HOW TO REBUILD YOUR LIFE AFTER CATACLYSM: ONE

Start.  Repeat.

There are widow lessons.  Here's one: 

How can a widow begin to rebuild her life after the fresh grief agonies have become a numbing norm to be largely ignored and ploughed through? You could say that I made many mistakes in the rebuilding stage of my grief. I don't see it that way, but it's true that I tried many, many ways of being before I found any peace at all. 

For me, my conscious awareness of the need to rebuild came after a very long, deep grief period of more than two years.  I wrote in "The Widow Lessons" (Amazon), that the mind chooses for you which battles to fight. This choice is made when you have two or more BIG fights going on at the same time.  For me, it was my own diagnosis of cancer soon after Ted died.  During my cancer fight, grief took a back seat without being asked, and only returned more than a year later.  Hence, the amount of time it took me to want to even consider a future without Ted was prolonged.  For you, it may be months or decades...every widow's journey is unique.

At any rate, you arrive.  You see a bird or a child or your reflection in a glass.  You have a pin prick of awareness of a life after.  A life beyond.  This is the first inkling you will get that you are beginning to learn to live with your grief, as it is now becoming a big part of who you essentially have become. 

I won't list all my mistakes, because it's a boring list that even I get tired of thinking about.  Some might call it a series of false starts, when I tried many new things and nothing worked out.  I have come to believe that there are only "starts" -- some work out and some don't.  That's my first message to you:  Just let yourself start. Repeat.  Don't even number how many times you start.  The miracle of starting is not made any less miraculous by the ultimate outcome.

When I was ready to move forward (sort of), I reached back into what I was doing when I met Ted, thinking that I may be able to pick that activity up again.  I had been involved in little theater in Columbus, Georgia from age six to age nineteen, when I married Ted.  So, I started a little theater of my own in 2012 called "The Blue Stilly Players".  We had success.  Then, I completely lost interest.  I let it drift away. It didn't fulfill me, sustain me, feel like the right path for me.  I put a lot of money, time and emotion into the endeavor, and then, I just let it die.  But it was a start.

The experience of initiating and developing a little theater company turned out to be too close to being a department head in a government agency, my professional assignment in life at the time.  "The Blue Stilly Players" felt like just another job.  Through a procession of experiments (although I didn't know at the time that is what I was doing), I discovered that I wanted to be a more useful and active part of my family.  I finally figured out that moving to a place that was closer geographically to my children was a step I could take that might bring additional meaning into my life.  By then, I had six grandchildren, and I could be of service to my family, play a useful role, and use this new location as my spring board into future interests.  I saw this step as building on a truth about myself:  I like family life, and I missed it with Ted gone.

Years ago, I had attended Haystack Writing Program on the Oregon Coast.  From one teacher I learned to not tear up my writing and go in a new direction, or alter what I had written in a dramatic way.  "Just take the words on the page, make them the best they can be, and finish what you have written.  Just work with what you've got."  This turned out to be a tip that came back to instruct me after I became a widow. 

When Ted and I were together, building and raising a family and a home, I was present.  I was in it.  It was real. THAT WAS ME.  When the kids grew up and moved away, I still felt intact as a family because Ted and I talked about it all the time, visited our kids all the time, had them over to our home.  Went to wherever they were.  I loved my life because I was part of a family.  That essential part of myself hadn't changed because of Ted's death.  But his death had robbed me of feeling like an essential part of my family.  I needed to end my isolation and move closer to my kids.  That particular start did work out for me.  There have been others since then that didn't take.  Some have taken off and are going strong.    

The how-to takeaway from my post today:

Take a look at your life in it's entirety.  Before the cataclysm.  Through it.  After it.  What can you try out, add, consider, or do to that which is already there.  Be willing and ready to start innumerable times.  You don't need to abandon all those beautiful moments in which you lived fully, happily, unaware of what was to come.  Use them.  Build from there.

