Honoring Your Wedding Vows

Being married again has given me lots to ponder these last two weeks. I am truly thrilled with my bride and the life we are building together. And I am reminded often that this never would have been possible if I had not fully let go of Deb. And that's what has me pondering recently.

Tonight's post is likely to be the strongest thing I have ever written, so I'll preface it by a word or two of warning. First off, if you are newly bereaved or within the first year, this post is not really meant for you, so you may want to give it a pass.

In fact, even if you're in year two or three, you may want to give it a pass. It really is that strong. I'm writing it specifically for that one person out there who truly wants to let go of their dead spouse, but something is holding them back.

So, if you continue to read this post despite my warnings and are appalled, hurt, or angered, then I'm sorry, this message wasn't meant for you. Please spare me the hate mail ;-) The one person out there for whom this is intended will recognize that it is for them. I don't mean to be so blunt, but it needs to be said, and I have yet to read this anywhere else. And please keep in mind that I'm not some shrink in an ivory tower — I have been where you are, and I can appreciate the kind of pain you are experiencing. I would relieve you of that pain. That is my motivation, nothing more.

Last chance to turn back!

---

Marriage is a curious thing. As I was mentioning in the epilogue to my story, I was more emotional while reciting my wedding vows than I had anticipated. The following simple words of traditional wedding vows have been dancing around in my head:

'to have and to hold
from this day forward;
for better, for worse,
for richer, for poorer,
in sickness and in health,
to love and to cherish,
till death us do part'

It is that last line that has me pondering.

Marriage is a contract. In that contract, we state what we will do, and the conditions under which we will perform.

I've been a contractor for well over 10 years now, so I'm quite familiar with the language used in contracts. Every time I sign a new one, I always pay close attention to the "exit clause." I want to know how much notice I have to give them, and how much notice they have to give me, and when I'll receive what is owed to me, and what restrictions are placed upon me at the end of the contract, like not working for a competitor for 12 months.

Most of the IT contracts I sign run into dozens of pages and use reams of legal jargon. So it must be the simple, compact, and concise nature of the vows above that has struck me. Such a contrast from most modern contracts!

You have probably already figured out where I'm going with this. At death, we are parted, and all our contractual obligations are dissolved. There are no restrictions placed upon us at the end of the contract. We no longer have our mate, we no longer hold them, and we are no longer obligated to love and cherish them.

Yes, I know that last line is anathema for just about everyone reading it. Relax — I'm not writing it for you.

I'm writing it for that one person (you know who you are) who wants to let go of your dead spouse and go on living, but you feel a deep sense of guilt about doing so. You feel that you will be going against your word, that you will be out of your integrity, and that you will be dishonoring your late mate.

You will not be doing any of these things.

What you essentially said in your marriage vows was, "I will do all these things while you are alive, but when you are no longer alive, I will no longer do these things."

You probably never thought about it like that before, did you?

Does that mean that the moment your spouse dies, you no longer love or cherish them? No! What it does mean is that you are no longer obligated to do so. You are now free to do so, but you don't have to do so anymore. You are now free from that bond, that responsibility.

In other words, any lingering guilt you feel about letting go and living your own life is without foundation. Think back to your vows, and ask yourself if you have fulfilled them.

Now that your spouse is dead, you have completed your marriage contract. You have fulfilled your obligations. You are now free to direct your attentions elsewhere.

You are free to live as you please.

Please do so.

The Outgoing and The Return II

In my last post, I imagine I irritated more than a few of you by suggesting that the death of our spouse is a gift. If you're within the first year or two, you probably use far different words, like tragedy, catastrophe, disaster, or robbery! Yet, I am in no way intending to cause indignation. Keep in mind that I too am a widower, and that I too have experienced the pain, anguish, anxiety, and suffering that goes with bereavement. But I have come through grief to the other side, and my days are now filled with peace and happiness. And excitement! ;-)

My last post gave Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose account of our life being one of expansion and contraction. It is within the contraction that we are given the gift, and personal loss and tragedy are often the catalyst:

AWAKENING AND THE RETURN MOVEMENT

The return movement in a person's life, the weakening or dissolution of form, whether through old age, illness, disability, loss, or some kind of personal tragedy, carries great potential for spiritual awakening — the dis-identification of consciousness from form. Since there is very little spiritual truth in our contemporary culture, not many people recognize this as an opportunity, and so when it happens to them or to someone close to them, they think there is something dreadfully wrong, something that should not be happening.

