Bold School Lesson 10: Learning how to accept the unacceptable

Monday, March 7, 2022

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Approach life after 50 with curiosity and enthusiasm.

(Alla Dreyvitser/The Washington Post)

By Suzette Moyer

Bold School Lesson 10: Learning how to accept the unacceptable

I knew Bruce was going to die; my husband had an inoperable brain mass diagnosed nine months earlier. He was treated throughout the year with unimaginable amounts of chemotherapy and radiation.

Hospice prepared my family for his death. I was "lucky," perhaps, compared to the people who find out their loved ones have died from an accident, suicide or in military combat. I was "prepared." But no one can really prepare you for death and mourning and grief. It can hit you all at once or take years to absorb.

"You can't hurry love, as the song goes. You can't hurry grief, either," Sigrid Nunez writes in her novel "The Friend."

There are constant reminders when someone you love dies, especially a partner. At night, I used to stay awake for hours, waiting to fall asleep. I would close my eyes, take a deep breath and say a short prayer. I'd reach over to the other side of the bed and put my hand where Bruce was supposed to be and say good night to him.

"I love you," I'd whisper, and then wait for a reply that never came.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is famous for outlining the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance — and wrote these "are a part of the framework that makes up our learning to live without the one we lost."

I'm not sure I agree with these stages, because I can't remember going through all of them — I was never angry and don't remember bargaining much. The depression was overwhelming but remedied with white and orange pills I still take daily. Talking to friends and family helps too.

I still have trouble with the finality of acceptance. It took me awhile to sell Bruce's camera equipment and donate or get rid of the clothing (I still have several Dallas Cowboys jerseys). I hate circling the word "widow" on medical forms. Six years later, am I single or still widowed? Sometimes, when people ask if I am married, I say yes. It's just too complicated.

I found solace in following the Hot Young Widows Group on Instagram a few years ago. Nora McInerny, who you might know from The Lily's video series "Nora Knows What to Say" or her podcast "Terrible, Thanks for Asking," and Moe Richardson started the group after their young husbands died. (McInerny's father also died that year and she miscarried her second child.)

They wanted a place where they could be their "weird, wonderful, widowed selves without judgment." I had found my people.

I contacted McInerny on Bruce's sixth "deathaversary" when I was feeling sad, and she responded right away.

"I am five years out from my losses, and I think the more we can remind people that grief is a chronic condition and not just a singular event, the better we all will be, because eventually grief comes for all of us," McInerny said. "The loneliness of grief is so real. The world around us moves on, and we do not."

Some days, I still feel like that. I get stuck on a memory or hear a song or linger too long on a photo of Bruce; it's a feeling that brings a smile and a tear.

McInerny's advice for handling some of this?

Sometimes looking good helps us feel better. When McInerny took care of herself, she felt better. And "shower," she said. "It's the last thing you want to do when you're grieving and the thing that can actually make you feel better."

We move forward, but this experience and this pain are a part of us forever. "I have more good days than bad now, but when I find myself in the thick of it, I pick a person I'm close to and I share that with them. I call, I email, I text and I say 'this is what I'm feeling today.'"

No feeling is final: It's a line from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, and McInerny says she lives by it. "It reminds me of the temporary nature of everything."

David Kessler, who co-authored "On Grief and Grieving" with Kubler-Ross, recently introduced a sixth stage of grief: meaning.

"Many people look for closure after a loss," he said. "It's finding meaning beyond the stages of grief that most of us are familiar with that can transform grief into a more peaceful and hopeful experience."

Kessler is not suggesting that we find meaning in how people die, but rather why they lived.

"There may just not be any meaning in that, but isn't there meaning from your time with them? Wasn't their life meaningful? What part of them lives in you? What can you take into the future? Or, if they did die tragically, how can you change the world so other people don't die that way?" he said in an interview with Jeff Krasno from the Commune podcast.

My colleague and Bold School editor Jim Webster looks for meaning by writing about his close friend, Tammy. When she died in 1994, Jim appointed himself "guardian of her memory," with the intention of keeping her memory alive. In one post, he wrote that Tammy was the person who believed in him long before he believed in himself.

When he wrote on Facebook or to friends, he often signed off on notes about her with this: "She's here as long as we remember her."

Jim's quote is similar to something often attributed to the artist Banksy: "They say you die twice. One time when you stop breathing, and a second time, a bit later on, when somebody says your name for the last time."

When Bruce died in 2013, it was too soon for me to know the meaning that Kessler talks about.

"They say your parents teach you manners, how to grow up, how to behave," I said in his eulogy. "Bruce showed me how to work and play. How to make my own smiles. How to grab adventure when it was in front of me."

So maybe I did know the meaning, I just didn't realize I knew it yet: Bruce taught me how to live.

Your assignment

Spend some time talking to a friend about a loved one you have lost.

Tell us

What simple act has helped you through the grieving process? What are some words that helped — or didn't help? Submit your response to be featured in Friday's newsletter here.