My wife died on September 28, 2018. There was nothing special about that date, there was no reason for it to be THAT day, except that God had somehow planned her life to that end; had numbered her days and arranged everything for her to come home that particular day, just after 11:00pm, with only me and our cat Mercy with her.
We had known for some time that it was probably going to happen soon. The MRI in March had shown “more than” 30 tumors in her brain, metastasized from the triple-negative breast cancer that we thought we’d gotten, but which is notoriously easy to treat and yet at the same time spreads even more easily, until there is way more than we humans know how to deal with.
It happened very quickly. We hiked at Crater Lake the weekend of Labor Day (September 1st). And then again on Monday, we drove 30 miles up into the mountains and hiked to a waterfall (or I did — she only did about 1.5 miles round trip, and didn’t quite make it to the falls). By the 14th she was in a wheelchair, unable to really walk and by Saturday the 22nd when the grandkids came she needed a catheter because there was no bladder control anymore. Then on Friday night she had another series of seizures (at least two, maybe more) and then she breathed her last and was gone.
That first week I don’t know how I managed. Two of her sisters and their families, another remarkable woman, who was like a daughter to us and her son and fiancee, all came the week she died. Two of the elders from our church in San Jose came 500 miles with their families for her final day with us, along with several others the next day. They sang and prayed with us, talked until late, brought food, did laundry, cleaned up, everything they could. One slept over on Saturday night, just so I wouldn’t be alone. But every step I took that next week seemed to be walking through quicksand, my heart with such a huge empty place, seemingly pushed back at every step by an almost crushing weight of grief. And yet, somehow (it had to be the prayers of 100s of people) I packed up my truck and trailer and drove the 500 miles back to San Jose, organized and was part of her Memorial Service on October 9th, and managed to spend time with many people, with family, to play music, to read, even do laundry, attend church, and take care of business.
But the first week, no two weeks, at least, back in the empty house in Oregon were the hardest. I had to work… from home… alone, after 20 of the best years of my life with my wife. And (try to) sleep. And keep the house, and feed the fish and the cat, and tend to the laundry, and get food into me. My frequent prayer was “Lord, I don’t know how to do this. Help me not to quit too soon, help me to grieve like I should, I don’t know how I’m going to make it.” I told her a couple of days before she was gone that it took 4 of us to do the work she did. The next day I revised it to 6 of us. She was amazing! I wrote a comment on LinkedIn today that she was way more than ½ of our relationship. She did SO much more than I did to support us as a family than I did with a good, high-tech job, pulling in a 6 figure income. And she still is. She taught me how to cook, how to clean, how to fold my t-shirts correctly, how to love and give and have hope and faith, when all I could see was looming disaster. It wasn’t just her, I know that. God was behind it all, and so was His church, praying and pulling and counseling and singing, and a lot more. When I came back home, I came back with two coolers of food; the sisters had cooked and baked and packaged and frozen so much food that I’m still eating it in January. But she was the face of Jesus in my life, mostly; the living, breathing one I could see and touch and kiss and talk to and pray with and sing with, and live life with. And then she wasn’t.
And I’m still grieving. A lot. I think I cried harder than ever a couple of days ago. I finally got up the nerve (out of necessity) to balance the checkbook that had gone undone since before she died. She always wrote the checks and kept it up-to-date. As I faced pages and pages of her handwriting, thinking of the countless hours she labored at that, for me, for us…. And I still can’t quite put back up the pictures of her that I took down from the walls and shelves to take to the memorial service; I’ll cry for days, probably.
But I’m busy now. I can’t even list all the stuff I’m doing these days. The other morning I tried making a list of just the stuff I’d done before noon, and it filled up a whole page of paper, and I think I forgot some of it before I could write it down. The busy-ness helps. Some. Sometimes. One thing I felt the Lord impressed on me in the first couple of weeks was from I Corinthians 7:35 “serving the Lord without distraction”. I think, I hope, some/most/all of what I’m doing is that. Likely I’ve erred in some ways. But if I am doing that, then I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. But I am also “supposed to be” grieving. Hey, I AM grieving. I miss her really bad! So part of my “doing” is weeping with Jesus. Jesus wept. I know there’s a song there, if I can just get deep enough to hear it. And Anna, a prophetess, as recorded in Luke 2:37, served the Lord night and day in the temple with fasting and prayer. I want to do that too. I’m very much less successful at that than some of the other things so far. Hopefully I’ll grow.
But grief HURTS! And it doesn’t just “go away” and time doesn’t always heal everything. I think tears heal. I think they start to fill in the huge empty place where she used to be, so that it doesn’t feel so big and empty. Maybe this is the bottle God has that He is filling with my tears.
Anyway, I need to sleep. The 4 necessities of life during grief: D = drink, E = eat, E = exercise, R = rest. Oh dear. Can’t even do that right without His help. And it’s “only” been 3 ½ months… When will I feel “normal” again? What is “normal”? When will I laugh again? I have already. When will I love again? I think I do already, in some ways more than ever. Now more than ever I NEED to love; I need to live, for Him. So I will see Him. And then I will see her again too. And then the grieving will be over.