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Our favorite banyan tree on the trail surrounding our community. 

Last Monday I returned to my paradise~ my home in Florida~ just in time to go out to dinner with good friends and then to the clubhouse for game night to play canasta.  I don’t like going away and being away, but I love the warm greetings I get from my tribe here when I return.  It somehow fills the emptiness I experience when I walk into my house, which remains void of another breathing human and dog waiting for me.  

The house and all its furnishings, appliances, and photographs seem to hum as I walk through, making me feel joyful and sad simultaneously.  My life now is as if I’m trapped in a paradox; every day is bittersweet. I have all intentions of moving forward, I really do, but then it’s as if there’s a bungee cord attached to me, when I’m in a moment where I’m content or even more than that. The cord stretches just far enough until, suddenly, it snaps, bringing me back to the moment where I’m at Duke in the Intensive Care unit, watching Mark die. It is so vivid that I believe I can hear the machines beeping and my children and grandchildren weeping.  

That bungee cord gives me pain but also peace, another contradiction. Although I need and want to go on with my life, there is a sort of comfort going back to the last time Mark was alive (barely), even when there was no hope, when our lives were still intertwined like the tangled branches of the banyan trees Mark loved so much. That’s what marriage is~ that intricate connection while growing together and forming roots, not knowing where you each begin and end. This weekend I received a picture of Mark and me from my best friend. It reminds me of the banyan trees. We are very young and Mark’s arms and hands are entwined around me as if he’s afraid if he lets go, I will disappear. But I look very happy and safe. If I look hard enough at the picture and then close my eyes, I could still feel his arms around me.  

The hardest part of all this is missing the understated treasures I once had~ growing old together, sharing our life, creating roots, the intimacy we had as a couple–not only making love- just the simple acts of love, like when he used to rub my feet, or gently take my glasses off when I fell asleep watching TV in bed, or me giving him a haircut during the COVID shutdown. Those are all memories, now and they are precious as well-meaning people will tell you.  But it was better when we remembered them while we were both still alive.  

There are times that I feel invisible because I am doing life all alone now. Yesterday, I had a plumbing emergency and a small flood and nobody to share the burden with me. I had to do it all by myself, which I did, and I felt very proud of that because the old me actually asked Mark to plunge the toilet when I picked him up at the hospital after his emergency appendix operation. And he did it, even though the nurse said, “Don’t you dare.”

It’s time I remove that invisible cloak and become who I am meant to be– entirely capable and “seen”. And every time I see a Banyan tree, I will always think of what I had and just smile; because I had it all.  

The reality is that going through grief is moving through a process, in which you begin to engage proactively with life, while still involved with profound loss.  It's the integration of grieving and living. It is knowing that the pain will always be there even as there is a merging, a blending, with life.

~Leisa Snow, Surviving Grief