Milestones in grief

                                                                Dan and I around 2011

I wrote this for a writing contest about milestones. Writing about every grief milestone would take a book and I had a word limit so I couldn't do that. I tried to do the really big ones.

I have not had a particularly eventful life. When I was eight, my parents moved, but they took me with them. At ten, I had a pretty bad accident, but I came out of it fine. My husband and I met at sixteen, and at nineteen, we went against all good advice and got married. I gave birth to our daughter when I was 27.

 

I loved our boring, normal life. We were living our happily ever after. I was a stay at home mom, Dan was finishing up grad school. Everyone says this kind of thing at funerals, but Dan really was the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my life. He wanted to save the world: the people, the animals, the ecosystem. He wanted to make the world better, and he was. I loved our little family and couldn’t wait for it to grow.

 

Instead it got smaller.

 

No one can say with certainty why Dan started having seizures, but we suspect it was from being knocked around in his years on the high school wrestling team.  The seizures were never a serious problem. They were controlled by medication. He had a seizure about once every 5 years. We didn’t use the word “epilepsy.” Most of our family didn't even know about it, because it wasn't a big deal. It was an inconvenience, not a life threatening ailment.

 

The night he died we went to bed at 11. I had been asleep for ten minutes when the bed started shaking.  His C-PAP machine was making a weird gurgling noise, like he was choking. I jumped up and ripped the C-PAP mask off of his face. Dan was having a seizure; his body was shaking uncontrollably.

 

And then it was over. It was short. No more than 30 seconds. It was small, not like you see in the movies or TV with limbs waving everywhere. This is how most of his seizures were, only twice were they big dramatic ones.

 

Then everything changed. Something was wrong. This was different than other seizures.

 

After a normal seizure, Dan would be pretty out of it, like waking up from anesthesia. I might get a mumble as he rolled over and went back to sleep. Usually I would try to get his attention by nudging him in the shoulder.

 

“Dan, wake up. Dan, you had a seizure. Dan, can you hear me?" He would throw his hand up and shove me away, as he grumbled and snored. That was how he always responded. 

 

Not this time. This time he didn’t move. I pushed on his shoulder. He didn’t move. I started talking to him.

 

“Dan. Dan. Wake up. Dan. Dan. Dan, can you hear me? Wake up!” He didn’t do anything, he didn’t move at all, not even an inch. I was starting to get really scared. I pulled open his eyelid and his eye was rolled up in his head. I put my ear on his chest. His heart was beating extremely fast. Or was it mine? Or both? I couldn't tell. I didn’t know what to do.

 

I ran out to the living room and grabbed my phone off the brown dresser where it always lived at night.  I dialed 911. I have never in my life dialed 911. I ran back to Dan, still in our bed, and looked at the clock. It said 11:15. At 11:15 I called 911; I will never forget. There was a voice prompt on the phone that said something like,

 

“Say help if you need help,” and I said,

 

“Help help I need help!” As I was doing this, I was thinking, “Dan is going to be so mad at me in the morning. He’s going to say ‘Why did you bother calling them, Jennifer? I was fine. They have people that really need help; they don't need to waste their time with me. I'm fine.’" 

 

A lady answered the phone and asked me what the emergency was.  I told her that my husband had a seizure and he wasn’t responding to me. I needed help; I didn't know what to do.

 

"He has a seizure condition, but something is wrong, help." She asked me if he was breathing. I looked at him closely, but I couldn’t tell if he was breathing. She asked me if I could hear his heartbeat. I put my ear to his chest and I couldn’t tell. Several times I put my ear to his chest and lifted it back up. I thought I heard a heartbeat and then I didn’t, and then I thought I heard it again. I was crying, and I kept saying “Dan, Dan!” over and over again. Remembering back, sometimes it feels like I was talking in a whisper and sometimes it feels like I was screaming at the top of my lungs. I don't know which one it actually was.

 

I put my head on his chest again. I couldn’t tell if I heard his heart beating.

She asked me if I knew CPR.  I couldn’t remember. I had taken the class 7 years before when our daughter was a baby, but I couldn’t remember how. I didn't think I would ever really need to do it. After all, if I were ever in a situation like that, Dan would be with me and he was highly trained.

 

The paramedics came and carried him from the bedroom to the living room. I stood in the opening of the hallway; I couldn't see his face, I couldn’t see what was going on. The paramedics were in my way.

