I had doubts about writing this third blog relating to my experience of grief. I'm pretty cynical about grieving in public and using tragedy as an appeal. I much prefer to leave that to Shakespeare and the great Greek dramatists, and normally do a quick turn-off when people start talking very publicly about their own bereavement. Yet, in this instance I thought that my gains might be of particular value to readers in most any situation of serious personal loss, so I've decided to share what I've learned thus far.
As some readers know, I've been dealing with a very difficult personal loss. My beloved wife of more than fifty years has Alzheimer's, a terribly debilitating disease that we will face more and more as medicine extends life. Pauline Boss, in a wonderful book entitled, Ambiguous Loss, writes specifically of Alzheimers' as a major form of what she calls ambiguous loss. The term refers to situations where the person is physically present, but psychologically absent, like my wife. Such loss can also occur when a person experiences serious head trauma, a too familiar consequence of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in serious head injuries here in America.
Last week I placed Marilyn in a wonderful assisted living residence in the Twin Cities. My network of friends around the country told me that better services and facilities did not exist.
Yet the next day I could neither think nor talk about my loss without tears. FYI, I am a PhD with behavioral background, and have both counseled and coached most of my adult life, still the pain of loss was uncontrollable. But I pulled together after a couple days, and at my daughters' insistence took the opportunity to counsel with a psychologist friend who'd also gone through serious loss in his own life. The conversation confirmed my decisionmaking, and gave me a number of important insights. The most important was that I would be reframing my identity without my wife. Although we normally think of identity formation as the work of teens and twenties, it may also take place conciously in our older years. And, I recognize it will take some time.
But as part of the conversation, my friend passed on three exceptionally significant questions that can apply to most any deeply felt situation of loss.
- What have I lost?
- What still remains?
- What are my still valid hopes?
With a calculated venom, in my last blog on Alzheimers and The Notebook, I wrote that I refuse to get stuck in melancholy or complicated grieving. I am committed to living well in spite of my exceedingly ambiguous loss and ever-present pain, and have given consideration to that process over the past months. Those three questions pull the issues together and give them a useful trajectory. They enable me to say my goodbyes without her leaving.
Though I've only started my journey without Marilyn, I've already found my colleague's questions revealing. He suggested that the more I can spell out the answers to those questions in specific, concrete ways, the better I can not only cope but thrive in the days ahead. With that in mind, I share them with you.