by Becky Aikman
Our marriage was symbiotic, a true collaboration, as we shared story ideas and edited each other’s writing. I aired out my serious side through Bernie; he picked up the latest buzz through me. When I helped with one of his projects, I felt that I was contributing to the betterment of the world. When he made suggestions for my profile of a fashion designer or my take on an overhyped new restaurant, he got to exercise his ever-present sense of whimsy.
Our careers advanced, and our marriage followed the same fantasy script. You know the one I’m talking about: a fairy-tale romance, or reasonable modern facsimile, with elements of drama and comedy, part Frank Capra, part Judd Apatow. Sometimes Bernie’s nervous energy set my more pokey sensibility on edge, but like me, he was an enthusiast, only scrappier. He had grown up in Brooklyn before it got all gentrified, and he was sixteen years older than I was, so our partnership gave the former bumpkin in me the confidence I needed. We weren’t always lucky—we couldn’t have children, for example, perhaps a forewarning that something inside Bernie was amiss. But he told people he felt as if he’d won the lottery when he found me. To me, the union felt like a happy ending, certain, complete. It safeguarded me with stability, security, and perhaps a protective set of blinders.
I was shocked when the script turned into something else altogether, full of sudden twists and alien words. Oncology. Chemotherapy. Metastasis. Resuscitate. This scenario played out over more than four years, nearly a quarter of our marriage. The news that mattered to us now was breaking in the hospital, a constant, harrowing tumult of test results and risky treatments.
I could scarcely believe the level of fear, or frustration, in the daily hand-to-hand combat against this monster that was trying to kill Bernie. Instinct told me to fight, but how? In primitive times, the hunter-gatherers who had the best shot at living needed the crazy strength to club a wildebeest or outrun a bear. But in the brave new world of technological medical interventions, it seemed that those who lived the longest were the ones who could restrain themselves long enough to remain polite on the telephone. Adrenaline only made it harder to tamp down the screaming meemies when some overburdened functionary would tell me, “The doctor’s schedule is full for the next three months.” Clubbing a wildebeest would have been a relief, almost as satisfying as clubbing a functionary. I kept plugging without rest for months on end, trying to perform my job while a nurse stayed with Bernie during the day. At night, it was my turn, as he wandered the dark apartment in a muddle of pain, needing oxycodone and comfort, constant comfort.
All of that had nearly been enough to break me, and then it ended with the added shock of finding myself, at an age when my friends were dealing with parent-teacher conferences, corporate promotions, and Pilates classes, a widow.
By the start of the memorial service three days after Bernie died, I could already tell that nothing about this role would match my admittedly ill-informed expectations, let alone those of most of the people who knew me. “This is going to be an ordeal,” one of them said before the service began at a chapel on the Columbia campus. Suffocating in a long-sleeve dress in sudden, unseasonable heat, I girded myself to make it to the benediction without disintegrating completely. I’d invited anyone who felt like saying a few words to get up and speak, so anything could have happened. What did, however, surprised me. The reminiscences reintroduced me to the Bernie I’d forgotten during the illness, the well Bernie, the one who still lived in the stories of those who hadn’t seen him when he was sick, stories about his generosity as a teacher, his mischievous wit. I came out less sad than I went in.
Afterward, I expected to collapse in exhaustion, but all that pent-up adrenaline wouldn’t let me. The next day, I found myself frantically planting geraniums in the apartment’s window boxes, flinging potting soil around with demented abandon, so tired was I of the ugliness of the hospital. I felt like a Looney Tunes character whose legs kept spinning in the air after she went off a cliff.
“Sit down. Rest,” said my mother, who stayed on with me for a couple of days.
But sitting only made me more desperate to find a wildebeest to club. Entitled to a week off from work, I’d never felt so profoundly that there was nothing for me to do. I was strangely disappointed to find that the busy working friends of a younger widow didn’t have time to drop off tuna noodle casseroles to break the sudden solitude. Instead they sent enough fruit baskets for me to open a produce stand, along with a few party platters of fancy nuts, cheeses, and olives for my nonexistent parties. I’d never been anywhere so quiet and eerie as the apartment in those first days with Bernie gone. And I’d never seen objects as poignantly useless as his wallet, his watch, and his wedding ring at rest on the bedside table.
