Grief is complicated. It’s not just sorrow; it’s a tangle of emotions. Grief can bring a reprocessing of the relationship you had with your partner and of previous sorrows as well. Past deaths and hurtful events can rise again to the forefront of our minds. As I mentioned in an earlier article, it’s not just death that we grieve. We also grieve past failed relationships, unkind things we’ve done or others have done to us, missed opportunities, lost youth, poor financial decisions, and so on. If your relationship with your deceased partner was difficult, you may find even more of a mixed bag of emotions coming your way.
The term “cumulative grief” is useful here. The strictest definition of the term is that when a person has had multiple losses quite close together, he or she may feel overwhelmed and wonder if survival is possible. However, I’d like to add that, from my own experience, the time when previous losses happened can be years or decades earlier, and still these negative experiences resurface and give trouble again, along with the new death. When Alan passed away (2019), I found myself rethinking not one but two marriages, as well as other hurtful life experiences. This rethinking is common in bereavement and not abnormal, unless we get stuck in the past and aren’t able to eventually move on. It doesn’t take a major incident to get us thinking about a past event but a new death can open flood gates. In “normal” times, we frequently put fresh eyes on an old experience, an excellent opportunity to find a greater degree of peace with it. Reprocessing occurs over a lifetime, as new wisdom and enlightenment come to us.
It’s scientific fact that the human brain thinks 75% negative thoughts vs. 25% positive thoughts, in spite of the reality that the majority of our experiences are positive. When we’re extremely vulnerable, as with a bereavement, our thoughts definitely tend toward the negative, a throwback to centuries past when that thinking was needed to protect us from environmental dangers. It’s like we’re revisiting past threats (traumas, miseries, negativities of all sorts) in hopes of solutions that will save us now. These days, we don’t have to worry so much about wild animals eating us or another tribe murdering us or freezing to death but our brain hasn’t caught up. Try to bring some positive thoughts or activities into your day to counter what your “behind the times” brain is doing.
Looking back at the marriage you’ve lost, you’ll likely spend time rethinking both the positive and negative parts of the relationship. Often you may be wearing your rose-coloured glasses and long for the love, laughter, good times, the many times when your partner helped and supported you through thick and thin. However, in your sad and exhausted state of mind as a newly-bereaved person, you may sometimes find your mind settling on the mistakes you or your partner made, hurtful words or actions, or rocky patches in your relationship.
One day a couple of months after Alan was gone, I was in a particularly low mood. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what I was feeling; my soul felt heavy and dark. I began to jot down what emotions I was feeling, to put a name to them if I could. I started a list on the kitchen counter and added to it as weeks went by. Later I gave it a title, thinking of black holes in space, where dense gravity pulls objects into a dark place. This was my list of emotions, with some examples of why a person might be feeling that way. Yours would be different if you made a list and your reasons for feeling that way might also be different. I didn’t always feel every emotion, thankfully, nor did I always feel the emotions with the same degree of intensity.
What’s in the Black Hole?
–sorrow as deep as a well
–fatigue from before or after the death or both
–loneliness and COVID restrictions have added greatly to that burden
–regret and sense of failure about caregiving and relationship mistakes
–anxiety about managing all the jobs alone and being alone forever
–hopelessness about continuing alone in a pointless life
–self-pity over not deserving to be alone, with the future stolen away
–disappointment and bitterness over a lost future
– anger about your partner’s mistakes or finances or about being alone, cheated
–fear of having no support any more, of being alone, of financial problems
–jealousy of intact couples and people with lives not ruined
–vulnerability feeling “raw” about everything
What’s important here is to acknowledge the range of emotions that come with grief. I think it’s helpful to know that whatever you’re feeling is exactly what you should be feeling at the time. It doesn’t show a lack of love for or disloyalty to your partner to think about the difficult parts of your time together. This rethinking is part of the work of learning to forgive yourself for past mistakes and of forgiving, or at least feeling more at ease with, your partner’s imperfections. Be ever so kind to yourself; coming to terms with the past can be a long, tough job. You won’t be devoting so much time to reprocessing as months pass. This isn’t a place you’ll stay.
“Birds sing after a storm; why shouldn’t people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them?” Rose Kennedy
Twice A Widow 