There is in our civilization a great deal of ignorance about the human condition, and the more spiritually ignorant you are, the more you suffer. For many people, particularly in the West, death is no more than an abstract concept, and so they have no idea what happens to the human form when it approaches dissolution. Most decrepit and old people are shut away in nursing homes. Dead bodies, which in some older cultures are on open display for all to see, are hidden away. Try to see a dead body, and you will find that it is virtually illegal, except if the deceased is a close family member. In funeral homes, they even apply makeup to the face. You are only allowed to see a sanitized version of death.

Since death is only an abstract concept to them, most people are totally unprepared for the dissolution of form that awaits them. When it approaches, there is shock, incomprehension, despair, and great fear. Nothing makes sense anymore, because all the meaning and purpose that life had for them was associated with accumulating, succeeding, building, protecting, and sense gratification. It was associated with the outward movement and identification with form, that is to say, ego. Most people cannot conceive of any meaning when their life, their world, is being demolished. And yet, potentially, there is even deeper meaning here than in the outward movement.

It is precisely through the onset of old age, through loss or personal tragedy, that the spiritual dimension would traditionally come into people's lives. This is to say, their inner purpose would emerge only as their outer purpose collapsed and the shell of the ego would begin to crack open...

The disruption of the outward movement at a time when it is "not meant to be happening" can also potentially bring forth an early spiritual awakening in a person. Ultimately, nothing happens that is not meant to happen, which is to say, nothing happens that is not part of the greater whole and its purpose. Thus, destruction or disruption of outer purpose can lead to finding your inner purpose and subsequently the arising of a deeper outer purpose that is aligned with the inner...

What is lost on the level of form is gained on the level of essence. In the traditional figure of the "blind seer" or the "wounded healer" of ancient cultures and legend, some great loss or disability on the level of form has become an opening into spirit. When you have had a direct experience of the unstable nature of all forms, you will likely never overvalue form again and thus lose yourself by blindly pursuing it or attaching yourself to it. [emphasis mine]

The opportunity that the dissolution of form, and in particular, old age, represents is only just beginning to be recognized in our contemporary culture. In the majority of people, that opportunity is still tragically missed, because the ego identifies with the return movement just as it identified with the outward movement. This results in a hardening of the egoic shell, a contraction rather than an opening. The diminished ego then spends the rest of its days whining or complaining, trapped in fear or anger, self pity, guilt, blame, or other negative mental-emotional states or avoidance strategies, such as attachment to memories and thinking and talking about the past.

If you read that last paragraph and thought, "Hey! I resemble that comment!" know that there is a way out. The vast majority of our suffering is caused by our cravings and clingings to the trappings of this world. Now that our spouse is dead, our memories of our past married life constitute a substantial part of those trappings. As we let go of those memories, we find that our suffering eases and we can find more contentment within the present moment. Being at peace is only possible in the present; we cannot be at peace when we hold fast to the shards of the past.

May you find peace.

The Outgoing and The Return

In the last chapter of Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose, he explains several things that directly pertain to us as widow/ers. Within the first year or two after the death of our spouse, it can be very, very difficult to conceive of our mate's death as a great gift to us. But, as Eckhart illustrates, the gift is there nonetheless.

Our life consists of two main phases — the outgoing phase, where we are growing and expanding, and the return phase, where we are diminishing and shrinking [pages 282-283]:

A BRIEF HISTORY OF YOUR LIFE

Those two movements, the outgoing and the return, are also reflected in each person's life cycles. Out of nowhere, so to speak, "you" suddenly appear in this world. Birth is followed by expansion. There is not only physical growth, but also growth of knowledge, activities, possessions, experiences. Your sphere of influence expands and life becomes increasingly complex. This is a time when you are mainly concerned with finding or pursuing your outer purpose. Usually there is also a corresponding growth of the ego, which is identification with all the above things, and so your form identity becomes more and more defined. This is also the time when outer purpose — growth — tends to become usurped by the ego, which unlike nature does not know when to stop in its pursuit of expansion and has a voracious appetite for more.

