Seekers Grieve and Embrace Life

Joan # 5

One story ends and another begins

Much to Joan’s surprise she fell in love and married again. Her second marriage was fulfilling in many ways. Joan says:

“My second husband Allen and I shared a love of the wilderness and of travel. We sat down early in our marriage and made a list of all the places that we hoped to go together, and we did go to many of those places before he died. It was however a surprise to find that traveling as a couple didn’t always go smoothly. We started out by trying to do everything together, and we discovered that our interests and attention spans were different. In museums, for example, Allen wanted to see every painting, giving each one his complete attention. I tended to move through the galleries more quickly, choosing fewer paintings to focus on. We learned that we didn’t always have to do the same things. Sometimes we traveled separately to a place—this was enormously freeing. I began traveling solo, often meeting Allen later in a trip.

With Mike, her first husband, Joan had created a family, but within narrow confines that hadn’t allowed her to be herself. With Allen, the doors of the world opened for her, and Joan healed from her losses and learned what she was capable of doing. Since Allen’s death, she has been able to live her life with clear intention and self-confidence.

I asked Joan to tell me about Allen’s last year. He died only six months after my husband, Ron, died. She didn’t answer me right away, but looked out to the hills beyond her house. When she continued, I had to lean closer to her in order to hear what she was saying:

“Allen and I lived well together for 20 years. The last year of Allen’s life wasn’t easy, but we did it together. He had stomach cancer. He managed his treatment, and ultimately decided when he would die. He didn’t want to give up life, and tolerated enormous pain, until he decided it was too much, and he wanted to die on his own terms. We spoke together about every aspect of this experience for both of us.

“When Allen finally made the decision to die, he was too weak to push the morphine applicator, and I wouldn’t do it. A colleague, under Allen’s instructions, gave the order to Allen’s nurse to give him enough morphine to ease his pain and allow him to die. When the time came, she was reluctant to go through with it and called the doctor one more time. He told her that those were his orders. Everyone in the family had hoped that Allen would live until his seventy-fifth birthday, only a few months away; but he was in terrible pain, and he was ready. The nurse gave him the morphine as he lay in my arms. He went to sleep.

“My daughter Lyn was there with me as she had been when her father died. We stayed with him through the night. It took a number of hours, but I held him, and then he was gone. He didn’t want me to take care of him, to again go through what I had experienced with Mike. I wanted to care for him, but not if he didn’t want to be here. It isn’t as if he gave up easily. He went quite far, and it was just time. This was his philosophy, and I share this with him. We spoke about it many times. He wanted to enjoy life and live as long as he could live with some purpose, but no longer. He was so enthusiastic about life, and his death made sense.

I told Joan’s story to my second husband, Patrick. It gave me hope that perhaps in our relationship we could accomplish what my first husband Ron and I had failed to do—to stay in conversation with one another through the harshest times. Ron and I had married young and had been fortunate until his illness. The conversations that we hadn’t had before he became ill were impossible to have after his diagnosis. Joan’s story showed me that partners can hold onto one another even in terrible circumstances.

“After Allen died,” Joan said, “I knew that I would manage day-to-day and take care of what needed to be done, but I didn’t know if I could manage my emotions. I was afraid that I would miss Allen so much that I wouldn’t know how to go on with my life without him. The challenge was living alone, not finding another relationship, but to live alone and do it well. I knew that I needed to learn to feel fully alive by myself. The loneliness of my childhood often lurked in the background, but finally it fell away.

“I didn’t feel joy, but I forced myself to do things anyway, so as not to miss this part of my life. The year after Allen died, I went to Bhutan. I knew I was too sad to do it well, but I went anyway. Later that year a young friend, almost a third daughter, invited me to kayak in the Chilean fiords. I went and took my grief with me. For a week, we hiked in Patagonia and after kayaking rode horses into the Chilean wilderness. I kept pushing on, although I didn’t feel like it. I came home and stretched my finances as far as they would go to redo my kitchen and the bathroom. This was a huge project. I also worked in the garden, and walked as much as I could on familiar paths. My heart was heavy for eight years, but much to my surprise, it changed, slowly.

“Now I see that I can be here and enjoy myself without Allen. I have a sense of my own future. I look forward to my life alone. I appreciate my good fortune. I will always miss Allen, especially his touch, his companionship, and the spontaneity of what we might do. I will always miss him. Yet, I know that my life is good right now.”

Joan’s oldest brother, Paul, died recently. In a telephone conversation she told me that her dreams were filled with a sense of loss from Paul’s death and the deaths of Allen and her son Mark, and at the same time, she told me that she was thinking about going to a global peace conference in Bali and then traveling on her own to Borneo. Although she was sad right now, she was choosing life once again.

The notion of being sad and moving on impressed me. I had believed that I had to get over being sad before I could move on. The expectation that life would either be all good or all bad got in my way of experiencing conflicting realities. Joan's capacity to hold all her life's experiences and possibilities gave me a wider sense of what might be possible for me.

What about you? Do you have stories to tell of either getting caught in grief and struggling to find your way out or moments when you could see the wider geography of life. Please send me your stories. Either click on "comment" at the bottom of this post or send me an email at: Ellen@Berkeleyfamilytherapy.com. Hope to hear from you.