I am grieving.  Every morning I wake up to the knowledge that my husband is not beside me.  All through the day I work from home, alone, on the creations from the Memory Quilts business I have started, and my time awake would be silent if not for the radio or television I switch back and forth from.  And every night I walk slowly back to a bed that is just for me alone.  No more whispers in the dark.  No more being tucked safely under his arm or my fingers reaching for his hand as we drift off to sleep side by side.  Only the knowledge that it will be the same tomorrow, and the next day, keeps me company, that and my two little dogs who cannot for the life of them understand why I roll over each night, still, after 6 months, to shake with silent sobs on a pillow that is never used.

For some, grief lasts.  For a percentage of us, the heartache goes on.  That is what I’ve come to determine after having spent time reading from the famous, the not famous on grief blogs, and listening to other widows and widowers in the group who come and go with the random timing of milestones in their lives where they need the additional support.  And there are the regulars who need the support of the once a month meetings.

I’ve observed the people in this group I attend and have seen that grief depends on so many things.  How long a person actively grieves can depend upon their age, maturity, their character, physical and mental health, their religious beliefs, the support of family and friends and the continuation of that support as time goes on.      
I think it also can depend on how prepared a person was before the death occurred.  Was there anticipation as in an extended illness?  Was it sudden as in an accident or an act of violence?  Was the loved one in a line of work such as law enforcement or the military where there is always great risk?  Did the bereaved witness the death, take frantic part in trying to save their loved one as I did when my husband was seized by a fatal and very unexpected heart attack?

I have drawn the conclusion, my own personal one from personal observations, that those who experience the sudden and unexpected death of their loved one have a longer adjustment period.  There was no time to have last words or to deal with the understanding that a disease could not be cured.  There were no last goodbyes.  There can be no timeframe for grief because every grief is unique to the person who experiences it and to their relationship with the deceased.

If you are looking for answers, as I have been, to when this hell will be over, know this.  It will end with the most acute pain winding down when it will.  The pounding in your chest, the constriction in your throat will cease at a time that you cannot predict.  And you will “move on” in your own way though your moving on will be very different than others who seem to have “gone on with their lives.”

There is one widow who had become a closer acquaintance than the others.  She had tried to reach out to me more.  She was incredulous at the amount of time I spend alone.  Hour after hour, day after day, I am alone with few interruptions.  My daughter calls every day.  My son two or three times a week.  My daughter tries to be with me for as much as three hours on her two days a week off.  Once her schedule allowed for a day that gave us 5 hours together.  One week I did not see her at all.  The facilitator of my grief group wanted me to make a note one month of how often I am physically in the company of another human being.  In that entire month, I interacted with people for a total of 26 hours.  Everyone was appalled but no one offered to stop by and pick me up for a supper out, or a movie with them, or to come and sit with me for a brief visit.  They are busy with their own lives and dealing with their own grief.  I am just someone they look at and most likely think, “There but for the grace of God.”

I know for a fact that I am in deep and active grief.  As of this writing, it has been exactly six months and two weeks since my husband was seized with a sudden and, in my eyes, violent heart attack.  I could not bring him back.  The EMT’s had a heartbeat, they said, but they could have been lying so that they were not the ones to break the sad news.  I say that I know I will grieve for him forever simply because I know what our relationship was.  It was deep and loving.  I’ve written too much about him in my other hubs to write about who he was here.  To stay on point, I will say that because of who I am and who he was and what we were together, I will be a widow until I die.

But I know of others who will not be.  The woman from my group who is a better acquaintance has been a widow for two and a half years.  She has a four year-old daughter and a seven year-old son.  And she is now newly engaged to her husband’s best friend.  She is ecstatic.  Her memories of her beloved husband have faded to a sweet sadness that he is gone.  They were married for 18 years and had their children later on, but she is only in her forties and craves someone to be with her.  She explained to me that she is so shocked at my absolute aloneness because she is so afraid of it.  She hasn’t been alone since her husband’s sudden death from a heart condition no one knew about.  She moved in to her parent’s home and stayed there, forming the attachment to her husband’s best friend from there, dating him while her parent’s babysat, and ultimately getting engaged.  Since she told me, she has stopped calling to check on me.  Her apologetic phone call out of the blue one day came because she felt guilty.  She is so happy and I am still so fresh in my own grief.  She started to say that I was a depressing reminder to what she had once experienced but she changed it after the word depressing to the thought that her happiness might make me sadder.  She told me she knows I will never get over losing my husband.  She sees that in me even now, this early on.

There is another woman who writes to me for advice that I do not feel qualified to give but she likes my writing, “the way you put things.”  She wrote to say she has been a widow of 6 years, recently divorced from her second husband, and wants to find a love like the one I write about.  I have no idea what to tell her.  She loved her first husband, the one who widowed her but even in that she says it was not like the love I have with my Marine.  The thing is, she said she remarried because she was alone.  She wasn’t ready though, she claimed.  And now she is divorced and wants to find true love.

