The Widower’s Rant: Snowy Sunday

This morning in the woods, I had the luxury of sleeping in and waking to a light dusting of snow on the skylights above my head. A quiet, serene, and peaceful Sunday morning. I began the day with freshly ground coffee, leftover oatmeal, and comforting music in the background. And in the rarest of rares, I had nothing planned for the day. 

The past few weeks have been quite nice. I’ve been telling my friends that 95% of the time, I’m the happiest clam in the sea. 5%, I’m pretty upset about why. Most of the time, when I think of Beth or have a short chat, it’s with joy and gratitude. But then there are those moments of abject grief, bottomless despair, and the plaintive pleading begging for the pain to subside and not return. Like the children's chant, 'Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day,' hoping that 'some other day' never comes. Climate change notwithstanding, the rain will come again.

Grief is Exhausting.

It’s good to be busy; it’s good to have things to do. But life can’t be about the pursuit of busy just to be busy. Knowing how to embrace the quiet, unstructured times was never my strong suit. To the opposite, my accomplishment-driven, checklist-organized life ruled my persona. Beth was great at unstructured, unscheduled times and revelled in them. To lounge on the couch with her dogs and a book was her “best day ever.” Mine was cleaning the garage or organizing travel. She learned to embrace guilt-free quiet times later in life. She told me that when she was younger, her father so frequently asked her what she was doing for fun that it compelled her to be out and be at play so she’d have an answer at the ready. Come to think of it, during the weekly zoom with Bob, the conversation focuses on what we’ve done or will be doing. We certainly are not talking about what we are thinking or feeling. 

I wrote earlier how Beth and I each understood that being busy or not being busy was the other’s kryptonite. Regression to the mean in a balanced relationship is a thing. Beth would get up from the couch; I would stay on the couch and not start new projects. 

Out of my parent’s home, when I began to form patterns of my own, my friends noted that I had an unusually organized closet. My shirts were hung by type, pattern, and color. I didn’t think about it; it was just how they went from laundry to hanger. When I say “noted”, I should say teased or derided. But I was happy enough with how they looked in my tiny Fraternity house closet that the only child in me assumed they were jealous. Beth and I lived together for 39 years–right after I graduated from Davis. After she had stopped working, she naturally adopted more household tasks, like laundry. My closet ceased being obsessively organized. Pants were near pants, and shirts were near shirts. Beth put the Ran in Random and capitalized Entropy with glee. When I put things away, I became much less fastidious about it because I would be creating order that would be promptly subjected to the second law of thermodynamics and become more disordered. Regression to the mean.

My closet is back to being organized. When I do laundry, I put things away FIFO. I can’t help it. What I’d give for a little more disorder in my life. 

I’ve been bracing for the quiet day. What will I do if there are no tasks and the weather isn’t cooperating with being outside? I’ve realized that one of the reasons I cook is that it takes time. Prep, cooking, and cleaning take an hour or two of my evening. By the time I wrap up, there are fewer quiet, alone hours in the evening to occupy. I’m not a good movie watcher. I’m trying, but it’s not a default activity. When I travel, I notice people staring transfixed at their devices, in the terminal and in the air, watching movies, shows, and other forms of visual entertainment. It helps me to understand why Netflix and other streaming services have grown so much. But it’s otherwise nearly foreign to me. Over my hundreds of flights, especially in the pre-device era, I remember seeing the list of movies available to watch as continents and oceans fell behind the wings and thinking, “Oh, Beth would enjoy this; I’ll wait and watch it with her.” I can safely say that I didn’t watch more movies, thinking I’d see them with Beth, than the movies we watched together. Now, when I see a movie on Netflix's recommendation list and I think Beth would have enjoyed seeing it, I simply can’t watch it. It would underscore the empty spot on the couch. I’ve let most of our streaming subscriptions lapse. 

