by Joan Kip

It’s now eighteen months since Art died, and while he continues to inhabit the depths of my house, that place where our souls meet, the upper stories still feel his absence. Existing within two overlapping levels, two distinct wavelengths, I float untethered between his reality and mine. While in his reality, I feel we are joined in communion and I’m back living a remembered sublimity. But within my own reality, that of the temporal with its day-to-day practicalities of taking care of the house, the garden, the finances, there are moments when I am overwhelmed with a recurring sense of desolation, the aloneness of a solo performer.

Before I was widowed, I facilitated bereavement groups and I remember pronouncing to the grieving members—with the comfortable conviction of the uninitiated—that our most abiding relationships never leave us, that we simply internalize them much as we internalize our parents. We hear their voices, see their faces, may even sense their hands in ours. They are impressions we cannot erase. Now, as I wander the house Art and I shared for forty years, the house in which we raised our children, I wonder if I could still make such a pronouncement.

My job, I tell myself, is to recognize the different wavelengths within which I exist, knowing that while I’m in my practical mode, there is another deeper wavelength that I see with my inner eye. It is there, while meditating in the quiet of my room, that I meet my internalized “other” within an alliance fashioned beyond time. Endowed with a questing imagination, if I can free my mind from its usual constraints and enlarge my conditioned perception of but one reality, I am able to find that other realm: the realm in which Art is with me, touching my face with his hand, hugging me when I return from the store, holding me close as we fall asleep.

Each morning I step back and observe myself in my new life as a widow. I carry on with my usual exercise routine of dancing to Reggae or to Scott Joplin—oiling the bearings, loosening the joints. It is a routine that comforts me, enabling me to move threatening sadness to a lighter level. Times past, Art would remain in bed, watching me, relieved that he wasn’t as compulsive as I. Some mornings, I sense that Art is still in that bed watching me, and when I have finished dancing, we stay with each other for a while, connecting with intention across our two realities.

Recently, however, I began to feel as if an unseen enemy was unraveling my slim defenses, a throwback to those early days just after Art died. I realized that I’d been thinking about him less often, had written him fewer letters. Sometimes an hour or two passed when I didn’t think about him at all, didn’t see his bearded face or hear his resonant voice. Later that morning, washing dishes, I looked out the window onto the garden Art had made, and had a vision of him there in his old gardening slacks and even older white shirt. I realized then that my panic was about my fear of losing him, of letting him go. Were I to relax my passionate concentration on Art, might he slip out of my life and fade away like a forgotten photograph, blurred and lifeless, a darkened shadow of the original?

In my day-to-day existence, time imposes its own reality and I know that no matter how much I try to cling to Art, his image will ultimately blur and gradually diminish. Sometimes, as I lunch with friends or attend a concert, my tears are forgotten for a magic moment, and I am hugged by my old happiness. But the curtain falls, the lights go on, and then, driving home alone, I’m back clinging to the sad, empty space alongside me. Eventually, after hours, days, weeks, I remember what I’ve always known: my love for Art lives in my heart, unchanged, unchangeable. 

I don’t believe that bereavement is a straight path to a beckoning shore. Rather, it is a capricious zig-zagging journey, one with Sisyphian overtones. And as I move along this unfamiliar rocky path, feeling more centered—time and again I find myself jerked back to my earliest grief: the grief I thought I had “dealt with.” 

It happens whenever I find myself staring at an elderly couple holding hands, whenever I hear a certain piece of music or look at a particular photograph. It happens when I touch Art’s watch, his worn-out wallet, his keys—so much of him still around the house, waiting to capture my attention. Museum pieces from our youth together through our old age, his possessions conspire to catch me off guard and, for a while, I land right back on square one. At this point I have found the best thing—perhaps the only thing—to do is to shake hands with grief, as I would with an old respected friend, then turn around and walk right back to the present. For I can never go back entirely to that which has left me, that which I have left.

