Although knowing the research will not ease your suffering, use it to ease your anxiety. If you have strange or frightening sensations they are probably normal, not signs you are going crazy or breaking down. (The exception is strong fantasies of hurting yourself or someone else physically. Then you must get professional help.)
Confidants help. Feel free to lean on as many people as you can. If being alone is very difficult, call someone. But be selective – call someone who will make you feel better, not worse. If you want help with specific things, ask. If you genuinely would prefer to be alone, don’t be too polite to refuse invitations. Let people in on what you need. Give others the chance to be helpful by not forcing them to read your mind.
If you focused your whole life on your husband or wife, don’t let my emphasis on the importance of planning depress you. Most of us are more resilient emotionally than we think. And even when people enter widowhood with everything against them, they often adjust remarkably well.
Don’t have unrealistic expectations about what you should be feeling or when you will be your old self again. Understand that getting back to “relatively normal” can take as long as a few years. Don’t be disappointed if you seem to be getting better one month and the next are overcome by grief. It is not normal to just improve and improve. Everyone takes two steps forward and one back. If possible, plan for the days you know will be difficult: birthdays, your anniversary, Christmas. Would having a friend over help? In the past, what strategies have gotten you through difficult times? Feeling especially vulnerable on special occasions is normal; it would be shocking if nature made us so malleable that we could completely forget.
Make the thirteenth month a time to assess your progress. How were you at the beginning compared with now? What can you do today that you couldn’t do a year ago? In what concrete ways has your pain lessened? You might list what you have accomplished: “doing the taxes; eating in a restaurant alone; stopped crying every night.” And since you may have trouble being objective, ask your family and friends: “How do I seem now compared with the first few months? Do you see signs that I am getting over Jack’s death?”
Most likely, making this assessment will boost your morale. You will realize you are indeed better in many ways, even though you are far from being over your loss. But if it does not, knowing this is important too. Do you still think about your husband twenty-four hours a day? Are your eyes just as red rimmed and about to brim over? Do you feel just as incapable of loving? Are you still wracked by guilt? If more than a year has passed and all of you still seems to have died along with your spouse, consider getting professional help.
Expect some lack of understanding from others. People may get angry because it is more than six months later and you are not reciprocating for all those dinners. They may not realize you still feel too disorganized even to cook for yourself. They may feel hurt because you would rather be alone than go out. You may meet the opposite type of censure: ‘ ‘How dare he insult Mother’s memory by marrying so quickly?” “It’s appalling the way she goes out with different men all the time!”
Friends and family may also pressure you to do things or make decisions, feeling strongly (but wrongly) that it is best not to ”dwell on things.” Out of their natural urge to do something helpful, they may advocate your taking all sorts of concrete actions: selling your house, moving to Florida.
Although ultimately making dramatic changes may be important in building a new life, experts recommend not undertaking any radical life changes during the first six months. People in the midst of grieving are not in a good position to decide how their lives should go. And being widowed itself is a tremendous change; piling on more changes will multiply the stress.
During the first year, take most advice about how you should behave with a grain of salt. There is no single best way to act. The way you are feeling and acting is likely to be best for you. If you prefer to be alone, don’t capitulate to a friend who urges you to keep busier or get out more. Your next friend is likely to counsel, “It’s better to be by yourself to think.” Neither judgment is necessarily right. At the same time, don’t get angry at friends and relatives. You need their support. Educate them.
Try to cultivate at least one sympathetic widowed friend. Talking to another person who has gone through what you are dealing with can be a great relief. And coming from someone who has been there, the platitude “things will get easier” is not empty. It carries real weight.
*102/159/5*
GENERAL HEALTH
