I know. The title you expected to see was "James Terence Nelson, 1946-2012" and that's what I expected it to say when I signed on to this. I'm just not ready yet. What did I know about grieving and bereavement after five days anyway?
This process has been such a bouncing ball that I thought I'd share what I learned about the process of grieving in hopes that my experience might be something that will help. ReneeNY reminded me of a book I had read in the comment thread of one of my own diaries about my experiences since Jim died, so I re-read it now that it applied to me and it helped me understand why I was feeling the way I did. I did not expect the overwhelming embrace of the Daily Kos community either, nor did I expect that the anguish of another Kossack would give me the opportunity to apply what I knew QUITE this soon, but it underscores something that we know. As Joan Didion wrote in her bereavement
Life changes in an instant
And so it has.
My attempt to make lemonade from the lemons of grief below the great orange wreath.
A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
It's almost nine weeks since I walked into the bedroom to find Jim dead, but it's still about me, and it's still about the 41 years we spent together and the idea that I have to go on with part of my life missing. This is why, I think, this book
had such an impact on me. The writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne had been married for 40 years during which time they were apart even less than Jim and I were because they worked in the same house or apartment for all these years and they were able to bounce ideas off each other. In Didion's case, John had a massive heart attack at the dinner table, so he was there, and then he wasn't, and her life changed in an instant. To make things worse, her daughter Quintana was in and out of hospitals; "I love you more than one more day" was something John would say to her daughter, and something Quintana said to her mother at John's memorial service, attributing it to her and not to her father.
Didion found herself unmoored, with all of her ideas about life and death destabilized. The silence in her apartment was as eerie to her as the silence in mine has been to me. She read all the literature, from Gawain and the Green Knight to the psychologists and psychiatrists who came after Freud and Melanie Klein. People forget to do things, like eating. I have days like that too,and I'm afraid of what's going to happen once I use everything that's in the freezer. We lose concentration, and then there is the complicated effect of depression on bereavement. Mine comes and goes.
Didion writes that John died in December 2003 but that all she could do until May 2004 was grieve, that she had not begun the process of mourning: I did not yet have the concentration to work but I could straighten my house. I could get on top of things, I could deal with my unopened mail . . . Grief was passive. Grief happened. Mourning, the act of dealing with grief, required attention. This is SO familiar. You may remember I complained about the ironing in one of the diaries I've written about this. I solved that, but now there's vacuuming and the idea that all I do is empty the dishwasher. Mourning? I started a Top Comments diary about the therapeutic value of meeting people from Daily Kos New Year's Day, January 12 and January 18-21 by complaining that Jim's friends hadn't called me since I called them to tell them he had died. Not ready to discuss him yet. About the therapeutic value of the Daily Kos community, here's a picture of my quilt, which arrived last Thursday. The bear on the right in the second row was my first Christmas present from Jim, in 1971:
Didion warns us:
We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative . . . In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be "healing." A certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days . . . [We cannot] know ahead of the fact (and here lies the heart of the difference between grief as we imagine it and grief as it is) the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaning itself.
I guess I'll see if that's right. I have classes to teach starting a week from today, and that will take a lot of my attention, just like Quintana's illness occupied Didion during the period where all she could feel was grief.
But I've been tested already. The reason I wrote that particular Top Comments diary was because the day before I wrote it (quoting from the diary)
I set about writing a Seneca Falls, Selma and Stonewall diary about Obama's inaugural address, and at one point when I saved it I saw the diary commonmass had written [about the fact HIS partner was intubated and on life support]. I was glad I was 95% finished with mine because I'm not sure I could have completed it after reading his. I published and I spent the afternoon wrangling mine and looking at his; I had commented pretty far down the thread, so I kosmailed him my phone number because, well, of ALL the people at this blog I had the most recent experience with his situation.
Between Tuesday evening and Friday afternoon he and logged something like four or five hours of phone time, and I knew that what I was hearing Tuesday was the same shock I felt when Jim's body was taken out of the apartment we lived in. And I was surprised to find I had untapped reservoirs of strength and compassion I could draw on to help. At this writing,
commonmass is experiencing more than one more day, and I'm happy for him. He knows I'm here for whatever happens.
So I'm really not sure how I am now. Course prep, distractions, all either helping me cope or keeping me from coming to terms with death, or both. But I can remember Jim for a while here. His surname may have been Nelson, but he grew up in a large Irish family in the suburbs of Boston and that inflected his life in some significant ways. Even though we went to Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve at the highest Anglican/Episcopal churches we could find, he liked Irish things, and we'd watch every one-hit wonder show on MTV because one of his favorite songs always won (he didn't really like rock music until the early 1980s). This is in case you're reading this, Jim.
And so we grieve together tonight.