Let me preface this post with a disclaimer right from the start, I am very grateful that I have my spouse still alive, the attempt in this post is to simply shine light on preconceived notions of grief as experienced by a couple, held by popular opinion and grieving parents themselves, at first. I am extraordinarily conscious of the grace we have in not having one of us in a pine box, my mother was widowed at 52, my father being only 54 when he died. Both Doug and I have buried our oldest brothers, both of them only 57 years old. As we approach those milestones in our lives, it gives cause for great reflection in many facets of our lives.
Some quick statistics and urban legends. The 70 to 90% divorce rate for bereaved parents is an urban legend, it is not that high. Newer statistics show the average between 12 to 16%, keep in mind as you are crunching numbers that conservatively 50,000 children die a year in the US, that is 6,000 divorces that can be linked directly to the death of a child using the lower percentage. As many as 1/3 of bereaved couples say they suffer from irreparable damage in their marriage, but do not divorce. What various studies show?…90% of all bereaved couples will struggle and experience serious marital difficulty after the death of their child. I thought that was significant and in a very rudimentary way, proved to us by what we have experienced by listening to others’ stories and in trying to objectively evaluate our own experience.
I was filled with misconceptions about what grieving as a couple would be like, I too thought, “we have each other”, just like the work horses I always think of when I think of Doug and I, harnessed together we would just keep carrying on. I had the first sledge hammer to that idealistic notion several months ago and it gave me great pause. The fact is that yes, we as a couple, as parents grieve for Justin, but not the same, not together. We are seen as a bereaved couple, but in reality we are individuals with our own grief, Doug cannot share my grief, I cannot share his. You grieve the child, but you also grieve the relationship you had with that child. I did not have Doug’s relationship with Justin, he did not have mine. The relationships were unique, personal. I cannot be to Doug what Justin was to him, nor can Doug be to me what Justin was to me. Great parts of us are missing individually, the entire dynamic of our marriage changed, we are individually not the same people. So we grieve the broken hearts of our spouse, we grieve for the pain they feel, but cannot share. We grieve the disappointment, the resentment, the anger of not being able to lean on each other, for we both are hemorrhaging life and energy. So in profound woundedness, you try not to leech what precious little is left in each other, to respect the individual journey. We will not journey the same path, Justin’s death will not effect each the same and the challenge is to not end up at such a totally different place, the place where all you have is the pain of who you were, and where you don’t recognize the other anymore. The place where collectively you don’t believe or hope for good things anymore, that you believe all will be snatched away.
Grief by its very nature is lonely and isolating, the second year of parental grief is often called the “lonely” year. Our mate cannot bear the weight of all our needs or of all our grief. They are not mind readers, they are not super human in strength, or any more experienced in dealing with their grief than we are, life is just as strange for them. I read the term “reinvestment of energy” quite a lot and the cautionary note that comes with that to evaluate closely where we reinvest our energy. To me it is sort of like a fiscal evaluation, where do I invest my energy?…evaluate the percentages invested and the return on investment, look carefully and closely at the cost of that investment. We chose where and with whom we invest our energy, we must look for ways to save our energy and search our interior for those investments that are absorbing too much energy at this time. That searching takes quiet and time, courage and commitment. I believe it will take the setting aside of old aspirations and dreams and willing the heart to spin new ones.
There is a stone garden border that I painstakingly built a handful of summers ago, but it has never really “worked.” I hear the stones calling to me to move them, they don’t like where they are either, they want to be part of a different garden, join with other stones. Perhaps it is time to move the stones.
Written in loving memory of what would have been my mom and dad’s 65th wedding anniversary, they were married for 28 years before my father died.
I have this photo on my living room wall.. I adore it!
As usual, you’ve written my precise thoughts. This is such a hard road to walk, and a lonely one.
I also love (not), “well, you still have Michelle,” as if that makes it all better. There’s really just no explaining how that doesn’t help. Maybe because it’s like one hand clapping. Everything is so utterly and completely changed for the worse it’s hard to be even remotely happy about anything.