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A year ago today, on a sunny but unseasonably cold afternoon, my family and friends gathered around me and walked me through the longest hour of my life: the funeral of my love, my wife, the mother of our three children, the funeral of my Lauren.
Lauren truly was the center of my universe. My everything. I never cared much about money, career success, social status, or things of that nature. I had something way more valuable than those things; I had true love with a woman of uncommon beauty, grace, courage, depth, warmth, humor, and feeling. I had everything I wanted and needed in life. I got to go to sleep with her each night and wake up with her each morning and as long as I had that I knew we could figure our the rest.
We were married for thirteen years, and during that time together we grew so close, and I felt so drawn to her that after awhile I think I forgot where I ended and she began.
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Lauren died young, at age thirty-eight, and relatively unexpectedly. In the summer of 2007 we learned she had a benign brain tumor, and while we were relieved that it was benign, it was still a serious issue that needed dealing with; the tumor was large and growing in the neighborhood of her brain stem. She decided to have the tumor surgically removed.
She paid for that decision with her life.
Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong. Despite approaching the ordeal with the utmost of courage and optimism, she suffered one set-back after another and eventually, a month after she initially entered the hospital, she died, on November 20th, 2007.
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I could never find a way to explain what the first days after her death were like. Nothing coherent comes to mind; just a random string of words denoting pain and suffering of the highest level, of the type I never even remotely knew existed in this world. Excruciating. Burning. Screaming. Searing. Vaporized. Decimated. Lost. Hell on earth.
My worst fear in life was that I would have to live through the death of Lauren. And when that worst fear came to fruition, the reality of it far exceeded my worst nightmares. I had moved to a land without any recognizable signposts; nothing looked familiar, I had experiences whatsoever that I could draw on for strength or comfort or wisdom.
Honestly, I just wanted to lay down and not wake up. That may not be the most flattering thing to say, but it is the truth. I just wanted to die.
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Eventually, around three months out, I had to accept the likelihood that my wish for death would not get fulfilled anytime soon, and I also had to accept the fact that I had three children who had lost a mother and probably needed their father.
In some ways, this period, the three to four months out phase, was worse than the very beginning, because much of it was marked by a deep despair, by a total loss of hope. In the earliest stages, while the pain was unbelievable, unbearable, and virtually indescribable, somewhere inside of me I had a glimmer of faith that I might want to live again someday, down the road. But I had lost that glimmer, and I began to believe that the rest of my days on this planet would be a miserable, loveless, joyless, monochromatic existence. I used to sit up at night and think that while they may not have buried my body down with Lauren's, they buried the best of me, and the best of my days. My life, for all intents and purposes, had ended.
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I think one of the reasons I took Lauren's death so hard - beyond the obvious facts that I loved and adored her beyond all reason, and living with her made me happier than I ever had expected to be - was that I had managed to live my first forty-one years with a naivete that I had little awareness of. No, I did not have the most idyllic existence in history, I had my problems, some of them somewhat painful, but after I met and fell in love with Lauren, all those problems just seemed like temporary roadblocks on the path to my true purpose in life.
As someone with a bit of storyteller in him, I constructed the narrative in my head, and I bought it hook, line and sinker: me and my true love would live happily ever after, we would raise our children together, happily grow old together, and then, someday in the future, I would get sick, and as I lay on my deathbed Lauren and the kids would gather around and we would hold hands and say our last I-love-yous and I would fade away in peace.
I suppose we all have a bit of storyteller in us; we have to find ways to make meaning out of the chaos of the world, the chaos of life. The meaning does not exist inherently; we create it in the stories we tell. I had written my story, and it gave meaning and shape to my life, it propelled me through the ups and downs of daily life.
Then Lauren died, and her death made a mockery of the story I had written, and I had no other story to tell myself.
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Someone told me, early on, not to look for answers; just keep living, keep getting up every day, keep walking, they said, and eventually you will walk through this. So in spite of the seeming futility of it, I walked. I spoke to a grief counselor once a week, I talked constantly to those around me, I journaled, I wrote diaries here. I made myself meet people for coffee, made myself take on more and more of the daily tasks of raising kids (I had a lot of support on the front, fortunately), made myself start cooking again.
At around five months, these efforts seemed to be paying off a little bit. The pain still felt unbearable, I still didn't feel like I really wanted to live the rest of my life, but every once in awhile, in some small way, the light of the world would shine down on me; not for long, but it would shine. One of the children would make me laugh for a few seconds, the breeze on a spring day would feel good for a minute or two, I would notice I had actually enjoyed a few bites of my dinner. Small things, but forward-moving.
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At the end of June, I left a job in progressive politics, a job I had held for eleven years. For the most part I had found that job interesting and rewarding, and over those years I met a lively cast of characters, some of whom will be friends of mine for life. But I found myself unmotivated in the extreme; I just didn't care about doing the job anymore. I had an exceptionally hard time focusing on anything complicated. I missed my kids all day, I stared at my computer and daydreamed about Lauren all day, I talked to my co-workers about my pain all day, I ran off into the bathrooms to cry all day; I did everything but WORK all day. Contrary to popular wisdom, work did not "distract" me from my grief. So I quit.
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And that's when the real healing started.
My children are now almost ten, almost four, and just past two years old. Though as adults we often profess a desire to "live in the moment", my experience has been that no one lives in the moment quite like a little child. At the ages of my two youngest, I don't think they live anywhere else.
So when I left work and spent almost every waking hour with my kids, without realizing it, I opened the door to a world where my babies constantly would invite me into the moment. I didn't always accept that invitation, of course. But often enough, I did. And through the summer and fall we began to string together moments, and suddenly I noticed I had hours, and then days, where I felt happy to be alive. I had moved beyond the wish for death, then moved beyond the grudging acceptance of my existence and into a tentative embrace of life again.
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Lauren's mother flew in from England last night. I got to the airport a bit early and wandered up to the observation area. Sat down on a bench and looked out at the runway and all the lights strung out there, shining in the darkness that now falls so early in the day. The first time I ever flew, it was out of this airport. I was twenty six years old and on my way to see Lauren. It was August 31st, 1993. We hadn't seen each other in four and a half months.
I looked out at those lights and thought about the fact that no matter how long I live, I will never set foot in an airport without thinking of Lauren, without thinking of the first two and a half years of our history together, without thinking of all the time we spent apart and how that time apart drew us so closely together, without thinking back to all the ecstatic reunions and agonizing goodbyes that took place in airports.
I looked out at those lights and thought of all this and suddenly it hit: I wasn't crying. Yes, the memories stung a bit, but they brought a sweet smile with them as well. I felt gratitude, that I had the luck to live moments of such intensity, that I had the luck to have crossed paths with Lauren, that I was the man who got to love her the way she deserved to be loved, and that she loved me. I felt gratitude that she left me with three children who have, I think, saved my life.
Yes, those memories will always sting. This will always hurt. I will always miss her. I will always regret losing the years I thought we would have, I will always regret that she did not live to see these children grow up, and that they did not get to grow up with the wonderful mother she was.
But looking out at those lights I can't help but notice the memories bring more than pain and agony and regret now. I can't help but notice that to my surprise, things have changed; to my surprise, I have survived this first year without Lauren.