When Grief Steals Your Will to Live
Two years ago today, August 1, at the University of Alabama Birmingham hospital, a neurologist oncologist asked if we could talk privately. We walked into a family waiting room. He asked the other two visitors to leave, and then he sadly, compassionately said, “I’m sorry. There’s nothing more we can do.” He proceeded to explain that the comprehensive CT scan they’d done of my husband two hours earlier revealed that the cancer, which was insofar as my knowing two hours earlier was treatable, had spread to all of his major organ systems.
He named them. I heard liver. He named more, but I heard nothing but the silent scream of hope falling into the void.
In my life, in my husband Sean’s near-year-long cancer battle, I have never abandoned hope. Even when I have wanted to stop hoping, I have always hoped. Relentless hope is my one romantic flaw. In my heart of hearts, I have always hoped for and believed in the possibility of miracles, of fairy tales that come true. I have always hoped for (and been equally terrified of) a surprise celebration; for a grand gesture of love, such as being whisked away to Cypress or a really good taco bar; for a wealthy, unknown relation by the title of “Lord” to pass peacefully and grant his castle full of books to his next of kin who is somehow me; or for a delicious brownie that both relaxes you and burns calories. Despite none of these hopes and some of my more mundane desires coming to fruition, I alway hoped.
The night before as I followed the ambulance from University Hospital in Mobile to UAB in my mother’s white 4-Runner, I believed we were the damn cavalry riding in on the hopes of one final miracle. We’d escaped near death in the hands of Grim Cancer once…twice…but it was not to be thrice.
Sean was thankfully heavily medicated and was — I believe — unaware of his death sentence until the evening before he left this earthly space. I was unwittingly already coming undone. Being told there was nothing more that they could do was a sledgehammer to the mold that shaped me. I had no idea how to live without hope or without Sean.
However, for the next few days, I wasn’t thinking about me; my sole focus was his comfort; it was protecting him from finding out in his less-than-coherent state what lay ahead. It was a battle that I went into knowing I would lose because eventually, he would leave, and then, I would fall.
I did fall. I fell off of the face of the earth as I knew it because my world had disappeared. I could not stand to be in my body. I hated being awake. I couldn’t sleep. I woke up every hour. I was itching to escape my skin. The funeral came and went, so did people. I had lots of friends who checked on me, who cared, who would’ve stood between my fistful of pills or a revolver and my own head if they had to…if they knew how badly I didn’t want to live anymore.
And that’s the thing…it’s true that the first three months for a widow or widower are the hardest, the ones where they’re most likely to die from grief or self-neglect or suicide. I would love to say that as a friend to someone in this pain there was something you could do to make them feel better, but there’s not. All you can do is show up and be there and make sure that they can’t hurt themselves when they tell you they are ready to die, too.
In some ways, I was lucky. In his final few hours of lucidity on August 3, Sean said something that made me ask my dad to take the two handguns Sean kept in our bedroom closet out of the house. They were safely stowed but also loaded — a good ol’ Southern security system. There were guns in the safe, but I had no idea how to load them; those guns were not a threat to me. The other two, as I sank into agonizing depression and absolute grayness, would have been.
And I know what you might be thinking…Amy, women take pills; they don’t shoot themselves. But I assure you, when you are in the depths of despair and you are hurting so badly from the inside out that all you want to do is to get out of your body, a one-bullet solution is genderless.
That was nearly two years ago. Today, I feel the depth of pain and grief and please just get me out of this body feeling that I had, but I’ve learned to sit with it. Someone else has Sean’s phone number — has had it since May 2020 — so I no longer send him texts begging for guidance or to let me join him beyond the veil. I have learned to meditate, to practice yoga, to journal, and to just cry.
I have learned to not self-medicate, not to drown my too-big-for-my-body feelings with alcohol or bulimia or shopping. I have also learned how important it is for me to keep these practices up because once you experience complex grief, you are so much closer to the veil that you are never not at risk of being consumed by it…of deciding that yes, taking all of my anxiety medication at once is what I need…going to sleep and never waking up is exactly what I need.
When I have these big feelings, I have learned to remind myself that I WILL feel differently tomorrow. So, today, when I had big feelings, and I felt like I was going crazy from the inside out, I laid down on my bed, and I asked myself, “Body, what do you need?”
My body needed to cry, and it needed to journal over and over and over that I was sad and that this hurts.
Complex grief is just that…it’s complex. I live bigger because of it. I feel more because of it. I have fallen further and will rise higher because of it. Today, two years later, I am hurting more because of it, but I am sitting here, letting myself feel, knowing that Sean would be proud of me and knowing that I have come a long way and that I am also proud of me.
As I laid in bed crying a few hours ago, I thought what Glennon Doyle says: we can do hard things. Yes, we can.
Sometimes the hard thing is doing nothing. For me, in the throes of grief, it’s sitting still, not reaching for a drink. It’s meditating. It’s journaling. It’s being with myself instead of looking to a person or Amazon for validation. It’s hard to just be, and it’s even harder to be alone. But even as I say this, I know I’m not alone. I have my friends, the ones who have relentlessly showed up for over two years, and I have myself who for the first time I’m truly showing up for and who I am nurturing and giving care to the way I did with Sean. None of it’s easy, but tomorrow, I’ll be glad I did the hard thing.
A Note about Suicidal Ideation
In this writing, I indicate that I had hard feelings where I didn’t want to live. That is very true. As I learned from my hour+ conversation with the suicide help hotline, people like me equally want to live and want to die…in theory. What we really want is to stop hurting. Most of us and your friends who have experienced trauma and complex grief just want to stop hurting, but the pain is so great that death seems like the only option.
If you have a friend who has expressed that they are hurting, please take them seriously. I am lucky that I am still alive. When I look at all of the challenges I experienced in my first year of widowhood, which includes a DUI, I am just proud of myself because I fucking survived. I didn’t blow my brains out. I never took enough medication. I didn’t cut a major vein. The biggest thing that kept me hanging on and that kept me from going over that ledge is my children. My daughters needed me. They already lost their dad. They were and are too beautiful and innocent and perfect for me to ruin. So, even though I felt like I had ruined them enough by being a fuck-up of a mom my lonely first months and year of widowhood, I didn’t die. And for that, I am an amazing mother and woman; the mother and woman who wrote a suicide note in December 2019 would never have believed or said that.
Sometimes you guys, the best thing we can do is not die. If that’s your biggest accomplishment today, I am so damn proud of you. I am squeezing your hand, and I am pulling you forward to tomorrow along with me. Trust me when I say that the world needs you.