Your grief belongs to you.  Your starts belong to you.  You don't have to leave your grief behind to rebuild after you lose your love, your life.  In fact, grief is part of your footprint now.  You can't go anywhere or do anything without it.  Feed every accepting bone in your body, and the parts of yourself that are grief stricken will get boots on in the morning along with the rest of you.  Grief is portable. Start there. 

WAITING FOR MY PINK ULTIMATE CINEMATIC REWARD

Produced with Fish Meal and Guano Fertilizer

I have a tendency to expect something cinematic to happen that will resolve a hard, true something that has happened to me, and make it all seem intentional, meaningful, purposeful, right and necessary.  I broke my  leg severely and spent a vicious year as a teenager in various casts. I lost part of a toe when a pit bull attacked me.  Ted got cancer.  Ted died.  None of these things ever got resolved in Hollywood style.  There was no cinematic reward for my pain...you know...the warm and satisfying end that makes it all worthwhile.  Even the movie "Titanic" seemed to redeem a horror of epic proportions into a love story, complete with a decrepit survivor looking glamourous and wise.  You would think that suddenly, one day, each of us who has had a hard loss would see the why of everything and feel a deep and knowing peace.  Hasn't happened for me. 

My personal truth about being a widow is that there is no cinematic reward for my loss. I can rewrite my story in order to live with it, but when I awaken every morning I am without Ted beside me.  And when I end each day, it is as a widow, alone.  By "re-write my story" I am talking about the mental trick of imagining a different ending, just to get to sleep.  Or even just retelling the Ted and Bridget story to my grandchildren, in order to control it a little more....step away from the pain of it an inch.

This week, I watched a Ted Talk that featured Amy Bickers, whose husband killed himself.  She talks about the cinematic reward in a way that is far better than I ever could.  Her message is one that ultimately helped me feel strong about my life as a widow, and the journey I'm on to rebuild a new life for myself.  It's worth a few minutes of time to hear it.
Watch here:  How to stop saying this happened for a reason

Along the way, I've acquired heroes who have helped me cope with loss, and few have inspired me more than Kevin Kling.  Kevin, as you may know, was born with one deformed arm.  He's an acclaimed story-teller and writer, and in his forties he was in a near-fatal motorcycle accident in which he lost his "good" arm.  Now his deformed arm is his good arm, and his story-telling has a wider audience than ever.  You can find him at his website here:  http://www.kevinkling.com/

I wanted to give you a taste of his storytelling abilities, so I've included a poem he wrote that bolstered me a bit.  Here is Kevin's explanation, and his poem, "Tickled Pink"....

Kevin Kling: 
And so this was a song that I wrote....when you were feeling your best, my mom would say, "You're in the pink," which meant that your insides were pink. And so this poem is called "Tickled Pink":

"At times in our pink innocence, we lie fallow, composting waiting to grow. And other times we rush headlong like so many of our ancestors. But rush headlong or lie fallow, it doesn't matter.

Storyteller, Kevin Kling

One day you'll round a corner, your path is shifted. In a blink, something is missing. It's stolen, misplaced, it's gone. Your heart, a memory, a limb, a promise...... a person. Your innocence is gone, and now your journey has changed. Your path, as though channeled through a spectrum, is refracted and has left you pointed in a new direction. Some won't approve. Some will want the other you. And some will cry that you've left it all. But what has happened, has happened, and cannot be undone.

We pay for our laughter. We pay to weep. Knowledge is not cheap. To survive we must return to our senses, touch, taste, smell, sight, sound. We must let our spirit guide us, our spirit that lives in breath. With each breath we inhale, we exhale. We inspire, we expire. Every breath has a possibility of a laugh, a cry, a story, a song. Every conversation is an exchange of spirit, the words flowing bitter or sweet over the tongue. Every scar is a monument to a battle survived.

Now when you're born into loss, you grow from it. But when you experience loss later in life, you grow toward it. A slow move to an embrace, an embrace that leaves you holding tight the beauty wrapped in the grotesque, an embrace that becomes a dance, a new dance, a dance of pink."


