As a widow, we hear plenty of platitudes. One of them being ‘time will heal all’. It’s one that I truly dislike and still makes me cringe mostly because I don’t believe it’s true. I don’t believe that time will heal becoming a widow. I don’t think anything will be able to heal that. I think that as time goes on I’m better able to handle the feelings of being widowed, but that doesn’t mean I have healed. This weekend was proof of that. Since March of 2022, people kept telling me each year will get easier. Each holiday will get easier. I found that to be untrue and in fact, it pissed me off a little when people would say that to me. Because it was the complete opposite of how I felt sometimes. This was the third year that the twins and I had to get through Father’s Day without Erik. And I have found it much more difficult for me with each passing year. As much as I was trying to be optimistic that this was the year it might not affect me as much, it did, and more so. I think it has something to do with the twins getting older. They understand much more now, yet still not fully. This year they made Father’s Day cards in preschool for dad. The entire week leading up to the weekend they kept asking me to give it to him and to go see him. And once again I had to give an answer that broke my heart each time knowing I couldn’t do anything to change it for them; ‘Daddy is no longer physically here, but we can go visit where he rests’. This is usually followed with the question ‘Why’ or ‘Is he watching us from the clouds, mama’. As the weekend got closer the topic of dad came up much more frequently than they normally do. Granted I expected this as they were talking about it in school. I had planned to take them to visit Erik on the actual day, but as the end of the week neared my anxiety started getting worse and I just couldn’t bear the thought of actually going on the day. So instead we woke up on Saturday grabbed the Father’s Day card they both made for Erik, went to get flowers and his favorite donuts, and visited him.
It’s been hard for me emotionally lately to take the kids to visit him, so they haven’t been since April. It has also been a while since I’ve cried in public, but this visit did it for me. When we got there they both started to have full-on conversations with him. This was the first time they just started talking to him without my prompting. They told him how they brought him flowers and made a card for him and they went on to explain their cards each taking a turn. My heart started breaking and for the first time in a while, I couldn’t hold it in. The tears started streaming down my face as they talked to the flowers that sat in the ground and got no response. I stood there and let them talk as they saw fit and then they remembered the donuts. And as three-year-old toddlers of course they started getting excited to eat it. They both started chanting ‘Donuts with daddy, donuts with daddy!’ So I took the donut out and gave them each a piece. And then Charlotte looks up at me and says, “Why isn’t Daddy having any, mommy?” Usually, I’m caught off guard by their why questions, because I just don’t know how to answer them most of the time. Nor would they really understand the true explanation as to why at this age. So I said, “he wants you to enjoy them.” And luckily that was enough to get her focus back on the donut. For the rest of that weekend, it seemed to be all about Dad. They normally ask about him quite a bit, but this was almost every couple of hours. Charlotte kept asking me where her daddy was more times than I could count this past weekend. And each time it broke my heart a little more.
Lately, I’ve been trying to figure out how to help them deal with these questions, but also learning how to best answer these questions for them at this particular age. It’s something I still haven’t yet figured out, but I’m hoping as August rolls around I can start getting them into play therapy and maybe that will help all three of us. As the weekend ended I thought to myself how much harder this year’s Father’s Day was compared to last. And maybe it had something to do with me trying to tell myself it shouldn’t affect me as much anymore, but I’ve learned. I’ve learned that I should listen to how I was feeling leading up to it instead of trying to tell myself maybe it won’t affect me as much. I’ve also realized that as our kids get older it will probably be harder to hear and answer those questions and witness them each year coming to the understanding that the reality is that their father is no longer here. And he wasn’t coming back. And all I keep wishing was to take that inevitable heartbreak from them. And with that thought, I’m bracing myself for each Father’s Day moving forward to be its own type of difficult.
