Surrender

Early after Mark died when I was talking to my therapist, I asked how I could possibly fill the enormous hole in my life when so much of it revolved around the husband who was dead and what he did for a living. Many times over she told me that I would eventually build a new life and it would have meaning. It was all I could do not to roll my eyes and sigh at such nonsense. She also told me that over time grief would loosen its grip and each morning after that I woke up expecting to feel a little bit sad instead of devastated. It did not work like that. Instead, I held a new grandson, joined a writing community explicitly for grief, expanded a garden, lost one job to Covid and got another, painted a bedroom and moved all the furniture into it because the one we had always slept in was too much every night. It took me so long to find my widow legs that I didn’t notice that incrementally I was building a new life and planning ahead. Along the way, though, I fought my circumstances at…