01. how are you doing?
written 1 month and 2 days after
… I wrote a book.
In early 2024 you will be able to read HERE AFTER — a book about him, our life, my grief.
It is still surreal that HERE AFTER will be a physical thing in the world. I am so honoured to share the book with you all.
If you’d like to receive updates about the book and these occasional letter-missives (which I don’t write regularly, just when I feel like I want to), please feel free to stay subscribed or to subscribe.
My husband died. Ten days later, I almost did too (more on this later). So, I have been asked ‘how are you doing?’ a lot, lately.
I have a really difficult time with this question.
The thing is, I’ve asked people who are in pain this question before. I would rather, when people are in pain, reach out and maybe say the wrong thing from a good place, than leave that person with silence, with a void.
So, when I say I know this question comes from good, well-intentioned, often deeply caring places, I really know because I’ve been that good, well-intentioned person before.
But still, now, as the person in pain, I have found something I did not know before. I find myself looking at that question on my phone screen and thinking I don’t know how to answer this.
The thinking is part of my problem (actually make that part of my much larger-context Problem). Particularly, I think about what it is that the asker really wants me to say? I run over the list of possibles:
Do they want honesty?
Assurance?
Platitudes?
To share their own story if I reciprocate, as I feel I ought?
To access details they might not be welcome to by way of this inquiry?
Are they asking about my grief?
Or my physical, ailing body?
Both?
I can never discern which of the possibles is the correct one. So, I end up staring at the message.
And almost always, I end up leaving it on ‘read’.
This is counter productive because right now, I feel excruciatingly alone. I have been told by my therapist to seek connection. To allow people in. So when someone reaches out, I want to reach back. And yet, the dangling question mark. My lack of response.
But it’s not just the possibles that stall me. It’s my answer too.
My response, really, to the question is not so much about death as it is about time. Rather, falling out of time, as I did, when I sat in a small, cramped hospital room only big enough to house three small chairs.
As Denise Riley says in her excellent and crisp essay Time lived, without its flow, I am not interested in parsing this falling out of time as dissociation, or psychotic breakage, or even neurological impact. I am not qualified, as Riley says, to consider it in these ways, and more so too, as Riley also says, I want only, here, to explain my answer to the question, to start to tell you – if you should be wondering how I am doing – what it is like to be doing out of time.
To start, falling out of time does not mean the end of life.
I am still, as of the moment of writing this, living. I am just doing so within a temporal reality that is entirely altered, entirely counter, entirely unlike the time I inhabited previously. I see time, now, as a wending, silken ribbon above me, and I am looking up at its flow, its continuing undulations. Time as I knew it before was for seemingly impossible things, now: moving, living by the sea, having a child, qualifying for a mortgage, seeing him go gray, and on. That I have only just looked up and seen time in this way, makes me lucky, I realize. There are many others thrown out of time, and who live this way, who have gone before me, who look up as well.
Explaining this is painful. Words keep splintering. I want to alter the ribbon and call it a visible air stream, instead. I want to delete everything I have written, and try again to get it right. Not only is it difficult to explain to someone who might still be inside time as they know it, it is embarrassing. I am sharply aware of the way in which these words sound in my mouth. I don’t want to appear maudlin or pitiful, though I am both.
Still, it was, is, such a remarkable cleaving, I feel compelled to try to describe it. Even in words that perhaps everyone else who has felt this separation has already used.
Trying to describe it, even now, feels unimaginable. And yet. This word, this unimaginable, is a part of the answer, too.
By merit of my age, I am in a comparatively small group. The average age of a widow, according to Google, is 59 years old. Because of my age, perhaps, or maybe just because I am amid a devastation, I have also experienced many people telling me that what I am living within is “unimaginable.”
This is another well-intentioned offering that I do not know how to respond to. To say that my widowhood, my husband’s death, perhaps even my unexpected emergent health event, is ‘unimaginable’ seems to me, in some ways, to possess a wicked duality, albeit likely a duality that the speaker has not given any thought.
I don’t expect people to think about this duality, really. After all, I never did, until now.
But the thing is, to say to me what I am, what I am within, is ‘unimaginable,’ seems to signal not only an awareness of the severity and horror and scale of my reality but also a (likely unconscious) desire to actively not imagine what it is like for me.
It is horrifying, what I am experiencing, and I would wish it on nothing - organic or inorganic, moral or immoral - but still, when I read or hear the word, I wonder: is it so unimaginable?
Picture your beloved being entirely inaccessible, entirely gone from you. Picture the parts of your life that your beloved directs and now erase the beloved from those parts. Find the spiders that frighten you untouched, because your beloved is not there to kill them, or scoop them up in a glass and release them in the grass outside. Find the indentation of your beloved’s ass on the couch and now erase it. Find your beloved’s mouth on your mouth and now make it vanish. Find the dishes your beloved faithfully washed by hand to save the planet and now leave them piled up, on the floor, on the counter, in the sink. Leave them there until dust collects.
This is how you could imagine.
It is understandable to me that my life, such as it is right now, is horrifying, that it might not be something anyone might want to look directly at, let alone try to fathom, but I do not want to be confined to the unreal land of the ‘unimaginable.’ I am already so acutely aware of being alone. To be ‘unimaginable’ too seems like another layer of loneliness that I do not want to bear.
These are pieces of this project, whatever it is, that I have begun.
I am trying to articulate some of the aspects of this doing, of this unimaginable, for not only you, but me, as well. My life seems unimaginable to me too. I put that loneliness and alienation on myself as well. So, if you were, perhaps, worrying that you have said this to someone who is in pain, let it be known that I have said this before too, to others. But I have learned differently, now. I have learned to ask different questions, with easier answers (did you drink water today? did you eat?). I have learned too that while it is not unimaginable, that my husband is gone, still feels unreal.
In fact, I wake each morning when my sleeping pill wears off, sit directly up in bed, and turn to face the mirror. I make myself look myself in the eye and I say:
You are here because your husband is dead.
He is not coming back.
I say this every morning, because I too want it to be unimaginable. I too want it not to be so. But it is. So, I have to tell myself until I can fully feel it.
These are the thoughts that have come to me, to you, after a month without him.
And no, the month that it has been does not feel like any other month ever has. This month has been as acute as the days after his death were, and as ancient as I imagine thirty-five years without him might feel.
The stream of time has continued, and yet, here I am beneath it.
Perhaps this is not what you expected.
I don’t know what I thought I would say either. I thought perhaps I might tell you about my beloved’s crescendo of a laugh. Or what it was like the first day in the After (this is my only measurement now, outside time: Before and After).
Likely, I will still tell you these things.
There are so many other pieces. Even this piece, this unimaginable falling out of time, I feel I have been able to only partially reveal.
I suppose that is why I am writing, and if you are reading, should you continue to do so, please do stay as long as it suits you, I’ll be here.