From Bliss to Grief: Or How My New Year Did Not Turn Out the Way I Thought It Would

On Monday, January 4, I posted my simple three-word goal for 2021: "Bliss, not dread."

On Tuesday, January 5, I got the call that when the nursing home staff had checked on my husband that morning, they found him, in their words, "with no vital signs." Our long, complicated, challenging, beautiful, frustrating, strange, loving, and often heartbreaking life together had come to an end. 

Needless to say, I haven't had what I would call "bliss" since then. 

The closest I came was in the miraculous gift of the truck ride I had with my first-born son through the Colorado mountains that same day, the landscape that had been so dear to my husband, the landscape we had experienced so often as a family. That day was one of God's greatest gifts to me, as was the knowledge that my husband's passing, after years of agonizing decline, was in every way a blessing.

But then the grief came, and I was surprised at its intensity. 

When my father died, my mother, who didn't go in for grief (private or public), chose poems for my sister and me to read at his memorial service. Mine was Christina Rosetti's poem that begins, "When I am dead my dearest /  sing no sad songs for me," and instructs those left behind, "And if thou wilt, remember/ And if thou wilt, forget." 

When my mother died, twenty-five years later, I was teaching Maymester, which is an entire semester crammed into thirteen days. I taught the day before she died, I missed class on her dying day, and I taught the day after she died; after all, missing one day of Maymester was equivalent to missing an entire week of a regular course. And my mother had so wanted to leave this life behind, asking me every day to "pray that it will be today." Her passing was so peaceful and beautiful, with my sister and me there beside her, each holding one of her thin, wasted hands. 

This time, however, I'm barely able to function. I'm haunted by sadness that I wasn't there with him in those final moments, that indeed I hadn't even seen him in person since late summer, thanks to the cruelty of COVID's enforced isolation. I'm spending untold hours reading over the journals I kept on our trips to Europe together: our honeymoon in the hill towns of Tuscany, the trip to Austria when I was finally pregnant (after years of infertility) with our first child, the family trip to France when my husband's health problems were just beginning and I foolishly thought a trip to Paris could cure anybody of anything. I keep listening over and over again to a song we sang back in Girls' Chorus in high school, "Softly, As I Leave You," and sobbing as I listen to my favorite version, sung by the great and under-appreciated Eydie Gorme. 

I've lost interest in trying to find a new book idea, even though writing has been my life's most reliable source of joy. I don't feel like reading, though I did find peace in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, a stunningly beautiful hymn to love, loss, forgiveness, and redemption. I sleep a lot. I eat huge quantities of comfort food. I waste hours doing Sudoku puzzles on my I-pad, even though I have long considered this a terrible vice - oh, but such a soothing one. And then I listen again to "Softly, As I Leave You" and cry some more.

Everyone tells me that grief is good and right and necessary and inescapable. On a friend's recommendation, I read Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May. May reminds us that life is cyclical, that winters come to us, not once in a lifetime, but with recurring regularity, and we need to learn how to accept and even appreciate their austere beauty. But it's easier to appreciate winter's gifts, I might add, when one can swim in geothermal pools in Reykjavik, witness the solstice at Stonehenge, and fly to the Arctic to behold the Northern Lights, as May recounts doing!  My wintering is much less glamorous. It feels a lot more like plain old depression.

So I'm setting aside my new year's goal of "bliss." Bliss feels awfully strenuous right now. It feels like too much effort. It actually sounds like quite a greedy goal, come to think of it. What was wrong with aspiring just for "joy"? Or humdrum happiness? I would welcome humdrum happiness right now.

Here's what I do know. Happiness, joy, and even bliss will all come again. I can help them along by doing what I can to conduct my wintering with a modicum of self-care. On days when I tell myself, "It's all right not to floss your teeth today because you are just SO SAD," I can force myself to spend two minutes flossing. My little dog, Tanky, does a good job of urging me to go outside for lengthy walks. I have no choice but to prepare to teach my online children's literature class for this spring and to help my three writing mentees grow in their craft.  When I make myself work on these projects, it does feel good, as if a little bit of the life force is stirring within me, a little bit of life's sap is beginning to rise.

The poet Shelley wrote, "Oh wind, if winter comes, can spring be far behind?" Spring will come again, for me and for all who grieve, though not necessarily on any prescribed schedule. But for now, my only goal for this no-longer-new year is to let myself grieve, to weather this winter of my heart, and let spring come again to me in her own sweet time.