I don’t think you can find true love.  I think it just happens.  I met my Marine and he became my Dragon.  We were meant to be.  It took years to find each other if that’s how you want to look at it, but we just happened upon each other.  There was no deliberate search.  We were just very, very lucky.  And now I am very, very sad.

I cannot tell this woman how to find a love like the one I had.   I tell her to just breathe.  What I do not know is if she is over her grief from the loss of her first husband or caught up in some whirlwind of hating to be alone.   I hear that from so many women.  They do not want to be alone.

The men in the group I have met seem to fall into the same perimeters of grief as the women.  It affects them the same way, by age, situation, type of relationship, how their wives died, age of children if any, and so on.  The grief that I have observed does not seem to have gender specific rules.  But I could be wrong.  I simply think that anyone who is grieving does not have to do what society thinks, what their friends tell them to, or adhere to a guideline suggested by a book.  Grief will last for as long as it lasts.  There is no right thing to do or wrong thing to do unless you wish to harm yourself.  Then you need to find a professional to help you cope.

I do see from observing others that grief lasts longer than you anticipate.  It can drag out.  There is a woman who drops into the group from time to time who has been grieving and been afraid of so much for over five years.  She has been encouraged to seek a professional for guidance.  I know that grief is a roller coaster with good days and bad days.  It seems the first year is hard.  During the second year a lot of things come together, details and thoughts on how the rest of your life is going to proceed.  But there are always the holidays, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, anniversaries, Valentine’s Day.  My husband’s funeral was on February 14th.  It will always be a day that I will have that memory rise up into my throat.  It wasn’t done intentionally.  It simply happened, like his death.  Out of my control and beyond my comprehension.  I wasn’t looking at a calendar when the plans were being made.  I worked around the cremation, the pastor, the church, etc.  But for me Valentine’s Day will never even have a bittersweet memory.  It will be the day of his funeral and all the family crap that occurred.  The only blessing on that day was that he was beyond being hurt by it.

How long does grief last?  It can take less than a year, or two years, three years, and depending upon your particular situation, your desires, it may never truly end.  But I think that is normal.  If you get up each morning, dress and meet the day, if you laugh and take part in life in some way, if you can smile and feel anticipation for a movie date with friends, or the coming of the coolness of Fall, or the end of a long cold Winter, then you are living.  So what if you never remarry?  So what if you do?  You are living and content with your life.  That is all anyone needs.  Contentment.  Peace.  It is more than some of us get.  I may not have friends who call to check on me, or invite me places, but I have a job.  I make Memory Quilts that I can tell brings solace to people during a time in their lives when they crave it the most.  When the death is fresh and they want this tangible object that every scrap of fabric in it belonged to their loved one, or their grief is months, years old and the pain has dimmed to sadness and only at certain times and they simply want the keepsake forever, I can make the quilts for them.  It gives them someone to tell their story to, to turn over the burden of it to someone who can see it as a tangible object.  I can take their stories and visualize a quilt that is only for them.  No pattern can be used for something as unique as grief.  Though I am alone, this is my way of staying connected to the outside world.  But I also believe that I will, in a softer way as time moves on, grieve for my Dragon for the rest of my life.

In the book “Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From the Beaten Track,” there is a letter written by Dr. Richard Feynman to his first wife, Arlene, who died of tuberculosis.  It is a letter that he wrote to Arlene a year and four months after she died.  It was found among his papers after he died.  It appeared well worn, as if he read and reread it often.  In the letter he states that he doesn’t believe he will ever love again, that he adores her and only her.  He claims to not believe in God and therefore doesn’t know where she is exactly so the letter cannot be delivered.  He states that he doesn’t want to remain alone but everyone he meets, “they all seem ashes.  You only are left to me.  You are real.”

He signs it, “My darling wife, I do adore you.  I love my wife.  My wife is dead.”

Dr. Feynman went on to marry twice more and have two children with his third wife.  In the book “Feynman’s Rainbow,” he has a conversation with the author, Leonard Mlodinow where he says that he met Arlene and loved her very deeply.  “She changed me. She helped me a lot.  She taught me that one has to be irrational sometimes.”  He went on to say that “when you’re unhappy, think about it.  When you’re happy, don’t.  With Arlene, I was happy.”  He knew when he married her that she had TB but he married her because he loved her.  “With Arlene I was really happy for a while.  So I have had it all.  After Arlene, the rest of my life didn’t have to be so good, you see, because I had already had it all.”

With my Marine, my Dragon, I had it all.  There is too much to the man to ever tell it all.  Too much of it is secret.  He is unique in all the world and he was mine.  Larger than life and so much like a Frederick Forsyth novel, I adore him.  We had no money during our marriage, it all went to paying off debt and to the children, but I have no regrets about living that way with him.  He gave me a love I had only read about in books and heard about in songs.  Our life together was not a fairy tale but there was magic.  I will love him deeply forever.

How long does grief last?  As long as it will.