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Staging Grief…

Filed under: All Women's Blogs — Anne at 12:45 am on Wednesday, October 24, 2007

It is an odd quirk of my personality that I treat myself like a test monkey or a lab rat… maybe the subject of a book. I am never actually experiencing anything in the first person; at least, not until much later, when the character and her motives and modes have been established on paper. Then, and only then, can I step into the body of the character I call “self” and safely experience the experience. First, I must understand. I must know the end before I open the book to get involved.

So it is with learning to be a widow. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross established the protocol for grieving, or at least claimed to define the tangled structure of the emotions of being “left behind.” She defines them like this:

The stages are:

Denial: The initial stage: “It can’t be happening.”
Anger: “Why ME? It’s not fair!” (either referring to God, oneself, or anybody perceived, rightly or wrongly, as “responsible”)
Bargaining: “Just let me live to see my child(ren) graduate.”
Depression: “I’m so sad, why bother with anything?”
Acceptance: “It’s going to be OK.”

This is bullshit. This is all stuff I felt BEFORE my husband died. I felt these things WHILE he was dying. Now I don’t feel; I act. I have established the path for future action, and I put one foot in front of the other on this path. I hover over the character that is me, watching from outside the process, saying to myself, “There she is. She’s reached acceptance.”

This is also bullshit.

This particular lab rat is running on its wheel, faster than ever. It refuses to participate in those stages, and refuses to slow down. It will run and run and run until it collapses. Then perhaps we can cut it open and study the guts of the thing.

A widow (rat) must learn to live life all over again. She must be again a nineteen-year-old girl, and this time, she must not follow the corridor on the maze that says, “husband arrives.” She must, after all, learn to service the car. He will not arrive just in the nick of time to take over this duty. He will not tell her that he will take care of her. He will not be omni-present, overwhelming her days with his plans for the future, sweeping her along in the bliss of innocence and trust. This time, he will not exist. He simply will not exist in this phase of the trial. She must run on the wheel and follow the maze alone.

Widow-rat has never blazed this particular trail. She stands up on her hind legs, wiggling her whiskers as she tests the new smell of the room. She has gained experience and bravery, but she is starting again at the beginning of the maze, deciphering the choices zig-zagging out from the center of her comfortable wheel.

She tries to categorize the things she must master. Kill a cockroach. Check. Learn self defense. Check. Rearrange furniture for more suitable single-rat environment. Check. Clean fridge and dispose of cancer-treating protein shakes, organic lemons, potassium supplements. Check. Store bedroom furniture on which he died. Redecorate. Erase all images of oxygen machines, nebulizers, home health staff and medication checklists. Check.

New environment equals acceptance. Check. Keep running on wheel. Sniff down the corridor of unexplored arms of the maze… Start a new business? Get a different hair cut? Stop pretending to like certain mutual friends?

Such is my life as I watch from above. I took an NRA certification class on Saturday to learn to be proficient with my new “Lady Smith” pistol. Bought the same pistol for my daughter, and now we are gun sisters, prepared to take life if ours are threatened. This is new. This is good. This could be anger. Note the chart, make comparisons to earlier studies, and perhaps someday these things will occur in ways that can be felt and measured in the heart.

For now, it is a study. We analyze, we chart progress, run on the wheel and watch from a distance.

Anne Pierson, Editor, Lab Rat

Tags: women issues, women writers, feminism, women rants