Life After Death

I think I may have “turned a corner” on my grief journey.  Somehow I feel lighter and retrospective, and then, introspective. I have been re-reading the letters in my journal that I had written to Mark and it's as if I'm looking at a version of myself that I no longer am. I want to go back and embrace her (me) and say, “You’re going to be alright. You will find strength that you never knew you had and you will be a whole new person nine months from now. Trust me.”  

At one stage in my “Letters to Mark”, I was watching love stories every night. This pastime not only took my mind off my sadness, but also helped me reminisce about our love story, which became very therapeutic. 

Here’s the first Love Story entry: 

5/9/24

Hi Babe, 

I started to do a thing today, well yesterday, really.  I am watching LOVE STORIES every night and they all have the word ‘LOVE’ in them.  They make me feel warm and hopeful.  They remind me of us, especially when there’s that moment in the movie–that look–that certainty–that takes their breaths away.  And you know, this is IT. They are going to spend the rest of their lives together.  

Do you remember that night when we were walking on Avenue K, right by my house, and it was snowing?  There was something magical about that snow.  It was as if we were floating and it felt like we were the only two people in the world.  I was talking about my dream in life to be an actor on Broadway and you turned to me with that forlorn look on your face when I said, “I will get you and your wife and kids front row seats to the shows I am in.” That was our moment–the moment that our breaths just paused; it was that scene in our movie when it was so clear that I would never be in a Broadway show and I would be the wife in that previous scenario. That moment is like a precious, fragile snow globe that is on my memory shelf of me and you and us.

Love you Forever xoxo

J

Several entries after this one summarized all the movies that I watched. Some of the movies had quotes in them that resonated with me. For example, One True Loves, was a love triangle of three people who grew up in a small town- 2 guys and a girl. One guy the girl considers her best friend, totally platonic. The other guy is the typical good-looking jock, adventurous, and of course she falls in love with him. However, secretly, her best friend is in love with her. But she ends up marrying the handsome jock, they leave their small town, both become journalists, and they travel the world. (This is just the very beginning of the movie.) On their first wedding anniversary he takes an assignment and the helicopter he’s on goes down in the Pacific and they can’t find any survivors so he is presumed dead.  And she is left, lost and alone, just like me (only I’m 68 and she’s maybe 28.) Anyway, she goes home and her family and this best friend end up helping her deal with the grief. And guess what……yes!– she falls in love with the best friend and just after they get engaged, who do you think shows up?....think of the title- One True Loves. It was a very sweet movie and I loved the quote that the main character said, “The only way to get my life BACK was to move FORWARD.” 

When I went from a wife to a widow, I went through several different stages. I can’t name them; they weren’t linear, they were more random and came in waves. Right after Mark passed, I started to wonder about the supernatural and life after death.  I watched a four-part series on Netflix about this topic, googled it nonstop, found Ted Talks on it, and even joined a Facebook Group dedicated to it, with a lot of desperate people as members. I just couldn’t think of Mark as not alive because he was such an exuberant human and there were signs that I felt his presence around me. To this day, when I’m home,I still hear the light switches in the bathroom click when I go to bed. My kids also saw signs like butterflies and the grandkids kept finding pennies and insisted they were from Papa. I even thought about going to a medium to try to contact Mark. 

Eventually, I acknowledged  this “Life after Death” stage did not serve me well and kept me from the healing I needed and subsequently, moving forward. I remember when Mark’s brother died, quite suddenly, my sister-in-law was sitting on the couch, crying while saying, “I want my life back.”  That image came back to me the minute Mark’s heart stopped and life, as I knew it for 47 years, stopped, as well. Perhaps I needed to consider that life after death is not about the person who died but the person who is left behind and still very much alive.

I realize now that there are three parts to the transformation of who I am–wife to widow to single woman– and although I didn’t ask for this, it’s here and my old life is gone.  It’s time I embrace that single woman and start really living. 

So, I took off my wedding rings, and I am now living life, after death. 

To be continued….

(I hope.)