When Things Get Back to Normal (10 page)

These friends spent the night with me when I could no longer bear my own company in that big house, and they insisted I go to theirs when even their presence in mine wasn't enough to keep the loneliness at bay. They never complained when I showed up late for dinner dates, or even when I never showed up at all, my tortured mind refusing to cling to any sort of structure. They remembered the terrible firsts. On the eve of the anniversary of your death, I came back from work to find a bouquet of flowers waiting for me – the giver herself a widow. They drove me home from work, refusing to let me walk in the cold. But perhaps their greatest help of all was their willingness to let me talk about you. They even contributed their own anecdotes from their stockpile of memories. Sometimes during these talks I would forget and use the plural pronouns: our, us, we. When this happened, they were never embarrassed by the slips, nor did they suggest that it was now time for me to use the singular pronoun.

So you see, even when rainy weather made my vegetable garden go to stalk, and even when the sun stopped shining, and even when the wind sucked the spruce logs up the chimney, I never had to bear these tribulations
alone. And so tonight I say, Thank God for steadfast friends.

I put the family picture and the graduation picture back on the wall today. Now they give me comfort.

People keep coming up to me on the street and in stores to talk about the sale of the house. “I hear you sold the house,” they say, always adding, “Do you think you did the right thing?” I'm so touchy on this subject that I want to snarl, How the hell do I know if I did the right thing? Am I supposed to be clairvoyant or something? But instead I make civil responses, peppering my sentences with platitudes such as “who can say” and “only time will tell.” I can't very well admit that already I'm wishing the buyer will go bankrupt or that some other monetary tragedy will befall him, so he'll ask me to rescind the purchase.

And I'm asked what I did with my furniture. When I say I gave the bulk of it up for adoption, they look at me admiringly and then somewhat shamefacedly admit they couldn't bring themselves to do such a thing. Right on the heels of this admission, though, and as if to dismiss my sacrifice, they always add, “But perhaps you weren't attached to your things like I am to mine.” It makes me want to scream,
Not attached!
God in heaven, each piece I
saw going out the door was like ripping my heart wide open with a jagged knife. Why do you think I couldn't sell it?

Right up there with conversations about the house and the furniture are conversations having to do with vacations other happy couples have recently taken. I want to hear about the good times of others just about as much as I want to hear that the ice age is imminent. I listen politely, but my heart keeps up its own prattle.
Shut your face! Shut your face!
it hollers. She doesn't want to hear about your second honeymoon in the Bahamas, or about your lounging on the beaches in Bermuda. Make her day. Tell her that your husband has the beginning of prostate trouble. That he is impotent. Or he is hankering for an affair. Or even that you are!

I purchased an answering machine. It allows me to return the calls I want to return. It also makes coming back to the apartment more inviting. I love to see that blinking light, signalling that someone cares.

Removed my wedding ring tonight. Friends keep telling me that the custom of widows continuing to wear wedding bands went out soon after they stopped using wives as kindling for their dead husbands' biers. After I removed the band, the engagement ring looked so forlorn that I took it off as well. But then I couldn't stand my naked finger, so I wore the diamond and sapphire ring you gave me for our twenty-fourth anniversary. I went with a couple of female friends to a movie, and afterwards we stopped at a bar. I felt like Jezebel, and I was convinced everyone in the room could see my unbanded finger.

The last page in the journal! I'll try to fill it with positive thoughts. I'm going to list the things I can do now that I couldn't do twelve months ago. I can:

1. Drive the car. This, I think, is an interesting aside. A couple of days ago my car went missing in the shopping mall parking lot. Of course it turned up, exactly where I had ordered it to sit before I went into the store, but a male friend came by and offered to search with me. “What type of car do you have?” he asked. “A Mazda 626,” I answered smartly
and proceeded to give my license plate number. Does this sound like the woman who once told a parking attendant that she was driving a Ford Chevy? Or the young bride who, when confronted with the statement, “I see you drive a Corvair Monza,” replied, “Oh, do I?”

2. Search a dark basement for intruders – although I have no idea what I would do should I come upon any.

3. Cut a squash, even one with the toughest hide.

4. Fasten my own pearls.

5. Warm my own feet.

6. Change a ceiling light bulb, even when it means stacking a chair on a table to do so.

7. Sleep alone. In this I am like what Samuel Johnson said about women preachers. They are like dogs standing on their hind legs. They can do it, but not well.

8. Travel solo.

9. Talk to service people – mechanics, electricians, etc. – without feeling that “vulnerable” is stamped on my face.

10. Talk about you without choking up.

The first poinsettias came in the stores this week, and I bought one for my kitchen table. I took a sprig to your grave and anchored it in the snow next to the unweathered monument.

My memory has remained gentle with you. It has bevelled your edges and sanded your corners. It's probably a good thing you won't be coming back. You'd hate having to live up to so much sainthood.

My grief is as constant as it was a year ago, but its pitch has lowered. It no longer has the power to bring on a migraine or make me sick to my stomach. Today I recalled the colleague, the one I mentioned earlier in this journal, who, being recently widowed, asked his neighbour of six months' widowhood when the pain went away. The neighbour didn't answer because, as he said later, “All I could tell you was that it takes longer than six months, and you certainly didn't want to hear that.” If I were to be asked that same question now, I, too, would refuse to answer. What comfort would it be to say, “It takes longer than a year”?

