A Stranger in a Strange Land
September 2nd, 2016
Dear Friend,
I've been away for so long for such obvious reasons. I'm in exile; a stranger in a strange land as it says in Exodus. I didn't find out until last week why I had felt so detached and useless to the world around me. I had suspected the cause, but being the intellectual I am, I have a tendency to intellectualize the obvious fact in front of me. It took the first step to do something about it: face the facts and start counseling to get help before I really got angry and punched the next person who said something stupid and inane about the death of a spouse I loved for 51 years. I received a letter from Capital Caring (the organization that took care of Connie's palliative care in her last 11 hours of life). I see the irony in everything. The letter contained one of those simplistic questionnaires - are you exhibiting any of these symptoms of Grieving? I qualified on the first 9 symptoms - text book, and I had to face the facts. I needed to call somebody for help, but definitely not the kind of help everyone wanted to offer me, had tried to push on me at times when I didn't want to hear it. I'm a hard head. Show me. I'm one of those "unless you've walked in my moccasins, I just don't even have time for your blather" kind of men. The quieter ones, the ones who have shown me the most humility have come forward or gotten me off to the side and offered that they too, have lost spouses in the last few years. No words of advice, no offer of help, no grandstanding, just an acknowledgement of "I'm going through the same process - and sometimes it's a living hell."
I have discovered an important fact of the grieving process - and God knows I never thought it would come to this. But I offer it up to all the great Catholic couples who knew Connie and I in our years and years of work with World-Wide Marriage Encounter, our commitment to the Eucharist and our Parish and Diocesan Catholic communities. My grief over losing my spouse has only made me stronger in realizing what an incredible gift my spouse was to me. The deeper the love, the deeper the commitment to our faith-choices and the deeper the grief. Although it hurts, I would not have wanted it any other way. No matter how much we strayed once in a while out of marital love for each other, our sacramental love for each other, the Eucharist, was there to bring us back to the center of our Catholic beliefs. My counselor put it bluntly: "You're in for a long ride in a new territory. A new land." I've explained to you before, My Friend, I'm just a dumb convert. I wasn't even born into this; but decided at age 41 that what was missing out of all aspects of my being was a Center - both spiritually and theologically. Connie and I would laugh about it and then carry on with our lives because, at that time and as now, our marriage was surrounded and protected by so many beautiful married couples who believed in what we believed in. The world looks upon it as cute and quaint. I remain so proud of Connie always wanting to take our marriage to the next spiritual level. Our marriage and our love for each other was never cute or quaint. It was a reality. It was for real. Made even more real by the fact that we actually loved each other and knew that it was for eternity - till death do us part.
Leave me in exile for a while. I need to get my bearings. I'm a lost sailor washed up on a foreign shore. I'm shipwrecked. My salvation compass is the small circle of friends who have quietly accepted that my world is different now. There are no words that will ever bring back the love of my life.