Even more shocking—I missed cancer. “At least his suffering is over,” visitors consoled me, and that was true. But cancer had provided me with such a pure, fierce, clarifying urgency for so long that I was lost without it. On any given day, deciding my priorities had been a snap. Should I get a haircut, pay the electric bill, or save Bernie’s life? No contest! Now everything seemed equally irrelevant. How bad could my hair look? Did I really need electric lights?
During the day, I felt too anesthetized to speak. Condolence callers encouraged me to talk about my feelings, and I was vaguely aware of this directive myself. I needed to air out the pain, I thought, or it would fester and come back at me later, worse than ever. My job, it seemed, was to wallow, to let myself feel depressed. But—call me crazy—even then, at the depths, I still felt optimistic, hopeful that my life would become full and happy again. Yet nothing I’d ever read or heard about mourning spoke to that.
At night, spent as I was by Bernie’s illness, I couldn’t sleep to save my life. I stared at the ceiling as my mind came painfully alive with the need to—what? My task now, as I understood it, was to give in, to let myself screw things up for once, to feel the grief. Again, I didn’t know what to expect, except maybe the Kübler-Ross five stages, which I couldn’t even comprehend. I supposed I should be starting with the denial stage, but trust me, when somebody is gone, somebody who made your toast every morning and shared your bed every night, it’s hard to pretend that he’s still around. Bargaining also threw me. Was a better deal available, and what could I possibly offer as a trade? I’ll give you a fruit basket if you give me back my husband?
When I did manage to doze for an hour or two, I was terrorized by nightmares. Usually, Bernie was in some ghastly peril and I tried and failed to save him. He would slip off a ledge, or fall into a river. One memorable night, a robot was performing surgery on him, but I saw that Bernie was awake. I tried to stop the mechanical surgeon, but it kept slashing him wildly, indiscriminately, faster and faster, with hands like razors, until I woke up clammy with horror.
Then there was the missing. The bottomless missing. Of course, I knew that I would miss Bernie, but what I didn’t know until those hyperconscious nights was that grieving would be so much more than any missing I’d experienced up to now. Missing, the way I looked at it, was what you felt for someone who didn’t happen to be around at the moment. Someone you’d see again in an hour or a week or a month, swooping in from the airport, spiral-eyed with jet lag. Someone off at Gorilla Coffee to buy Sumatra Roast, or away at an academic conference, wearing a name tag: Hi, my name is Bernie. Someone who would take off the name tag and come back, back home, to me.
No, this task of grieving was so much more than missing. It was more like homesickness for a home that was no longer there. A home that had been swept away by a tidal wave, or sucked into a giant sinkhole, or knocked down by a bulldozer to make way for a new Bed Bath & Beyond, never to be seen again. This grieving for my husband was like a permanent exile from that lost home. Like an asylum seeker in a strange land, I would have to learn to live in this world, bereft of familiarity, bereft of comfort. Bereft.
What I would have given to sleep through the night, or at least drive away the nightmares, like the ones where my husband was drowning and I jumpe
d into a churning river to rescue him, knowing it would surely kill me, too, reaching for his hand and missing it by inches as icy waters swept him away. Missing that hand in my dreams every time. More than missing him, every night. Never to be seen again.
MONTHS PASSED. Being a widow didn’t get easier. I began to venture out, where the least trigger prompted me to relive what I came to call The Top Ten Traumatic Moments. Somebody’s vacation photo brought back the first time I saw that scan of the tumor in Bernie’s chest. The sight of a neighborhood restaurant recalled the time he suffered a seizure over dinner at a favorite spot. I tried to talk to friends about some of this, but repeating it mostly fed the panic that was rising in my throat.