When Goose Lane Editions suggested publishing this new edition of
When Things Get Back to Normal
, I was filled with the same feeling of ambivalence and with the same sense of anxiety that I had experienced when Pottersfield Press agreed to publish it the first time around: I told myself then that it was too private for public eyes. It was so personal it would make for dull reading. It was a vulgar display of emotions. It didn't even have a happy ending. Indeed, that first time around I had so many misgivings about the journal's publication that I seriously considered buying up all the copies in every store before anyone could get a chance to purchase them. Only the cost factor prohibited me from proceeding with this method of keeping the book out of customers' hands.

I not only had no intention of publishing the journal, I had no intention of even keeping one. This came about by pure happenstance. Anne, a writer friend of mine, brought the journal to me when she came to visit me a few days after my husband's funeral. She said I should put my sorrow on paper. She was certain this act of writing would help me immensely. It would be cathartic, she said.

To me, her suggestion sounded ludicrous. But of course
I didn't tell her so, and not merely out of politeness. My reticence was also caused by the lack of energy that comes from grief, the shock of sudden death and the job of tidying up the loose ends that the dead leave behind for the living. I thought her suggestion was ludicrous because I knew beyond a doubt that nothing could help me, certainly nothing as simple and as undemanding as scribbling a few thoughts on paper. I merely thanked her for her thoughtfulness and laid the journal aside.

A few nights later, while prowling through my house, my nerves raw from the silence of the rooms and from the always startling cutting in and out of the refrigerator motor, I picked up the journal and began scribbling a few thoughts in it. It was a last ditch-effort to quiet my nerves. Before I knew it, morning had broken. From that point onwards, I wrote down my thoughts and catalogued the meaningful happenings of my days. I found great solace in doing this. I could express my pain, my anger, my fear, my uncertainties without running the risk of having others think ill of me, without selfishly passing on to others what was clearly my own cross to bear.

I continued writing in my journal throughout the year, and by the time the anniversary date came around, not only was the journal filled, but I found I had no more need of this exercise. The
firsts
were all behind me – first snow, first spring, first birthday and so on – and I was by this time well into the process of mending. I stowed the journal away with the sympathy cards and letters I had received during the year.

It would have remained in this box had not another friend told a friend of hers about me and my journal keeping. This person was working on a segment on grief for the local CBC radio station. She asked me if I would share my writings. I was horrified. Of course not! I said all the things that I mentioned at the beginning of this Afterword – it was too personal, too dull, etc. She persisted. And persisted. Finally, I relented and agreed to read a five-minute section of it on her program. Immediately after my reading, which was also the end of the program, she came back into the studio. She had a certain look on her face which I misinterpreted as regret for having asked me to read. I hotly defended myself before she had a chance to say anything. “I told you it would be boring,” I said. “But you insisted, against my better judgement.”

Then she told me that she was astounded by the response to the reading. The studio switchboard, she said was lit up with calls asking where the journal could be purchased. My own telephone also rang non-stop all evening. This confirmed for me what I already knew from the bereavement groups I had attended: the loss of a loved one through death brings about deep and long-lasting pain, and we have a great need to share these feelings of loss and pain with kindred others.

From this point and with a willing publisher, I was easily persuaded to have the journal go forth as the book
When Things Get Back to Normal.
Only later, when I was two years a widow and had struggled over the highest hump of grief,
did it appear in the bookstores, and I was conflicted over my decision to have it made public. The part of me that was still wounded wanted to share my journey with those others who were still trudging through that mountain of grief. The part of me that had healed wanted to buy up all the books in the stores and hide them under my bed. I'm convinced that if money had not been a factor, I would have done just that.

Very shortly after
When Things Get Back to Normal
appeared on the bookstore shelves, I was inundated with telephone calls. It seemed that readers, having read the book, needed to talk to me – to thank me for having written it, to commiserate with me. Mostly, though, they wanted my assurance that one day, they, too, would arrive at the place where I now was. The calls were not merely local ones; they came from all over this country and from many parts of the United States as well, even though my publisher had not placed the book in the stores in the United States. As someone pointed out, I had given the book a body, but it had grown legs all on its own.

If this were a fairy tale instead of an account of a real walk through grief, I would now be telling you that in the course of time I had kissed a frog who turned into a prince and who carried me off to a magic kingdom where I began living happily ever after. However, real life has a different outcome, and besides, having been born under the sign of fastidious Virgo, I could never be induced to kiss a slithery frog, no matter what opportunities lay beyond that kiss.
And if this were a fairy tale, I would also be telling you that sorrow and grief and loss are easily put behind you. There is a candy advertisement that says you can't rush a turtle. Neither can you rush grief. It takes its own good time. Even now, fifteen years later, I can still be catapulted back into the realm of that first excruciatingly pain-filled year. It may be a soft wind, the scent of a flower, waking from a dream, the glimpse of a person in a crowd, or a snippet of a song. However, the pain no longer lingers, and after a moment's stumble into sadness, I can move on with my day.

I did quit my teaching job earlier than planned. I took this step in order to devote my full time to writing. My husband's premature death made me realize how fragile life really is and that one should not postpone fulfilling one's dream until life is tidied up and in order. “Someday” so very quickly turns into never. I now have five novels on the bookstore shelves. As well, I have a film optioned.

If my husband were to return now, he would see an amazing change in me. I have become once more a complete person, but I am convinced that he was complete enough in himself not to be jealous of this change in me. Indeed, I am certain he would be proud of me. He might even relish this change. With my new and different completeness has come understanding, and out of my pain has come compassion, and out of my struggle to climb over the top of grief has come independence. If he were to come back, I'm certain I would be a more nurturing and helpful
partner to him. I regret that I wasn't then all that I could have been.

In the beginning, at the time of early widowhood, I was convinced I had lost my identity, and to an extent that was true. But through the process of growth and change, I have gained another identity. To be sure, it is different from the old one, but it is equally whole and satisfying.