 

“Please God, please God, please fix Dan. Please God, please God, please fix Dan.”

 

The lady paramedic said that Dan’s heart was not beating well and I said,

 

“But it’s still beating?” and she said no, that it “wasn’t beating well enough.” I was confused. What does “not beating well enough” even mean? A beating heart is a beating heart, isn't it? If your heart is beating, you are alive. If it's not, you’re not alive. It’s pretty simple, I thought. But it wasn’t simple. Dan’s heart “wasn’t beating well enough.”

 

I don’t remember anyone actually telling me that Dan had died.  I don't know that they did.

 

This isn’t my life, this isn’t what happens to me.

 

I was supposed to live in the suburbs with my husband and four kids; I was supposed to drive a minivan to dance lessons and soccer. I was supposed to be happily married for the rest of my life. We were supposed to grow old together and sit in rocking chairs on our back porch, holding hands and watching our grandchildren play. We were supposed to make it to our 80th wedding anniversary. Then, and only then, could we die. People were supposed to come to our funeral and marvel at the length and joy of our lives.

 

The whole thing felt like it took hours. Later, when I looked at Dan’s death certificate, his time of death was 12:01am.  46 minutes. He had just turned thirty-six, I was thirty-four, and our seven year old daughter was asleep in her cozy bed at the end of the hall.

 

Milestone: at 34 I was a widow and a single mother.

 

My life was over the instant his was, except I had a little girl that needed me. I wanted to die, or rather I wanted to be with Dan. I didn’t want to kill myself. That wasn’t an option. But if I got in a car crash and died, I would be okay with that. I didn’t care about life anymore. I didn’t care about anything, really, except I knew our daughter needed me.

 

It hurt to breathe, physically hurt to push air in and out of my lungs, and yet it just kept happening, automatically, the way it had my whole life. Why didn’t Dan automatically keep breathing? How were his lungs able to stop?

 

It was hard to walk. Every step felt like pulling my foot out of deep mud. Every step took effort and energy that I didn’t have. I kept walking anyway. It felt like I was being stabbed in the heart, over and over. The pain was unbearable, and yet I bore it.  I couldn’t think, I couldn’t concentrate. I was walking around in a thick fog, I couldn’t see anything clearly.

 

The memory of that night played through my mind all the time. Imagine placing a transparent screen across your face. You can see what's going on around you, but you can also see the picture on the screen. On my screen was the night Dan died, on repeat. I’d be driving down the road, looking through the screen of this awful movie. While having a conversation, the worst night of my life would play in front of my eyes.  That was my everyday life.

 

There is no fixing the love of your life dying. There is no fixing your Daddy dying. There is no going back to the way life used to be. All you can do is learn to live with it, like learning to walk again when you’ve lost a leg. We had to learn to live without Dan.

 

In the years that followed I did things I never thought I would have to do. I went to lots of therapy, as did our daughter. I did a special kind of therapy called EMDR, which was created for people who have PTSD. I was now a person with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. To me, that was something that happened to war veterans and abuse victims. Apparently it can also happen to people who watch their husbands die, and little girls whose favorite person dies in the middle of the night. Included in the deal are panic attacks and crippling anxiety. Lucky us.

 

A year after Dan died I found myself in a psychiatrist's office, based on the recommendation from my therapist, because I needed more help than she could give me. The psychiatrist prescribed Prozac and sleeping pills, and food started to have flavor again. That felt like a milestone. A year after Dan died, I began to be able to taste food.

 

A year after that, when our daughter was nine, I did the same for her. She needed more help than her therapist and I could give her. Nine year olds shouldn’t need Prozac, but it helped. Her daily “grief tantrums,” a torrent of screaming, kicking rage and fear, became less frequent. She had fewer panic attacks. After a year of anti-depressants, she was able to sleep in her own bed.

 

We spread Dan’s ashes and got rid of his clothing and bathroom things. We moved out of the house we had shared, the house that he died in, and moved in with my in-laws.

 

Around two years in, I felt the fog start to lift a little. Walking wasn’t as hard. I took my wedding ring off. It wasn't planned. I took it off to clean it one day, and never put it back on. I bought a house all by myself. We went to more therapy.

 

It took three years for me to stop clenching my fists in anger every time I thought about Dan’s death. When I couldn’t sleep, which was every night, I would write about my grief. Then I started blogging about my grief. I told the whole world about how much it hurt. It helped me and I think it helped those that read it, none of us were alone. I kept writing. I wrote a book, a grief memoir. Something inside me was pushing me to do it, my heart wouldn’t stay inside my chest, or maybe Dan was haunting me. After all he was the writer in our family.