When I listen to or read Kevin Kling, I admit that I do not feel much like a dance of pink. Not yet, anyway.  But his storytelling, Amy Bickers' story....they do one wonderful thing.  They make me feel not alone.  I think that is what telling our stories does for us and others.  Maybe you are like me and you are counting on it. 

ALMOST NEVER ALWAYS PRAYING

Poem and Prayer

I told Red Shuttleworth, an accomplished poet whom I just recently discovered, that I am an atrocity as a poet.  That is an understatement.  He said I should write a poem anyway.  I did, and here it is.

      

I hate to write poems

       because I'm bad at it

       I'm no better at praying

       which I'm almost never

        always doing

I joined a church recently after a twenty-five year hiatus from churches altogether.  As a member of this church, I was looking for a service group to join that didn't involve lots of meetings.  I now knit prayer shawls. 

I don't know how to knit.  I did get a quick tutorial at a group meeting this week and now we each knit separately, and will meet again in September with our work.  All I can tell you about this group of older women is that when I got in my car to drive home, I felt like I had encountered a living prayer.  I was dripping wet from a warm soak in a tub of grace.  The group and the individuals in the group didn't say anything about mercy and the divine, or about hope, which I find to be a particularly annoying word.  I am the widow of a cancer victim who fought a thirteen-month knife fight in the alley cancer treatment marathon battle.  Then, he died anyway.  Observing this, living through this, living beyond this, I developed a grudge against the idea of hope so fierce that it may outlive me.  I don't know yet.  No, these women knitters talked about knitting, yarn, how to knit.  They introduced me to  a prayer I can say when I start knitting if I want to.  Right now I believe that prayer might be the only thing that stops me from finding knitted shawls at the thrift store and passing them off as my own in September.

Knitting for someone you don't know who is hurting in some also-unknown way is a poem and a prayer, is it not? 

This is where my widow life has taken me this past week.  It was Pentecost at church, which is about a time in Christian history when everyone was speaking separate languages and misunderstanding each other, until doves and flames came along and united the spirits of everyone, causing them to know what good things needed to be done.  The super involved people at my church put on quite a pageant about flames and doves.  It was electrifying, really.  Another poem, another prayer.  I took from this particular day in Christian faith that something powerful sometimes unites people in a way that makes real change possible.  Call it the holy spirit, call it god, call it Pentecost, call it whatever you want to call it, at the root of humanity there is the potential to turn away from doing bad things to the earth and each other, and do only good.  Almost nobody has made a complete and unqualified decision about that, and therein lies our difficulties on planet earth.  The world's problems are not political, they are spiritual.  That's my read.  My poem.  My prayer. 

In the garden this week, I finally paid someone to shovel the remaining endless cubic yards of wood chips from my front yard to my back garden.  I shoveled valiantly for three weeks, blowing out my shoulder several times, and managed to knock out well over ten yards.  I was almost never always praying about those chips.  I wanted to cry out to my neighbors -- another poem:

         Arborist chips are far superior

to cultivated bark

         they get wormier

         they rot and make rich dirt

         Yes, they are smoking now

          I get it that it's an eyesore

          I'm sorry, but only in a way

that I don't really mean

I say a poem and a prayer and not writing poems and not praying are all prayers.  Everything we do is a poem and a prayer.  I'll never be a great knitter.  I'm not even a knitter yet because my fingers are crooked and pudgy and it's hard. 

But, I'm trying.

If I don't say another word ever about being a widow, how to be a widow, what a widow experiences or what can become of widows, I can say that.  I can write that poem.  Any widow can. 

      The sun comes up

      I rise

      I do something

      don't stop and pray for me

      don't write a poem about my loss

      don't interrupt my prayer, my poem

     

Amen.

