52 Card Project 2024: Week 4: Shipwreck

*Sigh*

This is the fourth year I've been doing these digital collages, and every year on the fourth week of the year, the collage has been about the same subject. I am not sure it always will be. But after all, I select the subject for the collage on whatever I've been thinking about that week.

This week included the sixth anniversary of Rob's death.

There is a diffidence, a shyness about grief that you sometimes see in widows in our culture. An embarrassed self-consciousness. As time extends further and further out from our loss, we face a certain amount of judgment, even (and yes, we widows can be oversensitive, but I have felt it) a very faint tinge of...contempt. Yes, of course we know that you loved and miss the person you lost. But life goes on. Shouldn't you as well? There's an unspoken but blunt sense of get over it already.

Well, I assure you I am continuing to live my life. I am not frozen in time. I have cleaned much of Rob's stuff out of the house. I continue to go out and have new experiences. I have even fallen in love again.

But I know Rob will never hear me speak Scottish Gaelic. He will never see his daughters marry. He will never hold his grandchildren. I may dream about him, but I'll never hear his spoken words or feel his touch again.

And it still hurts.

When I was considering seriously the question Am I really going to do another collage about this? I remembered a post I've seen floating around Facebook that hit me with the ring of truth. Here it is:

I'm middle aged. What that means is that I've survived (so far) and a lot of people I've known and loved did not.

I've lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, father, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, pets, neighbors, and a host of other folks. Gratefully I have not lost a child but I know people who have (too many), and I can't imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here's my two cents...

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. But I never have and I don't want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don't want it to "not matter". I don't want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it.

Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can't see. As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves.

When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive. In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

That is what the grief has been like this week, perhaps. The anniversary of his death have brought back memories that are like fifty-foot waves, instead of one hundred-foot ones.

There is much in my life that has gone on without him that makes me happy.

Yet I love him. I still miss him.

And this week, I grieved him.

Image description: Background is a stormy sea (a portion of Thomas Moran's painting "Moonlight Shipwreck at Sea.") A remnant of a wrecked ship is tossed by the sea in lower center. A semi-transparent of a woman dressed in white floats in the center of the painting. One extended hand hovers over the wrecked ship. The other stretches toward a white lily flower (a symbol of grief in the language of the flowers) in the upper right.

Shipwreck



Click here to see the 2024 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2023 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2022 52 Card Project gallery.

Click here to see the 2021 52 Card Project gallery.