And then, just when you thought you made it or that you belong here, the return movement begins. Perhaps people close to you begin to die, people who were a part of your world. Then your physical form weakens; your sphere of influence shrinks. Instead of becoming more, you now become less, and the ego reacts to this with increasing anxiety or depression. Your world is beginning to contract, and you may find you are not in control anymore. Instead of acting upon life, life now acts upon you by slowly reducing your world. The consciousness that identified with form is now experiencing the sunset, the dissolution of form. And then one day, you too disappear. Your armchair is still there. But instead of you sitting in it, there is just an empty space. You went back to where you came from just a few years ago.

The day we came home from the hospital knowing that Deb's cancer had returned and that this would be a fight to the death was the day I could feel our life contracting. I watched, helpless, as Deb became less and less. All this at a time when, as a new mom to our 1 and a half year old son, she should have been fulfilling her potential. She absolutely saw motherhood as her outward purpose. And I had thought my outward purpose was as a husband and a father. Instead, It turned out that my outward purpose was as a caregiver. Until one day the couch was still there, but instead of Deb sitting on it, there was just an empty space.

In my next post, I'll share Eckhart's wisdom of the gift that awaits us during The Return, if we will just be aware of it and seize the opportunity.

Time To Say Goodbye

If at first you don't succeed, you're running about average.

-- M. H. Alderson

How is it that some widow/ers seem to move on fairly quickly after their spouse dies, and others are still deep in grief after several years? I have been asking myself this question for the last few days. I consider myself to be in the first group, but I know people who are in the second group.

I suspect that a big part of my healing was saying goodbye to Deb. No, I don't mean while she was alive. She said goodbye to me 16 months before she died, but I could never bring myself to say goodbye to her until she was dead. The last thing I did before leaving the hospital was kiss her lifeless forehead and say "goodbye."

But that's not what I'm talking about tonight. It took me a number of months to understand that our relationship continued after she was already dead. We are creatures of habit, and I had 14 years worth of habits that involved Deb. Simple things, like what groceries to buy. Complicated things, like deep-seated differences in our personalities. Mentally, I was still involving her in my life months after she was dead.

To me, letting go of your dead spouse means no longer involving them in your life. I needed help in accomplishing this, and I relied heavily on the excellent book The Grief Recovery Handbook. I describe how this book helped me in an early post titled Grief Work.

The main focus of that book is writing and then reading a goodbye letter to your dead spouse. A definitive letter. You are going to say goodbye, and it means goodbye. No longer will he or she be part of your active living. You will not defer to them again, solicit their opinion again, rely on them again. Goodbye means goodbye.

Is this hard to do? Absolutely! It cut me in half to read that final letter out loud. But it was necessary. It put a floor under my grief, a line in the sand. Here, and no further.

But the mind is a creature of habit. And we are addicted to the endorphins our brain generates when we engage our spouse in our day to day life. Over time, these habits have become ruts — familiar grooves through which our thoughts run. We need to break out of those thought patterns if we ever want to heal.

Changing habits, especially mental habits, can be very difficult. And it's not like we have ideal conditions to start from either. Most likely, we're mired in anguish and pain. But change those patterns we must. It is hard, and we will fail. Often. But we need to continue until the thought patterns have changed and we no longer include our dead spouse in our day to day lives.

I'm reminded of the poem "Autobiography In Five Short Chapters" by Portia Nelson:

I

I walk down the street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk
I fall in.
I am lost ... I am helpless.
It isn't my fault.
It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I pretend I don't see it.
I fall in again.
I can't believe I am in the same place
but, it isn't my fault.
It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I see it is there.
I still fall in ... it's a habit.
my eyes are open
I know where I am.
It is my fault.
I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street.
There is a deep hole in the sidewalk.
I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

Walking down another street begins with saying goodbye. As you watch this video, ask yourself if now is the time for you to say goodbye as well.

Lingering Grief

As I've written about in the past, I'm a big fan of Dr. Lou LaGrand's work on grief. His articles are always relevant, accurate, and above all, extremely helpful. For tonight's post, I'd like to revisit a topic I hear widow/ers talk about frequently, namely, how long should grieving take? Specifically, if you are well into your second or third year of grief (or more), you may be wondering what is causing your grief to linger. Will this ever end?

In this article, Dr. LaGrand has written about five key concepts that may be holding you back from completing your grief work. If you are looking for an encouragement to help you get "unstuck," this great article may be what you are seeking. Enjoy!

