Widow's Voice

The Oft Repeated Question~

| Posted by:

Chuck wouldn’t want you to be sad. 

Don’t you think Chuck would want you to be happy?

We’ve all heard this inane statement. This inane question.

It doesn’t always come from the un-widowed, either. I see it frequently in the widowed community.

What a pain to listen to others speak for someone they don’t even know.

I remember, a couple years after Chuck’s death, I was in a 12 step meeting and a guy who’d known Chuck asked me how I was doing. I responded that I was in a shitload of pain, my heart hurt, and I missed him with every breath.

It isn’t that this guy didn’t have good intentions. I get that. Yadda, yadda, yadda.

Of course his response was that dreaded question…starting with wouldn’t he….?

I very kindly responded that Chuck didn’t get a say in it, what with being, you know, dead, and when he was alive I wasn’t happy all the time either, so there’s that.

Clearly this man was a bit frustrated with me because I didn’t just say thank you and move on, so he asked me well, what would Chuck say if he were here?

I know exactly what he would do, I said. He’d listen to me, and then he’d wrap his arms around me in a hug and just hold me and be silent.

Here’s the thing, folks, when it comes to Chuck and dead Chuck and my grief and my shattered heart and my struggle to make meaning out of something so bullshit as him dying…

If I see Chuck when I die…and I have no expectation or belief that such a thing will happen…but if I do get that incredible opportunity, and after I’ve knocked him to the floor with the excitement of seeing him again, and handcuffed him to my side so that we’ll never be parted again…

And he says to me that he wishes that I hadn’t grieved him so much and so deeply…

I’ll look straight into his green eyes, unflinching, and tell him you know what? Look what I did even as I grieved for you. Longed for you. Died for the wanting of you. Look what I did. And I’ll grandly sweep both arms in the direction of the earth…I’m assuming I’m up in the clouds or in the star studded sky somewhere…giving him a glimpse of PinkMagic, and the pink sequin tailed coat and pink top hat that I wore as mourning clothes, and the names of thousands of people written on my rig, and I’ll map out to him all of the roads I traveled on my Odyssey of Love and the many times thousand hugs I gave and received, and he’ll just stand back and look me over with that glint in his eyes and a smile will tug at his lips and he’ll shake his head back and forth, proud as a peacock, not surprised in the least at any of it.

What I’ve learned about grieving in these 7 godawful long centuries since his death, is that it isn’t at all about how much I grieve. Or if I’m happy or not happy. Or joyful or not joyful. None of it.

It’s how I’ve carried this grief. How I continue to carry it. And how I will always carry it.

Because I know, and Chuck will know, that I have braided grief and Love into a beautiful Love knot. One is the other and the other is one. Woven gently and fiercely together. Unbreakable. Unshakeable.

Love is grief is Love is grief is Love.

It’s really

just

quite

simple~

About Alison Miller

My beloved husband Chuck died while we were full timing on the road. We’d rented a condo for our stay in southern CA, and I had to leave 3 weeks after his death. All I knew at that time was that I had to find a way to continue traveling on my own, because settling down without him made me break into a cold sweat. I knew that the only place I’d find any connection to Chuck again was out on the roads we’d been traveling for our last 4 years together. I knew nobody out on the road, I knew grief was a great isolator, and I knew I had to change the way I traveled without him, to make it more emotionally bearable for me. So I bought a new car, had a shade of pink customized for it, bought a tiny trailer and painted the trim in pink, learned how to tow and camp, and set out alone. My anxiety was through the roof, and all I knew to trust was the Love that Chuck left behind for me. I found Soaring Spirits early on, thank god, and the connections I made through SS helped ground me to some extent. I needed to know that other widow/ers were out there in my world, because I felt so disoriented and dislocated. Through Soaring Spirits, as the miles added up, my rig taking me north, south, east and west, I found community. I found sanity…or at least I learned that if I was bat shit crazy, I was in good company, and realizing that ultimately saved my sanity. PinkMagic, my rig, is covered with hundreds of names of loved ones sent to me by my widowed community, and I know it isn’t visible to the naked eye, but I’ll let you in on a secret…she actually illuminates Love as I drive down the many roads in our country, and I can see it through my side view mirror. Love does, indeed, live on~

TO LEAVE A COMMENT ON A BLOG, sign in to the comments section using your Facebook or Gmail accounts, or sign up for Disqus.