Widowhood is an exclusive club that no one in their right mind wants to join. It is a club that is joined out of the necessity to continue breathing. Widows need each other to survive. These sound like such desperate statements but new (and maybe all) widows tend to be desperate people.
Meetings with social workers, bereavement groups, therapists, grief literature, and other members of the exclusive widow club all talk about the length of time and the amount of work that goes into grieving. They all talk about the timetables for grief and the stages of grief and then they all mention that each person is unique in his or her grieving. This is all so ridiculously hard for me because I am an analytical, information obsessed type of person. I want definitive, concrete information about what is happening to me and what I can expect down the line. I have never liked or felt comfortable not being in control. I am quickly finding out that there is absolutely nothing I can do to even come close to being able to control anything about my grief.
This lack of control over my grief should not be news to me though. I had absolutely no control over the fact that my husband was diagnosed with stage iv lung cancer either. This is pretty much my reaction after he was diagnosed ON his 37th birthday: MY husband has cancer? What do you mean MY husband has cancer? No, no, this happens to OTHER people not me. MY husband is young and vibrant and has a very active job running up and down stairs and carrying very heavy packages in his ugly, yet sexy brown uniform. He has never been short of breath, he has never smoked, he doesn't have a persistent cough, and he is not experiencing any form of fatigue. I am a great wife who is constantly nagging him about taking his vitamins and his blood pressure medications. I make sure he is eating well and is getting plenty of sleep. There is no way that MY husband falls into a statistic where there is a less than 1 percent chance that he won't survive 5 years. We just got married a year and a half ago! I just got finished changing my name! AND today is his birthday!
Oh the anxiety that followed is nothing that I have ever experienced before. Anxiety is caused by my feeling out of control. I was definitely not in control. Throughout the next 14 months of radiation and 3 different chemos, we tried desperately to have a say in controlling our lives. Where and when we traveled, where and when to meet up with family and friends, each day, especially near the end, when the brain mets reared their ugly head and whole brain radiation took its toll, we tried to have a say. But, alas, I was definitely not in control. I hate that cancer made my husband a statistic and I hate cancer even more for taking him away from me. I am not a fan of losing control.
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