What am I going to do for the rest of the day? After the 2nd cup of coffee, the weather made me think about roasting a Chicken. Prep takes a long time, and there are days of leftovers. I look out the window and see that the snow isn’t sticking to the roads, so driving into town isn’t a big deal. But wait, isn’t the whole reason you have a pantry of shelf-stable ingredients and frozen food specifically so you don’t have to leave the house on a cozy, stormy day? I’m torn. 

What am I going to do for the rest of the Winter, Summer, Year, Life? I have some great adventures planned for the fall. One requires me to step up my fitness, so I’m beginning to work on a training regimen. It’s good to have a goal and something to look forward to. Maybe that’s the secret. A series of short-, mid-, and long-term goals and plans give the interstitial time structure and purpose. But I can’t create busy just to be busy. It is avoidance behavior. The quiet, unscheduled hours and days are woven into the fabric of time, especially at this phase of my life.

Physicists discuss spacetime and the fabric of time in terms of its continuity, malleability, and interconnectedness. They also talk about disruption in spacetime, the ripping of the fabric of time. These alterations in the fabric of time might be a means of time travel. But I digress. 

For some reason, my social feeds favor me with musings on grief. Some are saccharine, some moving. It is both reassuring and awful to learn that grief does not leave. There is no “moving on.” To know that one year, five years, twenty-five years from now, I’ll miss Beth just as much as I do today, and just as much as fifty-one weeks ago (still counting), provides comfort and a terrible foreshadowing. 

“Grief, I’ve learned, is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

The exact quote is attributed to Jamie Anderson, though there is discussion about which Jamie Anderson. It is also debated that Grief is so much more than Love without a home. I agree. There are multitudes of dimensions, from anger to loneliness, disorientation, and more. What I can state with absolute certainty is that Grief is Exhausting.

There you are, enjoying a perfect day. A few laps of skiing with your son, the victory beer and burger digesting happily away. Then, without warning, like a faulty smoke detector going off, you are leveled by grief. Dropped to your knees. Unable to articulate why in what should be a happy moment of peace and quiet, suddenly you find your head buried in your hands, inconsolable. 

The sun rises, and it’s another beautiful, happy day. Grief is again a memory, and I’m the happiest clam in Bikini Bottom. 

Another quote that popped up this past week philosophized, “Maybe the happy ending is that you fall in love with your life—eat your favorite foods, admire sunrises and sunsets, pick up the book you've been trying to finish, dance to your favorite songs, buy yourself flowers, bring your mind back to how blessed you are.”

I believe I have done an above-average job of being grateful for how fortunate I am. I’ve won life’s lottery, save for one wrinkle in time. But the quote reminds me to be mindful of the present. Not to be stuck in the doom loop of living in the past or worrying about an unknown future. Beth was exceptional at living in the present. I take some credit for helping to facilitate this since I did enough planning and worrying about the future for the both of us. Now, the pivot is to do enough planning and goal-setting to have a roadmap but not lose sight of the gently falling snow or the sounds of waves washing ashore. 

What am I going to do next week? Saturday, April 5, is the first in an endless series of unwanted anniversaries. Unlike birthdays, holidays, and other occasions where absence is noted, 4-5-25 will indelibly mark the tearing in the fabric of time, the unfillable chasm in my life, and the hole left in the lives of our children, relatives, and friends. 

The theoretical physicists were correct. This discontinuity in spacetime has opened a portal of time travel for me. Memories, some driven by the photos around my home, others from the scrapbook inside my head, stream freely. No subscription required. All but one are happy memories. The recent memories are also wonderful. I sometimes revisit the days leading up to those 30 hours when time stood still and the gossamer fabric of our lives was abruptly ripped. Fortunately, not often. 

I was asked by a friend what one does to prepare for loss. I explained that we didn’t prepare because loss was unexpected. What we did, fortunately, was enjoy a phenomenal life together. We didn’t leave many cards on the table. So I suppose there’s no real way to prepare for whatever tsunami of emotions I’ll surf, or you might feel, on the 5th. What I do know is that I won’t be sitting around creating quiet time, wondering what to do next. Beth would be out having fun. So will I. I hope you will too.

I miss you Beth. I love you forever.

Donald