Read Red Shuttleworth's Poetry Here

VEGANS GONE WILD

Shifting Outcomes

At the totally vagan Café Gratitude restaurant chain in California, animal rights activists and some patrons of the restaurant are actively picketing and protesting, enraged that owners, Mathew and Terces Engelhart, have started eating meat.  In their private lives, that is.  Meat is not appearing anywhere on the menu at Café Gratitude.  Never mind that the restaurant chain is the biggest and reportedly best vegan restaurant in the state.  Once you associate the word "vegan" with your restaurant, then you, by extension, can never eat meat.  That's the logic. 

How do vegans gone wild relate to becoming a widow, and learning how to cope with the magnitude of that?  Everything, according to my experience.  Here's why.

There is subtle pressure not to change too much when your husband dies.  There is support for you to continue on, without him. Your life is your life, the one you have chosen, and there is pressure to "stick with it", "gut it out" and "carry on, soldier" --- especially in many family cultures.  Or, you may be relegated to a small number of traditional widow activities, mostly about cruise ships and socials.  By the way:  You might be the one doing said relegating.  I know I certainly tried to be a "good" widow for a long time.  Lame, but true.  I'm a chronic achiever crossed with a people pleaser. 
Suffice it to say that everyone who loves you wants to make this better for you, and quickly assigning a comfortable role for you is a perceived kindness.  Maybe it's an actual kindness.....but it should be up to you. 

At some point -- and for me, it was years -- you will face the prospect of Life Without Him.  In my case, I was fifty-four years old when Ted died.  I knew at that age that I might have a ways to go before I lay me down.   My age is now sixty-one, and it still looks like I might last a while.  So, what then?

If you are like me, or the vegan restaurateur Engelharts, you don't want to feel like you are betraying someone by not living up to what is expected. Human beings want and need to BELONG.  Belonging is YUGE.  Widows used to know where they belonged.   Now, that question may be muddy, difficult, and disorienting.  Chances are, you did things as a couple with other couples.  Now, every invitation may be perceived by you as another opportunity to be an uncomfortable third wheel.   Perhaps your married friends will try to get you remarried ASAP.  Or have tried already. 

I have a few suggestions:

• Let your family and friends know the totality of how you feel.  It takes a lot of time before you are through grief's first wave of horror and shock, when you fully realize that he is not coming back in human form to pick things up where the two of you left off.  Any family and friends still speaking to you will probably be supportive. 
• Maybe you don't know what you want to do with your life.  So?  Just let the aforementioned remaining loved ones know that you are going to go through a trial and error period that may, or may not, end. 
• Get ready to do what you want.  See a psychologist or ten....get some professional help to clarify what your options and preferences are.  Talk to a financial advisor.  If you lost every penny you have when your husband died, AARP, community resources, churches, and some counties and cities all have resources that can connect you to subsidized housing, part-time and full-time employment, or whatever you may need. It's quite literally never too late in life to begin.
• Give yourself credit for subtle changes you have already made.  I went to a writing class about five years into widowhood.  In one assignment, I had to write a simple list of the steps I had taken to learn something new.  I wrote about how to operate our Kabota.  I treasure that document.  My lessons began when Ted was alive, and ended after.  You have probably been making imperceptible changes in your life that you chose, in addition to the ones foisted upon you by death.  Write them down, a step at a time.  See yourself crawl by inches, toddle, and walk. 

In my book, "The Widow Lessons" (Amazon),I guide readers through some of the steps I took to find a new path. Today, my path feels like the right one for me.  But, changes within or outside of my control will undoubtedly come along.  I am not chiseling my identity out of marble.  I think of my life now as a dresser drawer, full of assorted Legos.   

