Post mortem

I've seen a number of posts on online support groups for widows in which people complain about incidents when someone says they can relate to being widowed because they are divorced.

I can understand the frustration. There are obviously distinct differences between being divorced and being widowed. But there are also similarities. You thought you'd be spending the rest of your life with a certain special someone, and now that turns out not to be true, and you have to adjust to your new life.

I wouldn't advise that people use the "I can relate; I went through a divorce" line when trying to console widows. It's much better to simply provide a sincere offer of friendship and of being there for the person in any way you can. But on the other side, I think that widows who do hear that line should try to be a little more understanding and less judgmental.

A lot of those posts seem to have an undertone of "How dare you trivialize my loss by comparing it to being divorced?" But the truth is, the end of a relationship for reasons other than death can be as painful as the end of a relationship due to death. Unless someone has been both widowed and divorced, they can't really say which, if either, is worse, and even then it would of course only apply to their own specific set of circumstances.

On October 9, a date that will likely go alongside April 24 in my personal list of significant milestone dates, I was completely blindsided when EB told me she thought we should break up. I was quickly reminded of two previous events in my life: Cara's diagnosis with lung cancer, and Cara's death. Cara's diagnosis with lung cancer was incredibly shocking and horrific... but at least she was still there and still my partner in life and we could both be there to support each other as best we could. Cara's death was incredibly painful and sad... but at least I had had a considerable amount of time to prepare myself for the possibility of that tragedy unfolding.

This breakup wasn't even a divorce, obviously, because EB and I weren't married, nor were we even officially engaged, but we had both expressed to each other numerous times that we intended to spend our lives together. From my point of view, this came completely out of nowhere, and it feels like EB suddenly became a different person and that my EB, the EB I knew and loved, died. So I quickly came to feel that this sudden loss of a life partner, and that constant presence of love and support and friendship, might be even more painful than Cara's diagnosis or Cara's death. I also thought, maybe it's just the initial shock, and I won't feel the same after more time goes by. But now, several weeks out and as finality has settled in, I'm pretty sure I do still feel that way.

There is, of course, another factor here that was not a part of my loss of Cara.

I have come to love [redacted] as if she were my own child. That's something that EB went out of her way to encourage throughout the course of our relationship. I don't say that because I want to make EB look bad, and I debated whether I should include that line at all in this post, but my purpose in writing this blog is to give people a real and raw insight into my life, the good and the bad. It helps me for other people to know "how I really feel," and I'm hopeful that it could be beneficial to other people as well. And I've come to realize that my loving [redacted] like a child of my own, encouraged by EB, is probably the single most pertinent point one must understand in order to understand the trauma I'm now experiencing. Because I haven't just lost a life partner. I also feel like I've lost a child, and taking the two losses together, like I've lost a family. It's really awful. Every time I see a young child, I'm reminded of [redacted], and it tears at my heart.

Making the whole thing even more painful is that it does all come in the aftermath of my previous devastating loss of Cara, and after all my hard fought efforts to rebuild my life through my grief over Cara and through everything else I've been through since then. And yet another way in which this loss could be more painful is that I am able to look back fondly on all my wonderful memories of Cara without those memories being tainted in any way by what happened after. That's not the case here.

I'm sure everyone is wondering what happened. I don't feel it's my place to publicly go into great detail, but I feel comfortable sharing that EB said she realized she just wasn't ready for this and she might never be ready. Hey, being a widow isn't easy. I certainly know that myself. I feel bad for EB. I also feel bad for me. I feel bad for everyone involved!

Almost two years ago, in a blog post about my experiences with chronic pain that I wrote during a horrific recurrence of one particular chronic pain condition that began about half a year after Cara's death, I wrote, "I think a lot of people have been pretty amazed at how well I've seemed to handle [my loss of Cara]. That I was able to do so well is, I think, in large part due to the great example that Cara set in how to deal with tremendous adversity. But I think it's also partly because the aftermath of Cara's death was, in fact, not the worst period of time that I've experienced in my life."

Well, here's another entry for my personal list of "things that have happened to me that are more painful than my wife dying of cancer." It's unique, though, in that it's the only entry on that list that is not an episode of severe chronic pain. And I should remind myself that this breakup, like Cara's death, is not the most painful thing I've experienced.

I'll close this entry by mentioning that the morning after the breakup, another remarkably unlikely and bizarre coincidence joined the long list of unlikely and bizarre coincidences that have happened in my life. When I was backing my car out of my driveway, the song "All Your Favorite Bands" by the band Dawes came on the radio. EB and I went to a Dawes concert for our first date. I consider this coincidence particularly unlikely because it was the only time since (at the very least) that first date that I have heard Dawes on the radio. I know this because I would undoubtedly have made note of any other such occurrence. It was another one of those moments that would have seemed utterly contrived and hokey had it happened in a movie, except that it really happened in my real life. Lyrics selection from the song:

I hope that life without a chaperone is what you thought it’d be
I hope your brother’s El Camino runs forever
I hope the world sees the same person that you’ve always been to me
And may all your favorite bands stay together

My favorite band was EB, [redacted], and Jeffy.