A Terrible Year: Grief, Anger, and Questions

Fourteen months ago Tom died, my Tom, husband of 41 years and teenage boyfriend for four years before those forty-one. He died with grace, meeting death with a solicitude for those he was leaving behind and with a gratefulness that those whom he loved best were with him for those last hours. Missing from this blog are all the details of that dying, the grief  and horror put on hold while we dealt with the daily indignities of dying. Tom was a very private person, and he asked me not to keep a public record of his struggle with stage IV lung cancer. And so all my thoughts went into my private journals, there for someone, someday, perhaps to read, probe, and analyze the mentality of a person obsessed with recording, that is, if I don't burn my journals before my own death.

When the long vigil was over, I was drained of emotion. So much had been required of me in the almost two years that we dealt with Tom's illness; I was sustained, I think, by my desire to not let Tom down, to be strong and supportive. Oh, I failed at times, overcome with grief or impatience. "Be strong," Tom told me in mid-October of 2019 as I was driving from the heart clinic at Houston Methodist Hospital to the house we had been living in temporarily during Tom's visits to Houston for treatment and less temporarily the last six months of Tom's life when Tom was in and out of MD Anderson Cancer Center hospital and then under hospice care when all hope had been exhausted. "Be strong," he said, as I was weeping while trying to maneuver through Houston traffic. "Be strong," he said, as he was clenching himself in pain, trying not to scream in agony.

And so I girded myself in the emotion that I could find the most strength in, and that emotion was anger, anger at whatever god or fate had chosen this man for this disease, a better man than many who lived and thrived, a man who had taken good care of his health, had never smoked besides a cigar or two in his twenties, had run 8 marathons, the last one just 16 months before his diagnosis; anger at myself, for all the shortcomings I could identify in the many years of our marriage; anger at other people whom I felt had never appreciated the man I loved. And I was determined through love, certainly, but also through the gritted teeth of anger to do this man proud. It was anger and a strong sense of responsibility that held me up, with only a hint of tears, during the celebration of life that I planned and at which I spoke for the love now lost to me forever. Anger solders a strong spine in adversity.

I would like to say that that anger is now spent, but it isn't. It has been fortified by watching a great country fumble at managing a terrible pandemic, an emergency that people knew was coming, just not when, and which a previous administration had given warning. By the time of this emergency, government agencies had been neutered by political appointees, many inexperienced and inept, by under-funding, and by lack of interest from a president whose main concern his entire life has been himself first. Over 300,000 Americans have died of covid-19, and yet there are still Americans who think the disease is a hoax or that wearing masks and socially distancing are unnecessary or that Democrats are socialists and evil while this administration that has been morally, ethically, and legally derelict in its duty retains their loyalty. 

I fear, though, that when this anger is spent it will be replaced with immense cynicism and a shrugging futility. Is that any better than anger? Cynicism and futility absolve one of responsibility, of care and concern, of action.

And so this is what I am thinking about on this last night of 2020--the strength and pitfalls of anger. 

I have had a difficult year and have survived that year in loneliness and in grief. Certainly, others have helped me, and I appreciate their help, but grief, I have discovered, is a lonely emotion, especially during a year when my children, with whom I most share this terrible sorrow, are at a distance difficult to negotiate during a pandemic. I have moved to a state where in normal times, it would be much easier for us to visit one another--no four-hour drive from the nearest large airport to reach the home that Tom and I shared in Apache Country, Arizona--but we are all taking precautions so as not to catch this disease. We know people who have become ill and have either died or are dying now or have experienced long-term health consequences. With that knowledge and the scientific knowledge that health experts have disseminated, it's difficult not to be angry with those who approach the pandemic with such indifference for themselves and others. What should be our responsibility toward those who show such irresponsibility? Another question for the tag end of this year.

I have now lived alone for over a year after 41 years of having a constant and loving companion, not a perfect companion, but one never failing in love. On the last day of his life, Tom asked me if I were afraid, after assuring me that he was not afraid of dying. I told him that I was not afraid. And I wasn't. But the year has been a very difficult one as I dealt with this grief and anger while also dealing with the endless paperwork of widowhood. I also moved across country at the beginning of the tenth month of that widowhood and have been dealing with since then all the details of setting up a new home alone. We moved many times, Tom and I, but we had each other to share the duties of establishing a new home. Now I alone deal with these issues: a crawlspace flooded twice during huge downpours, getting quotes to have that crawlspace waterproofed; a roof that had to be replaced; electrical work that needed to be done; a garden shed that needed to be built; all the little details the state requires for insurance and home ownership. I still do not have diningroom furniture; it's in storage in Houston. Here in Georgia I rent a 10X20 foot storage space to store all the 41 years of accumulated stuff that I cannot fit into the much smaller house that I have purchased and in which I plan to live out the rest of my life. Sometime this year, if the pandemic allows, my children and I will go through those things together, each deciding what he or she wants to keep and leaving the rest to be sold or discarded in some other way.

It's been a difficult year. One could find bitter comfort, I guess, in realizing that the year has been difficult for many people, but I'm not so sure that misery loves company. I certainly do not take comfort in knowing that the loved ones of 300,000+ Americans and millions of others around the world are mourning or that millions of people face hunger and possible homelessness, made jobless in this damaged economy. No, it's anger that I feel, aimed at a feckless government and an equally irresponsible narcissistic president. People still would have died under more responsible leadership, but many fewer people, and aid would have been distributed more readily.

And so I end this year. I would like to say with hope for a better one. I guess there is a little of that as I am in some ways, despite my efforts, an optimist though it's an optimism that makes plenty of room for disappointment. The anger, though, should lead to activism, an activism that looks for ways to make this world a better place. Yes, that's something to hope for.