CLOUDS FAR BEHIND ME
A Memoir of Love, Loss, and the Path to Resilience
Sometimes it feels as though the dark clouds will never lift.
At age 41, I became instantly thrust into a strange new world with a horrific new title: Widow. A widow with an unwanted mantra repeating in my head: I am so fucked.
With two young kids, a loving husband and a thriving business together, my beautiful life was unfolding according to plan. Then, a cancer diagnosis changed everything. After enduring a year-long battle as caregiver, my husband Joe died sending me into an unexplained and unchartered new world.
Having lost my identity as wife, parenting partner and business partner, I wandered aimlessly in numbness and denial until the harsh reality of widowhood took hold. I struggled daily as a parent just to make it to 9 PM each night, constantly felt waves of PTSD coming on, and had to endure holidays and milestones alone without familiar navigation to guide me.
Reluctant at first, I began to honor my intuition, giving up resistance and allowing myself to lean-in and grieve fully. Immersing myself in surfing (a previous favorite pastime) in the frigid ocean in an effort to feel again, I’m met with both physical challenges and mental strategies to stay alive. Wise words from a fellow surfer offers life-changing advice: “Learn not to struggle, you will surface again.”
After allowing myself to fall down what became a bottomless rabbit-hole, I discovered valuable life lessons in whatever came my way. I realized it was “OK to not be OK”…for a while, until the grieving space became a little too comfortable and I changed my thinking to “It’s NOT OK to just be OK.” I wanted more.
With signs from beyond, “aha” moments and self-discovery along the way, I ultimately found inner-strength, peace and a revised version of myself with a newfound identity.
“I’d always seen my life’s plan laid out before me as if on a gigantic whiteboard…
Ideas, goals, projects, and projections too vast to physically manifest onto an actual board, this vision had traveled with me in my head. Each role I played in life represented in a different color and font all clearly seen in my mind’s eye. Wife, mother, business partner, etc.—all with their corresponding maps of completed, edited, and constantly revised elements unfolding like promising red carpets into the future or scrolling up into memory when completed.
Shortly after Joe died, I experienced a shocking and unforeseen revelation: my whiteboard had been completely erased. Blank. All my hopes, plans, and dreams had become intrinsically intertwined with Joe’s. Now they were gone. I was no longer a wife. No longer a parenting partner. No longer a business partner. My world had been shattered beyond recognition. My life’s narrative disrupted. I had no idea who I was. My identity was gone.”
EXCERPTS FROM CLOUDS FAR BEHIND ME
Bird in the Yard
I looked out the car window and noticed the familiar surroundings of our home but wasn’t sure how we got there. Still in the driver’s seat, I had somehow mustered up the wherewithal to drive the two short blocks back home. I knew it was time to get out of the car but found myself locked in momentary paralysis. My brain was telling my body to move, but it would not listen. Except for my eyes, I had completely frozen. I began scanning the front yard for something to help wake me from my comatose state. My focus settled upon the distinctively shaped, puzzle-like markings on the trunk of a Chinese elm tree.
This is your yard.
That is your tree.
There is a bird on its branch.
Letting Go of Things
My first attempt at letting go of anything tangible was trying to tackle a stack of papers left untouched on his desk. While I had taken over this space as my own, I kept most things on it exactly as they were. This, in a way, was his shrine. I had read stories about other widows leaving entire rooms or various objects untouched. Toothbrushes, razors, glasses, shoes—all with closely held memories and traces of their loved one’s scent and DNA left behind—unmoved from their last location for months or even years at a time. Every item holding a connectedness to what once was. Things still here, while they were not.
The Day I Got My Humor Back
Soon after Valentine’s Day, I realized something else was missing in my life: my sense of humor. My mind had always worked overtime to rapidly release comedic interjections and see the hilarity in life’s daily absurdities. “Witty and sarcastic” was how people often described me. Now these descriptions, along with my sense of humor, had vanished, completely changing both my perspective and how I was perceived. With the exception of my recent celebration bathroom incident, I had endured eight months of grieving without cracking a joke, laughing out loud, or seeing anything anymore as comedic. I feared it would never come back and that my whiteboard would never see those descriptive words again.