Steps I Took to Learn Kabota Operation

By Bridget Clawson

1.       Sat on Kabota while Ted showed me controls for bucket

2.       Rode  Kabota over uneven terrain

3.       Encountered terror of tippy Kabota on uneven terrain

4.       Listened as Ted dished terror antidotes (aka Kabota facts)

5.       Swiveled seat to operate backhoe

6.       Sat on Kabota while Ted showed me controls for backhoe

7.       Removed stump with backhoe while being tutored by Ted

8.       Decided to use Kabota after Ted’s death

9.       Abandoned Kabota in situ during terror episodes

10.   Used regular gas instead of diesel netting $800 repair bill

11.   Negotiated barter with neighbor Jeff:  Borrow Kabota in trade for handyman

12.   Learned further Kabota operation tips from Jeff

13.   Found Kabota peace with limited use by me

14.   Asked neighbor Steve to get stuck Kabota out of woods

15.   Discovered back tires spew chalk when punctured by sticks in woods

16.   Learned Les Schwab not just for car tire sales

17.   Called Jeff or Steve to request operator assistance for advanced projects

18.   Made plans to practice backhoe solo

19.   Shook dirt from excavated vegetation using backhoe

20.   Wished I had not done step number 19  on windy day

21.   Remained patient with self 

REDISCOVERING MICE AND MEN

John Steinbeck

Tuesdays, I sometimes go to Value Village, a thrift store that offers a thirty percent discount to senior citizens on Tuesdays.  I have six grandchildren to find newish toys and clothes for, and I have discovered valuable antiques and art there on occasion.  But what I really like to snoop through are the books.  I'm eternally looking for great illustrations, first editions and quirky stuff in general.  Today, I found a sixties paperback of Steinbeck's "Of Mice and Men."  It was too torn up to buy, but I stood there for an unknown period of time, reading through it, super fast.  Then, slower.  OMG, that writing of his.  It always gets to the through-and-through of me, like clouds over a mountain. 

When I read "Of Mice and Men" in high school, and maybe again in college, I thought the book was about loneliness.  And it is -- Curley, Candy, the old man and the dog, George and Lennie -- everybody's busy playing solitaire and being lonely.  When I stood there in Value Village, reading it again, I couldn't stop thinking about how out of hope everyone was.  Farmhands back then were all stuck.  Everyone during that era who worked on a California ranch didn't have anywhere to go next that wasn't more of the same.  I read the part about different men over a long time, coming and going, lighting fires over the ashes of previous fires that others had made.  There was no future for any of the characters in Steinbeck's book.  No future is the deepest despair. 

I remember being a widow, fresh.  I had no more future.  I sure didn't want one, if it wasn't with Ted.  We were a duo, as so many long-married and still in love people are.  The kids referred to us as the Ted and Bridget show, because we were predictable and the curtain on our show was always up.  We were...We.  Now, there was no more we.  So, there was nothingness for me.

To a new widow, I can tell you that this sense of having no future without him goes on for an indeterminate period of time.  There is no such thing as snapping out, bucking up, getting a hold of yourself.  It goes on and on, until you look back as I am now, after more than seven years, and you see that somehow you started making plans again.  I started thinking about the fact of a possible future, then I started thinking about the actual future, and then I started creating my future.  This isn't something I decided to do....it just happened.  I don't know how long it will take you to start thinking ahead about your life.  I am still tossing around different ways my own story may go.

I stood in the checkout line at Value Village for a while, and thumbed through a chapbook of quick Rumi quotes that was in a stack by the register.  I snapped a few pictures with my I-phone of the poems I liked.  I put this one on my Facebook page:  "Goodbyes are only for those who love with their eyes. Because for those who love with their heart and soul there is no such thing as separation."  I liked it.  I thought it was true.

The next one took my breath for a second, and I suddenly felt the whole world was not outside myself.  I felt revealed, known, and exposed.  It read:

"How would it be if you appeared in this open window?
  It would be as though my hands and feet
  were suddenly untied, and life was pouring back in."

"Jesus, Rumi."  That's what I wanted to blurt.  Instead, I managed to smile, then smile pretty big.  It's a wonderful thing to not be lonely in 2016 because a thirteenth century poet knows exactly how I feel.  Rumi's little poem reassured me that feeling hopeless is the worst kind of lonely there is.  Having no future, that's even worse than loneliness. Ah...but life has a way of pouring back in.