I heard a really touching story yesterday and wanted to share it.
A woman's husband died about 7 years ago very suddenly and tragically. They had just moved into their dream home and were involved as volunteers in a homeless shelter.
She is now in her early sixties and a little while ago she was in the shower when it hit her: she wasn't living her dream. She was living HIS. She wanted to keep things going that her husband had dreamed of and wanted because he didn't have the chance to live and enjoy them. It was like a mission for her.
But it wasn't her life. It was his. The life he didn't get to live.
So, she put the house on the market and moved to a smaller place with no yard. She took up fishing, and found she really loved it. While she was out on the lake, she met someone. And, suddenly, her life has opened into something that's hers.
Thinking about this, I can really relate. My husband died so suddenly that I am often struck by things he should be doing, or would have done if he was here. But he isn't. So I feel like I need to complete some things or take them on, for his sake. In his honour, is more like it. It is a bit of a mission, and it is also a campaign.
It makes me think of Melody Green or Yoko Ono. Even now, many years after the death of their famous husbands, they are still remembered as the widow of... Yoko lives that out when she's in public, and perhaps in reality she's moved into her own life and her own campaigns. I just don't get that impression from what I've seen. Melody has turned Keith's ministry into her own and it's blossomed into something huge: Last Days Ministries has produced high quality materials for years. Melody has written books, and raised her children in honour of her husband. But she also remarried and has had her own ministry that has carried on where Keith left off. She complements Keith's legacy but isn't overshadowed by it.
I hope that, if I do choose to take up some of my husband's dreams, that I will do so in a way that is my own. I don't want to live his life that he couldn't live. I need to live mine. Right now, that is often painful and difficult. I fight my life a lot of the time. I wish I was anywhere else but here.
But, on the other hand, I don't want to turn my life into a shrine to his memory. That would be like staying stuck permanently in an unhealthy place. I have my own life and he would want me to live it, however painfully, as long as I am here.
I don't want to cut out every single vestige of him either. I was permanently changed by his presence, and now, again, I am permanently changed by his absence.
Part of the grief process is moving through to find a new life. Actually, it reminds me of the Schlossburger development theory, which I quite like: moving in, moving through, moving out. I think it takes quite a while to accept that we have to move in, and that is part of the trauma of this loss. Once we start moving through, it becomes apparent that it will be much slower and much longer than we initially expected.
Grief takes time, but life keeps going.
Somehow, we have to keep living. Forever changed, marked and scarred, but we have survived. Eventually we will find our way out, but we will never completely leave this journey of grief. That's not the "voice of doom", it's reality.
I have set before you life and death....Choose Life!! Deuteronomy 30
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