 

Milestone: three and a half years after Dan died, my best friend talked me into online dating.

 

“Whats the point?” I said. “I’m never going to find anyone as wonderful as Dan.”

 

“You don’t have to,” she answered. “You’re not looking for a new husband, you’re looking for someone to go to a movie and have a conversation with.” I filled out a profile. A few months later another friend asked me how it was going. “It’s stupid,” I said. “I’m still in love with my dead husband.” I was never going to love anyone like I loved Dan. I had my true love. You don’t get another. Besides, a man that would be okay with kissing me one minute and listening to me cry over my dead husband the next minute did not exist. I was sure of it.

 

I was sure, because in online widow groups, you hear the stories. “My boyfriend wants me to take down all the pictures of my dead husband.” “My boyfriend wants to move in, but he won’t until I get rid of all my dead husband's things.”

 

I wasn’t doing it, ever. Dan and I were still madly in love with each other. He died, and I would give anything to have him back.

 

One day I messaged a man named Justin. I teased him about one of his profile pictures. I didn't care. I wasn't invested, and if he was offended, he wasn't good enough to go to the movies with. But he teased back. That started our conversation. He told me his story, and I told him mine. Before meeting in person, I told him how I had watched my husband die. I told him I still loved Dan. He said “Of course you do. Why wouldn't you?”

 

We scheduled a breakfast date. I will never forget walking around the corner of the restaurant, and seeing him for the first time.

 

He got up to give me a hug, like he had always known me, like we were old friends. We sat down.  Justin grabbed my hand and looked into my eyes, and I immediately thought “Oh. Oh right, this. I know this."

 

He tells a similar story. It was as if we had always known each other. Some might say we knew one another in a past life. I don’t believe in past lives, but it was obvious we had a deep connection.

 

The first time we kissed, we were sitting next to each other. It was a new experience, a different type of kiss. It didn’t feel the way it did when Dan and I kissed. After he kissed me, I laid my head on his chest. Thump Thump Thump Thump. I could hear his heart beating. I heard a heartbeat, loud and clear, no second guessing it.

 

That triggered a panic attack. I jumped up and moved away, tears pouring out of my eyes. I was breathing fast, anxious. I covered my head in my hands and tried to calm down, but it wasn't working. Justin gently scooted toward me and asked me to tell him what was going on. Quietly, I said, “The last time I put my head on somebody's chest, it was Dan's, and I was looking for a heartbeat. I couldn't hear his heartbeat. I put my head on your chest and you have a heartbeat." He moved closer and put his arm around me. I cried more.

 

After a few minutes, he said, “I can't possibly imagine how hard this is for you. I know I can't fix it either, no matter how much I want to. But I can be here for you. I can hold you while you cry, I can hold your hand and just be here." I cried for another half hour. That was our second date.

 

Justin has held me while I cried over my dead husband. He has let me cry. He has been with me, while I missed my husband. He doesn’t tell me to get it together. He doesn’t think I should be over Dan. He doesn’t ask me to stop talking about him. He knows I still love Dan. He holds me and lets me cry. He empathizes and understands.

 

Milestone: It’s ok to love again. Without telling his story, which is not mine to tell, I will say that Justin did not experience love the way I did. I was loved well. I was certain that no one would ever love me the way Dan did, and assumed that meant that I could never be in love again. That is half true. No one will ever love me the way Dan did. Dan was Dan and no one will ever be him. The years after Dan’s death were all about what I lost. I didn't take into account what I had to give. I didn't think I had anything left to give. I didn't take anyone else into account. I didn't know that Justin was out there, waiting for someone to love him well.

 

Lately I have realized that Dan gave me enough love to share with other people. I loved Dan. I loved Dan with every piece of my soul. I still do. Justin knows that, and he knows that he is not in competition with a dead guy.  Love doesn't work that way. I can show Justin love that he has never known because Dan loved me so fiercely, because I have experienced true love. I can help him see how beautiful and wonderful and fun real love can be. Dan showed me that. I have room in my heart for someone along with Dan. I didn't think that was possible, but Justin showed me it was. He also made room in his heart for Dan.

 

Milestone: The best way to honor Dan is to share my love with others.

I wrote a book about my grief. You can buy it here