This morning I woke to hear my husband sobbing in the next room. The sobbing is not new. He does it. I do it. But it has been five months and fourteen days and nine hours and fifteen minutes since we lost our son and so these times have gotten less frequent.
In the beginning we cried endlessly and we tried to hold each other constantly. Then we found that we needed to give each other time alone to be with our sadness ourselves. We acknowledged that although neither of us intended it, being in each others presence sometimes made us self-conscious. We needed to be free to have snot running from our noses, to make ridiculous animal sounding noises, to hit things, to fall down, to get hiccups and for this you need privacy. Cathartic behavior looked melodramatic in front of anyone else, even ourselves. We didn't need to act as a mirror of that to each other. So we agreed that unless one or the other of us asked for comfort that we would try to create space for each others need to howl.We saved the holding for the safer kind of crying.
And so this morning, I stand outside the closed door to the room that once was Caleb's and I listen. Should I go in or should I not? On the other side of this door I am crying but I make sure that it is soundless. I am aware that we are a metaphor. This experience that I share with him and only him, we cannot truly share at all. I cannot touch his grief. He cannot touch mine. Our love made Caleb. Our love for Caleb has held us together through so many other strains in our lives together. But the place that Caleb held in my husband's heart is theirs alone. I shared this man with two people that are as important to him as I am to him, perhaps more. He shares me with those same two people, our sons. It is paradoxically the root of our strongest bond and now, in the face of this death, the most constant reminder of how alone each of us truly is.
My husband worries that his grief will be endless, that he is not as "strong" as I am, that his inability to feel any joy will ruin what is left of my life. I try to console him that this is not true; but sometimes I wonder if this is not what causes so many marriages to fall apart after the death of a child (the majority if statistics are to be believed but that subject is probably a whole separate blog.) It is hard to shoulder even an ounce of someone else's grief when you are drowning in your own. We have tried to be as honest as we can with each other about what we need, but what will that look like if one or the other of us says, "what I need is to do this alone."
The desire to be alone might seem crazy to anyone outside of this experience but it is actually something that we have both felt. The way that I understand it is to recognize that this experience can best be characterized as a complete deconstruction of the self. It as if Caleb grabbed a strand of each of us when he went flying off into death and we unraveled from cloth back to thread behind him. Everything that was reality before went with him: our perception of the past, our vision of the future; nothing was left unchanged. To reconstruct oneself from the inside out takes time, takes great focus and, to some degree, self-absorption. My husband likens it to how he felt coming back from Vietnam. He wanted to roam the country by himself, attach to nothing, let life come back in whatever new way it would, having no expectations. His fantasy now, he says, is to run away. He feels guilty about it because of his love for our other son and me. I try to tell him not to feel guilty because I have the same desire and the same guilt over it. We wonder what it would be like if we actually had the money to carry out these fantasies. We imagine what it would be like to pay for an apartment for our son so that he didn't have to struggle financially, hire someone to take care of our animals and then just take off separately. We compare vehicles that we would go in. He says he would get a van. I say I would take an airplane to a country where I didn't know the language. Then we argue about the particulars of our fantasies and end up chuckling but inside I know each of us is still escaping into the comfort of the fantasy.
How can there be comfort in dreaming about being separate? i think it is part of our strength that we have always had as a couple. We are as different as two people can be. We have not always had an easy time with these divisions but the respect we have for each others autonomy has seen us through a lot. That ,and humor. And our sons. My husband's delight in our two unique sons is a beautiful thing and one of the gifts in my life that I will forever be grateful for witnessing. I know that we will come through this together no matter what together may look like. I can love this man sobbing; it would be so much harder if he couldn't cry. That's what I try to tell him from the other side of the door.
In the beginning we cried endlessly and we tried to hold each other constantly. Then we found that we needed to give each other time alone to be with our sadness ourselves. We acknowledged that although neither of us intended it, being in each others presence sometimes made us self-conscious. We needed to be free to have snot running from our noses, to make ridiculous animal sounding noises, to hit things, to fall down, to get hiccups and for this you need privacy. Cathartic behavior looked melodramatic in front of anyone else, even ourselves. We didn't need to act as a mirror of that to each other. So we agreed that unless one or the other of us asked for comfort that we would try to create space for each others need to howl.We saved the holding for the safer kind of crying.
And so this morning, I stand outside the closed door to the room that once was Caleb's and I listen. Should I go in or should I not? On the other side of this door I am crying but I make sure that it is soundless. I am aware that we are a metaphor. This experience that I share with him and only him, we cannot truly share at all. I cannot touch his grief. He cannot touch mine. Our love made Caleb. Our love for Caleb has held us together through so many other strains in our lives together. But the place that Caleb held in my husband's heart is theirs alone. I shared this man with two people that are as important to him as I am to him, perhaps more. He shares me with those same two people, our sons. It is paradoxically the root of our strongest bond and now, in the face of this death, the most constant reminder of how alone each of us truly is.
My husband worries that his grief will be endless, that he is not as "strong" as I am, that his inability to feel any joy will ruin what is left of my life. I try to console him that this is not true; but sometimes I wonder if this is not what causes so many marriages to fall apart after the death of a child (the majority if statistics are to be believed but that subject is probably a whole separate blog.) It is hard to shoulder even an ounce of someone else's grief when you are drowning in your own. We have tried to be as honest as we can with each other about what we need, but what will that look like if one or the other of us says, "what I need is to do this alone."
The desire to be alone might seem crazy to anyone outside of this experience but it is actually something that we have both felt. The way that I understand it is to recognize that this experience can best be characterized as a complete deconstruction of the self. It as if Caleb grabbed a strand of each of us when he went flying off into death and we unraveled from cloth back to thread behind him. Everything that was reality before went with him: our perception of the past, our vision of the future; nothing was left unchanged. To reconstruct oneself from the inside out takes time, takes great focus and, to some degree, self-absorption. My husband likens it to how he felt coming back from Vietnam. He wanted to roam the country by himself, attach to nothing, let life come back in whatever new way it would, having no expectations. His fantasy now, he says, is to run away. He feels guilty about it because of his love for our other son and me. I try to tell him not to feel guilty because I have the same desire and the same guilt over it. We wonder what it would be like if we actually had the money to carry out these fantasies. We imagine what it would be like to pay for an apartment for our son so that he didn't have to struggle financially, hire someone to take care of our animals and then just take off separately. We compare vehicles that we would go in. He says he would get a van. I say I would take an airplane to a country where I didn't know the language. Then we argue about the particulars of our fantasies and end up chuckling but inside I know each of us is still escaping into the comfort of the fantasy.
How can there be comfort in dreaming about being separate? i think it is part of our strength that we have always had as a couple. We are as different as two people can be. We have not always had an easy time with these divisions but the respect we have for each others autonomy has seen us through a lot. That ,and humor. And our sons. My husband's delight in our two unique sons is a beautiful thing and one of the gifts in my life that I will forever be grateful for witnessing. I know that we will come through this together no matter what together may look like. I can love this man sobbing; it would be so much harder if he couldn't cry. That's what I try to tell him from the other side of the door.
