Losing a Loved One

The widows: Wendy, Ro, Candy, MaryKay, me, Irene

By Judi Curry

With every holiday that passes; with every special occasion that comes up, I am reminded how much I miss my husband.  It is always traumatic when you lose someone that you love, but I think it is more traumatic when you lose your best friend, your lover, your confidante, your weekly date, your protagonist, your companion, etc. all at the same time.  The heart heals, but the scab always remains.  Just scratch the surface a little bit and all the angst returns.

I got so tired of people saying to me, “I know how you feel”. Unless they lost a spouse they have no idea how I felt.  Yes, losing a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a child, etc. is horrible but it is nowhere near the same thing as losing a spouse.  Please understand – I am not negating the loss of a loved one. Those feelings of loss are genuine, but not the same.  I know; I have lost a mother and a father; I have loss a granddaughter at 13 months old; I lost a sister.  I will always feel those losses, but I was not prepared for the loss of my husband.

So how did I survive? How am I now able to function; to laugh and smile; to write; to enjoy certain things of life?  I joined a support group just weeks after Bob died.  (In actuality, I joined two support groups – a “widow/widower’s” group and a group of people that had lost someone dear to them.  In the course of things I brought both groups together and for several years after the deaths of our loved ones we got together frequently.  We all shared the grief and dismay of losing our loved ones, and several of us became very close and see each other regularly.

But this past week a few of us got together to reminisce about the past ten years.  We found out what others are doing; we found out how they were coping without their loved ones, and, interesting to note that only one of the widows in our support group has remarried. One, the youngest of our group, has a “significant other” but said that she really has no desire to marry again.

So why am I even writing about this? Because we talked about friends that we have that have lost loved ones since we lost ours.  And, to a person, we all said that without the support group we never would have survived.  We could cry; we could rant and rave; we could threaten to kill ourselves, and WE ALL UNDERSTOOD where each of us was coming from.  We truly “understood how the others were feeling.”

So many times I might break down and cry over missing Bob, and people would say, “as time goes by it will get better.”  That’s a loaded statement for me, because “As Time Goes By” happened to our song. Instead of making things better, that statement always made things worse.  Sure, we all agreed that things have gotten better – we are not weepy all the time any more; we can function; we can even have a good time.  But deep down we all would do anything possible to give us an extra hour with our loved one. (Many years ago I wrote how a group of us went to hear a “Medium” to see if we could contact our lost loves.  It still gives me the chills to know that one of our group did, in fact, establish contact with her Mother at two different sessions. The rest of us had no contact.)

Getting together after 10 years was heartwarming.  None of us cried as we have done in the past; All of us said that 10 years is too long not to get together – that we need to do it more often, and it was even suggested that we invite our leader – in this case Colleen who worked for Sharp Hospital because that was where our group met – and let her see where we are now.

Some of us talked about the loneliness – guess who – that comes at night when things quiet down at the house and you are, basically, all alone.  Others talked about the traveling that they do just to get away and enjoy life again.  But, again, it all boils down to the tremendous help that we received from the Support Group.

Even though we had “support” from friends and relatives, it was this group that kept us sane, able to cope, and aware of difficulties we were facing without any aspersions cast on us.  Even though the entire group was not there Saturday, I want to thank each and every one of them for being there when they were sorely needed; and, in spite of their own grief, were helpful to me in alleviating my pain.  I only hope that I did the same for them.