Why Grief Lingers On and On

Grief and grieving is inevitable because we choose to love. And it can be argued that it lingers on and on because we refuse to learn to love in separation and complete a primary task: acceptance of the loss and the many changes demanded.

However, there are a number of old beliefs that we have learned about grief from the authority figures in our lives that have a major impact on the length of time we grieve and the amount of unnecessary suffering we endure. For example, some people believe you must grieve for a year, grieve for the most part in silence after a couple of weeks, and eventually find closure (often interpreted as meaning forget about the deceased) and get on with your life.

Still there are several things in addition to questionable beliefs that tend to prolong and exacerbate the grief process that you can immediately change.

1. You grieve without a goal. Make a full commitment that you will accept the death of your loved one and reinvest in life. Ask yourself the most important question about your grief: Do I want to be loss oriented in my life or restoration oriented? Without the inner commitment to heal—and the actions to back it up—each day will prove to be filled with pain and aimlessly long.


2. You are expecting to be your old self again. Yet you are different. We are all different when someone we love dies because a part of us that related to the loved one in the physical world has also died. We will grow from having known the deceased and build on what we were given, or we will regress and try to live in the past.


3. You are not aware that you are starting a new life. You may have to take on new roles and develop new skills. Your routines will change; some you will retain. Few of us like the new. We like the expected, the security of old routines, many of which have to be given up.


4. You don’t realize its okay to establish a new relationship with the deceased. Our loved ones die but relationships and love live on. There is nothing wrong with talking to or writing to the loved one that died to express your feelings at various times. Though physically gone, depending on your belief system, you can still speak to his/her spirit.


5. You have not found someone you trust to talk to about how you really feel. It is not unusual to have a confidant early in your grieving and months later feel you can’t say what you’re feeling to that person. You may believe you should be “over it” or sense that your friends feel that way. But each grief is one of a kind. You may need more time and someone to talk to.

Although the above five concepts may be behind your extended grieving, keep in mind that grief has no specific time boundaries. Its length varies with the individual. You will know when grief is lessening in your life. But one final awareness to consider: It is normal for grief to revisit. Something you see or hear can bring up a sad memory, even tears, or the wish that the loved one was with you. Perfectly normal. Allow the gift of grief to run its course at that moment.

Dr. LaGrand is a grief counselor and the author of eight books, the most recent, Love Lives On: Learning from the Extraordinary Encounters of the Bereaved. He is known world-wide for his research on the Extraordinary Experiences of the bereaved (after-death communication phenomena) and is one of the founders of Hospice of the St. Lawrence Valley, Inc. His website is http://www.extraordinarygriefexperiences.com

The Heartbeat Of Death

It has now been several months since I finished reading The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, but I found it to be a very, very interesting read, full of amazing insights from a very different perspective than my Western mind produces. I'm currently reviewing some of the pages I had tabbed for further reading, and I'd like to share one of these with you tonight.

Before I do, I'll just explain that this passage will likely make a lot more sense if you have had at least a little bit of exposure to Eastern / Buddhist thought. And just to clarify, I'm not a Buddhist, nor do I play one on this blog ;-) I did get a healthy dose of Buddhist thought when I attended a free 10-day Vipassana meditation course this past winter, and it was that (amazing!) experience that prompted me to pick up The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.

I last wrote about a silver lining to grief back in March, but I want to take that concept many steps further tonight. If you are past the first year of grieving, this may give you a suitable foundation upon which to build your new life. I know for me this perspective colours everything regarding how I live my life now.

I think it was about the 11-month mark after Deb died, when the pain was at its most intense, that I decided that whatever lesson I was learning through this ordeal, I intended to learn it! I wanted to make sure that all this suffering and anguish I was going through was not in vain. Over the ensuing months, I learned that Deb's death had forced dozens of major changes on my life all at once, but the reality is that change is relentless, ever-present, and ongoing. The sooner we can come to grips with this fact, the sooner we can come to embrace it. It is this embrace of change that helps me to thrive as a healed widower, and it is my hope that you too will thrive again in your new life of your choosing.

[from page 33 of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying]

THE HEARTBEAT OF DEATH

There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death's pulse, death's heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to.

So let us then work with these changes now, in life: that is the real way to prepare for death. Life may be full of pain, suffering, and difficulty, but all of these are opportunities handed to us to help us move toward an emotional acceptance of death. It is only when we believe things to be permanent that we shut off the possibility of learning from change.