I showed up at work, sometimes carting in remains from the party platters to share with the newsroom. I can’t remember what else, if anything, I did there. Looking in the archives, I see that I wrote a peppy article about celebrity chefs, so I must have given the appearance of playing reporter. But I was missing another story right under my nose, a story that imperiled my future. Through the long slog of Bernie’s illness, I had barely noticed that my job might be disappearing along with my husband as the newspaper industry succumbed to a slow fade of its own. I managed to ignore the evidence, even as co-workers headed for the lifeboats, finding other jobs or quitting to work on their own. But I was still frozen, as I had been in his hospital room, too fragile to face reality, too uncertain to make a change while still absorbing the trauma from such a big one. I couldn’t bring myself to consider conditions that would separate me from my job, the one familiar port in my new world of exile. Maybe it was just as well. If I’d left, I would have wound up flat on my couch every day in sweatpants and fuzzy slippers, alone, watching One Life to Live. One more life than I had now.
In the evenings, stranded on that couch after work, I sometimes gave myself a break from missing the cancer and missing Bernie, which often coalesced into one overwhelming ache of missing, and turned my attention to puzzling out my new place in society. I’d seen the movies, read the books: Old Widow So-and-So was often an outcast, or cursed. In some cultures, she’d be handed off to the husband’s brother like a bag of shabby clothes. I had to admit that my own conception wasn’t much more appealing—a sad sack of an old lady, marginal, helpless, irrelevant, ready for assisted living. That can’t be me! I protested. The only assistance I want in living is from the personal shopper at Barneys! Here I was—sad, yes, but still able to chuckle when appropriate, still able to wedge into my relatively slinky jeans. I felt as miscast as I did in my rural high school when I played Yente in an all-WASP production of Fiddler on the Roof. Applying the word widow to me seemed … unseemly. Rude.
I cast about for possible young-widow role models. There was the dour Queen Victoria, preserving Prince Albert’s things as if he might pop back in for tea at a moment’s notice. Or the other extreme, Scarlett O’Hara, branded an unfeeling slut for dancing at a ball after her husband died. I decided I should aspire to the impossible grace of Jackie Kennedy while trying to avoid the pitfalls of Jackie Onassis.
Signals from my friends were as mixed as my own jumbled emotions. Some seemed to expect me to live out my life as Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrows. Others promoted casual sex as if it were the new wonder drug from Merck. Should I jump a grief counselor or take up knitting? Cat around or get a cat?
When I made an effort to drag myself to an office picnic or dinner with a college roommate, I recognized that no one knew how to behave in the presence of a young widow, and even more disconcerting, neither did I. Those who weren’t tongue-tied might blurt out something wildly inappropriate like, “Don’t worry, you’re young, you’re blonde—you’ll find another man.”
Everyone from close friends to total strangers started sizing up my desirability and feeling free to comment on it. “Your ass looks amazing in those jeans” became something I heard nearly as often as “I’m sorry for your loss.” Nobody, aside from Bernie, had noticed my ass in twenty years. Now it looked as if all the stuff from high school—looks, popularity, condoms—might matter again. It was surreal to contemplate that my entire future happiness might rest on the contours of my behind.
Among my mostly married contemporaries, I felt like a freak. My friends wanted badly to be helpful, and they were. But we were out of sync. It wasn’t their fault that they were already overtaxed, with children, husbands, jobs. Did I mention husbands? My buddies tried to fit me in. At dinners with couples I’d known for years, it was heavy lifting holding up half the conversation without Bernie to carry some of the load. My repertoire of cancer anecdotes didn’t make for sparkling material, and I had nothing else going on. Still, I knew I needed to get out. On many, many Saturday nights home alone, I felt like the least popular kid in junior high school.
