My first husband passed away in September of this year. My indirect post here spoke of some of that impact. But I realized this story wasn’t properly told. And grief, being something we will all have to deal with in some regard eventually, seemed to require it’s own explanation. Or at least the attempt at one.
Our story had a sad ending, as previous marriages often do. The slightly indescribable part of the story that included his passing was astonishingly too close to an anniversary.
I found out he was gone the exact same day, in fact on the way to the airplane to take me home, as my last day with a company I had began working with since immediately following the dissolution of our marriage. Almost 18 years with a company that became a second family. A company I made the very challenging decision to leave to pursue more education.
I found out he was gone the exact same day I left the company that held me through the toughest years following our very tough split.
And I didn’t know what to do with that. This new anniversary. This secondary grief. It didn’t seem mine to hold after so long. I wasn’t sure that I had any right to it.
My darling DD believes that humans are pattern matching machines. His exact words are:
I believe we are pattern matching machines made of meat. Stochastic parrots. Trying to find meaning (and the occasional apex predator) in the dark.
– A. Bissonnette, 2023
And yes, he’s definitely the poetic one. I would say to this, we have evolved and survived this long as a species due to our painfully impressive ability to match consequences with actions, even when cause and effect may feel obvious to us directly, and not necessarily built on peer-reviewed research or data.
Humans notice anniversaries and mark them with religious vigor. We notice apparent coincidences. Some of which stay with us as memories. Some of which have helped us survive. Some that we attribute to divine intervention. And I believe these pattern matching abilities are some of the attributes that make us truly marvelous. A little bit of the scientific method in us all.
But this particular coincidence or symmetry or perhaps shocking new anniversary, when I recognized it, felt like a unexpected curtain drawn on nearly two decades of existence. It transported me back to the before-times and re-broke open all the parts that I thought had started to heal. It cracked free the emotions I had buried because they were too hard to look at. It painted all the memories in a new light, now that he was gone.
I am completely unsure of how else to describe this. I left him. And yet, I railed aloud to all the gods and angels that he didn’t deserve this after all he had been through. As though suffering was somehow earned or could be explained by checks and balances. I railed aloud to myself for somehow being the indirect cause of this, 18 years later, which is, of course, ludicrous since cancer does not care at all about your life history. Cancer is indiscriminate.
I mourned deeply for his kids and their mother. I wanted to do anything to shield them from this pain. I held my own extra close after learning of his passing.
And I guess my point in all of this is: this is grief. It is messy and intolerable and completely impossible to explain properly to anyone, as everyone’s own grief experience is their own. And this grief also held something else: as I felt I didn’t deserve any of these feelings – having broken the agreement we made so long ago to love and cherish each other forever. Having broken his young heart.
My darling DD had another little bit of wisdom for me as he does, always, in unexpected comments and music shared. He sent me this song by Ainsley Wills. He had become lost in her poetic recount of celebrating a different kind of loss one day. A kind that you choose. And I listened to this song the entire week on repeat. It was everything I always wanted to say and never had the chance. It was a beautiful reminder that this kind of pain isn’t isolated, nor is it original. It is something many of us have experienced, in some form. It is the dreadfully, insufferable, shared story of many.
But I wanna celebrate, I couldn’t if I’d stayed, there was love and our mistakes, so let’s try to celebrate….so let’s try … I wanna only see the good.
I wish only peace for this special person who was someone I had to leave behind, so many years ago. Left without the experience of the someone I am now, without the ability to explain properly or to love properly, the way he deserved. Perhaps he will know now, wherever he is. Perhaps it is enough that you are reading this and can mark this statement as fact: he was someone special. And he died too young. And any of us that knew him are devastated by that fact.