt after Sandy's death. She was the person I shared every thought, experience, exasperation with. And even as she lay dying, she was still there, beside me. As she put it in a letter she wrote me a few years ago:

When you are sad, or stressed, I want to be there for you; when I am happy, you are who I want to share my triumph with.

That was true throughout our relationship, but several factors made it more exclusive recently. I've been self-employed, working out of our house, for more than a decade. I don't have a workplace with a gang of co-workers to go to every day. And this past year, Sandy was home on disability, with me every day.  I had only to walk a few feet to see the person I most wanted to be with. I was spoiled, and had no need to look elsewhere for company.

Our world grew smaller because of Sandy's cancer treatment and her exhaustion. But she took a woodworking class, saw friends regularly, and pursued other interests. Me? I encouraged her to do all that, believing (as I still believe) that it was important for her health. But I rarely saw friends or did things with people other than Sandy. Instead, I read all I could about breast cancer research and dedicated my non-work time to finding options for improving her current welfare and for finding a clinical trial for something that might get us closer to a cure. I, too, was exhausted - from caregiving itself, from putting myself second most of the time, and from fear of losing her.

As Sandy was dying, we were surrounded by her family and her closest friends. They provided a wonderful sense of community, and it was important to me that she spend as much time as possible with the people who knew her and loved her best.

And then she died. And I looked around. What happened to all my friends? I used to have many close friends, and many more casual friends. But I'd lost contact with all but the few who are closest to me -- and I still had them only because they were good about making the effort while I focused on Sandy.

I lost my core, the person who knew the context of everything in my life - the one who would know instantly why some comment was relevant or what might comfort me. At the same time, the extent of the loss I'd brought upon myself over the past few years really hit me.

When I most needed to feel known, I realized how unknown I'd become, how I'd let so many really amazing people wander away. It didn't help that, though I knew that socializing was important for my sanity, such as it was, all I wanted to do was to crawl into bed and talk to Sandy's spirit, read compulsively on her kindle, and do sudoku.

So I've given in and started a Facebook page, hoping to stay in touch with people more easily - if only casually. I didn't expect it to be yet another heartbreaking experience, but when I got to the profile page that includes relationships, I chose Widow. And screamed.  

When the impossible becomes reality

She had a terminal illness, metastatic breast cancer. But she responded well to chemo, and there's so much exciting research, and, well, we weren't like other people. We were special. We both believed that we could keep her alive until the cure. On July 19, 2011, we were proven wrong. Her heart stopped, and mine shattered.

We were together for 15 and a half years. We'd known each other for 21 and a half years. We wanted to spend the rest of our lives together -- she got to spend the rest of her life with me, but I apparently won't be so lucky.

We had a plan. We had lots of plans. Dying was not in the plan. Nor was the pain she suffered the last few months of her life - not the pain, nor the nausea, nor the weakness of the last few weeks. And the pain that I've somehow survived (so far) since her death definitely wasn't in the plan.

The first several weeks, I survived only by convincing myself that she would return. I knew it was impossible, but since her death was impossible, too. . . I staggered under the weight of grief, and I was surprised by how physical the pain of her absence was. When I had open-heart surgery a few years ago, it felt like someone had strapped a sharp-edged metal plate to my chest. This felt similar, but in addition to the weight and the pain, there was also a cavity, an emptiness, an internal void. Empty heaviness -- perhaps it would be closest to describe it as a biological black hole.

Now, after her memorial last week, as we approach the ten-week mark since her death, I've started to feel a shift. I'm beginning to be more willing to envision a future, even one that doesn't include her. I'm becoming more confident that I can carry her with me, that she will not fade for me. I've taken comfort from text in About Grief, by Marasco and Shuff. They reassure me that our names appear together in the book of the universe and that somewhere it is written that she was mine, I was hers, our love was (and remains) powerful, remarkable, and true. Death cannot change that. As I told Sandy while she was dying, "Love doesn't stop."

Turns out, that's true. For a woman who's "gone," she's been with me a great deal. My love for her hasn't stopped, and I feel her love for me continuing strongly. As I'm beginning to piece together the shattered remnants of my heart, of my being, I'm putting my relationship with Sandy - and the part of her that she gave me - at the core.