If we shut off this possibility, we become closed, and we become grasping. Grasping is the source of all our problems. Since impermanence to us spells anguish, we grasp on to things desperately, even though all things change. We are terrified of letting go, terrified, in fact, of living at all, since learning to live is learning to let go. And this is the tragedy and the irony of our struggle to hold on: not only is it impossible, but it brings us the very pain we are seeking to avoid.

Lack of Meaning

Value:
Noun. Relative worth, merit, or importance; import or meaning; force; significance; liking or affection; favourable regard.

One of the more fascinating attributes we humans possess is the fickleness with which we assign value to things. When you were married, you probably had a pretty good idea about the value to you of your house, car, job, possessions, friends, spouse, even yourself. And then in an instant, it all changed. Now that your spouse is dead, does anything have the value to you that it once did? What would you give up to have your spouse back, if that were possible? Is there anything you wouldn't part with? Things you may have staked your entire career on, like a big house or car, can now seem almost meaningless. Overnight, your entire value system has likely undergone a major upheaval. And the aftermath can last for months and years.

I'm not real interested in the fast car or the big house. Never have been. Of far more interest to me is the value that we assign to our own lives, and to life itself. Several months after Deb died, I remember staring up at the ceiling one morning for 3 and a half hours with little thought other than "life is pointless." The meaning and value with which I had previously regarded life had all but vanished. But if life held no meaning, what was my place in it? What was the meaning of my life? Oh great, just a simple question like "what is the meaning of life?" My life. Or at least the one I now found myself living.

After Deb's death, this niggling meaning-of-life question would surface every now and then, adding to the sea of uncertainties in which I floundered. Did my life have meaning any more? What was that meaning? Hard, universal questions, and the only answer seemed to be, "the meaning you give it." It took me many hard, hard months of reassigning values to lesser things before I could even begin to conceive of the value I would give to my own life. Was I a father? Single dad? Friend? Co-worker? Naturalist? Idealist? Realist? Essentialist? None of these answers came quickly or easily.

The truth is, I have always been interested in the answers to these questions, and I still am, even though I am now at peace with both the questions and the answers. So it was with some interest that I read "Finding Meaning In the Second Half of Life" by Alexander Green. I'll just quote a few of the pertinent passages, but I encourage you to read the whole article. This will probably be more helpful to those of you who have already passed the one year mark and are beginning to grasp the need to reinvent yourself as a single person. There's lots of food for thought here...

Psychologists believe that roughly a quarter of Americans with symptoms of depression suffer from a chemical imbalance that, like diabetes, is most effectively treated with medication.

Others are experiencing a kind of reactive depression that is triggered by a serious reversal of some kind, an unexpected layoff, for example, or the sudden loss of a loved one. This form of depression can be severe but will ordinarily fade with time.

Yet, according to Dr. James Hollis of the C.J. Jung Educational Center in Houston, millions more suffer from a chronic melancholy that emanates from an entirely different source: a lack of meaning in their lives...

Many of them are haunted by the vague notion that something is missing in their lives. Often they can't put their finger on it. But it gnaws at them, creating fear, anxiety and, in some cases, depression...

But if meaning is missing, where can it be found? Some find the answer in their religious traditions. Others discover it by studying the world's wisdom literature, the great writings by history's wisest souls. Still others are fortunate enough to see it modeled by a parent, friend, or teacher, someone who is not merely living up to someone else's expectations but is instead busy living "an authentic life."

These men and women are too rare. And when they appear, society has a tendency to label them eccentric. As the poet T.S. Eliot once observed, in a world of fugitives, the person who is headed in the right direction will appear to be running away...

"Despite the blandishments of popular culture, the goal of life is not happiness but meaning," writes Dr. Hollis, author of "Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life."

To determine whether you're on the right track, he suggests you ask yourself a simple question: "Does the path I'm on enlarge me or diminish me?" Your answer, he says, should be immediate and instinctive...

Living an authentic life is not an easy choice. The poet e.e. cummings said, "To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting."

So expect conflicts and hurdles. Setbacks, too. Finding creative solutions to these challenges fuels the mind with positive energy. It gives you the opportunity to show yourself - and those around you - how much you really want it.

And, in the process, it gives your life meaning.

Does the path I'm on enlarge me or diminish me? What a great question to ponder as we make our own road.