Two Lucky

Eight months

One of the tenets I live by since the fact is to remind myself that I am not, nor will I be, imprisoned by his death.

This idea implies strength, but more importantly, choice. Choice is an important word in my journey. It was my choice to see Rusty through the cancer, to stick it out; in other words, to love him. It was my choice to see him die. In the months after his death, I still choose; in spite of my grief, I choose joy, gratitude, freedom. I cling on to these words.

But I am not so strong to choose every day.

Nor should I feel the need to, I realize. After all these months, I continue to be humbled by the largeness of these feelings that stay with me. To say “I choose,” implies that I am able to best my emotions. I now understand that I am not. It has taken me this long to realize that to say “I choose,” ignores a fundamental lesson in death: when you lose a husband, you will never stop feeling sad.

I have often said in my writings that I must learn to live with my grief, to understand its peaks and valleys, to make a map of it so I may better locate myself in the journey of what life remains for me. With love as my light, I would mark on this map the traps of sorrow and anger. By acquainting myself with its terrain I would not be overcome by the strangeness of my circumstance. Implicit in my resolve was to discover, eventually, a road that would lead a way out.

There is no “out.”

In other words, I have stopped trying to escape my sorrow. I don’t believe I will stop grieving. The dichotomies with which I chose to live by after his death - joy and sorrow, gratitude and despair, freedom and imprisonment - to persuade myself that I could choose one over the other - no longer make sense to me.

I am bound to this sorrow as love’s consequence. A time ago I would have been overcome by the weight of this admission; I feared it. Now I feel strong enough to bear it.

I know some day my sorrow will leave room for another man. I know beyond grief’s boundaries lies for me some remainder of life’s sweetness. Part of that comes from knowing I still have love to give. But to receive love, to seek it, I still cannot. Quite plainly, I am not wanting.

So for now, I choose to be sad. I am no longer afraid of it. My sorrow has no hold over me.

Since I started work, every night I take a taxi from the office back to my apartment. In the 20-minute ride, I let myself grieve, without a sound. Every night, my companion is different. We ride in silence, and by the time he pulls up to my building, I feel lighter, and still more loved than ever.