I am thinking that there should be a Catechism According to the Bereaved, some gentle-bound truths to counter the many mistaken notions about bereavement, both for those living with their bereavement and for the still apprehensive observers.

One of these notions is that after one year, we are presumed to be all mourned out. People, kind friends even, will imply that one is now ready to close the door on sorrow and resume a life unattended by grief and by tears. I am sure they mean well; it’s just that they are entirely mistaken. It is true that time softens the initial blow, but I don’t think I could ever completely seal up that door—and perhaps I shouldn’t—for the act of mourning inspires my healing and incubates my sorrow, allowing for its gradual transformation.

Maybe tears are a natural antidote to the anguish of an otherwise inexpressible grief. In the early days, I would not weep. But my body would soon shake from the withholding and eventually break down. Occasionally there are still mornings when I wake up from a night’s sleep with a deep sense of heaviness and restraint, and I know this feeling to be one of tears struggling to escape. One of my musings is that we humans are born with an endless reservoir of tears and joy—complementary twins—into which we dip or plunge, as the occasion arises, and that when I am with one, the other is not far away.

Another mistaken notion is that once a person has died, he or she has become an unmentionable, someone to be dropped from the roster, wiped off the slate and filed under Departed. To give voice to their name is somehow to commit an indelicate social blunder. Shortly after Art died, I was invited to a dinner party and decided to face this baptism by fire—my first time out alone. I hardly knew the other guests around the table, but they had known Art for many years as his colleagues. The evening passed slowly, the conversation distant from my interests, but I hoped to be an attentive guest. I was surprised, however, that no one mentioned Art’s recent death or offered me a word of sympathy. After a while, I brought Art’s name into the conversation, which resulted in an uneasy silence and a swift move to another subject. Later, and somewhat belligerently, I again offered up Art’s name, and again the same uneasy silence followed. I left that dinner early and am sure the other guests must have been relieved. I don’t fault them for what I assume to be their own fears of mortality, but it made me realize how tender our culture is, how fearful of death so many of us are. And how needy we bereaved can be in the early months of our loss.

There are also those godsent others: friends, acquaintances, even strangers who, by a miracle of innate empathy, manage to convey a compassion that warms my coldest parts. I am ever grateful when I am asked directly how I am doing. Facing someone’s avoidance only denigrates my sadness, as though all those yesterdays with Art had never happened.

Events tend to happen in clusters and death is no exception. Around the time of Art’s death, many of my closest friends were also dealing with the loss of partners; vigorous people suddenly faded and died. It felt as though some kind of hex had descended upon us all. In the mutuality of our grief, we sad ones rallied around each other and supported each other as we fled into the solace of feverish domesticity: one old friend remodeled her entire living area, another added a large studio onto her house. After Art’s death, like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, I had every room in my house repainted in bright colors. It was an audacious act, tinged with guilt, as if I was celebrating a too early thaw, yet it yielded a momentary liberation from the darkness of grief.

In some ways, grieving the loss of Art has cut through my emotional complexities, opening me to the core so that, in all manner of things, I feel a new freedom. Shortly after Art died, a physicist friend of his visited from England. John and I share a deep friendship and he asked me if I had ever written about my feeling of being loved by loving. It’s a question that has stuck in my mind. But the more I ponder, the less clear is my thinking—shades of the chicken-and-egg enigma cloud my thinking. Is my feeling of being loved by Art dependent on my first having loved him? Is it possible to love without the assurance of having been loved? It’s a philosophical roundabout which confuses my mind.

Yet my heart seems to understand. I have an abiding sense of Art’s love moving through my sorrow and comforting my soul. And alongside his love for me is my own expansive love for him, as we move in concert with one another across the illusion of separateness, embraced within a spiral of light, which has no beginning, no end. The world assumes a softer glow now—my corners having weathered into roundness; I’ve lost much of my former sharpness, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the possible lassitude of old age. It has more to do with love becoming visible.