It was on one of those Saturday nights when I formed the resolution to join a widows’ support group. After nearly a year and a half of widowhood, I was ready to “move on” in the words of the grief literature; ready to think, maybe, someday, about dating again, taking some vacations on my own, finding some other unattached people to hang out with on the weekend. What I needed, I decided, were knowledgeable guides. I hoped the widows in the support group might help me sort it all out. Those fellow castaways to the land of the grieving might be the only people I knew who could speak my language, show me the customs. They might have discovered the tricks I didn’t know—how to change that lightbulb above the kitchen cabinet, or make small talk at that wedding where I was marooned at a table with the geriatric and infirm. How to keep making things happen, necessary things, when I could barely manage to make breakfast. After I got kicked out, I was more confused than ever, utterly flummoxed about what to try next.
I wasn’t very good at the role of decorous widow, so I fixed on what I was good at—being a reporter, in essence, finding out about stuff and then writing about it. Only now I wanted to find out what I needed to learn most for myself: How does a human being remake a life when it’s shattered by loss?
TALKING TO DR. GOLDENBERG, the psychiatrist who helped Bernie during the last months of his life, was a logical first step. He was young, articulate, and well informed, and I knew he specialized in patients with cancer and HIV. He would be up on the latest thinking about people and death. And much as I dreaded meeting him in his East Side office and sitting in the same upholstered wing chair where Bernie had sat, hemmed in by the same bookshelves filled with the same soothing Asian art, more than anything I wanted to learn what Goldenberg knew about this perplexing state of bereavement that I now inhabited.
“You look about as I’d expect.” He greeted me with welcome candor, no doubt taking in my freefall weight loss, the sacks under my eyes.
“That’s refreshing,” I said, lowering myself gingerly into the armchair that had been Bernie’s and pulling a notebook out of my bag. “Everybody keeps telling me what a babe I am now.”
“People want you to feel better right away,” he said. He sat opposite me in an ergonomic chair and switched into his soft, professional psychiatrist voice. “Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut.” A therapeutic silence filled the room as he waited for me to continue.
“I don’t expect a shortcut,” I countered. I switched into my professional voice, too. “I know I have to plug along this road on my own. But I don’t seem to be following any map. Like the five stages of grief—I can’t seem to get the hang of it.”
“There are no five stages of grief,” Goldenberg said sharply. “They’re a complete misconception. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross studied people who were dying, not people who were grieving. People who are grieving don’t necessarily follow any particular pattern.”
“You’re kidding me!” I said. “At my support group we had handouts! I thought we’d be tested on them later!”
“Somehow, the stages of grief have lodged in the popular consciousness.” Goldenberg shrugged. “Even many professionals buy into them.”
I nodded slowly. It made sense that these emotions mi
ght emerge in a person facing his own death. Denial—of course, Bernie had been incredulous at what was happening to him. Bargaining—yes, we tried everything to forestall the end. Anger—sure, it was tough to accept the unfairness of it. Depression—understandable. And acceptance—ideally, perhaps, a person would want to die at peace with his fate, although I can’t say that Bernie achieved that stage. Why should he?
The truth is, scientists had begun a serious study of grieving only in the last few years, Goldenberg said. “They say that the emotions of loss and sadness come in waves, and that the waves become less intense over time.”
“That explains why I’m weepy one minute and finding something funny the next.”
“Exactly.”
I told him about the nightmares and flashbacks. “Are those normal, too?”
“More than you’d think,” he said. “Many people worry about succumbing to depression after someone they love has died. But trauma is more common than depression among people who are bereaved. You probably suffer from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder.”
Just what I need, I thought. “But I haven’t exactly been waging war in Afghanistan.”
“No, but in some ways you and Bernie were in the trenches, bullets whizzing around you,” Goldenberg said.
The comparison was extreme, but it made sense, too. I thought briefly about the sorts of excruciating medical interventions Bernie had endured. The toll on those left behind can be traumatic, I knew too well. Visions of robot surgeons and failed rescues from drownings didn’t seem much worse than what I had witnessed in broad daylight before he died. I was reliving the horror now in my mind, again and again.
“Also, while you were at war, so to speak, you were surrounded by people who were living a normal life,” Goldenberg said. “You were living a double life, and that makes it difficult to adapt. You still are … everybody around you is continuing normally while you go through this traumatic experience of loss.”
