I have been wondering about the nature of grief. This is a very “hot topic” for me right now because my wife died unexpectedly toward the end of October. It has been a terrible roller coaster since then – sometimes I can ignore my feelings, but then they come roaring back at the most unexpected times. My reactions and actions are mostly a big surprise to me, I don’t know what I expected to experience, but it hasn’t been that – whatever “that” is.

An interesting part of this is that it appears to be so much like other people’s experiences. Instead of “that’s odd” I often get “oh yes, that is what happened/happens to me” when I share my experiences with others who have encountered the “existential” loss of another. By this I mean someone that we have “bonded” so closely with that another that our individual selves have somehow evaporated. My experience with my marriage has been that during the past 20 years or so there wasn’t so my “me” and “you” as “us”. In many ways I had become her and she had become me, and we liked it that way. I didn’t lose my sense of individuality, but instead took on a personality and experience of life that was MUCH fuller, much more meaningful, and much more fun. It took us a few decades to reach that place in our relationship, but it finally happened. Before this happened, I was “me” and she was “her” – but eventually that dichotomy vanished – we were we.

Losing her wasn’t just losing a partner, it was in some sort of very real sense the death of myself, the “me” that I had become “we.” Now I am searching for the next “me” – not particularly with a new person, but someone that is really, really different from the we that I had become accustomed to. When I try to describe this to people, those who have a deep loss agree with me. We end up sharing our experiences, and often share tears. This can be because of a death, or because of a divorce – that doesn’t matter so much because the experience is one of losing a loved one, but more importantly lose “the loved one” – what we had come to believe was “our-self.”

What seems odd to me is that I knew almost nothing about this before I experienced it. Nobody talks about it, almost no books or articles talk about it – it is almost as if the idea that we experience a loss of self, and experience a loss of our place in the universe is taboo. We hear a lot about the five (or four or seven or whatever) stages of grief, we hear about how it will moderate and finally not be such an important emotion, we hear lots of things. We hear that eventually we will be able to feel joy when recalling our lost partner. But, we almost never hear that we will become an entirely different person. We don’t hear that the old “me” will need to be replaced by a new one – whether we like it or not.

This evening a neighbor told me her story of getting an old Corvette and just driving, and driving and driving. Searching for what? I think she was searching for a new “me”. My first instinct when my wife died was to get a trip on a cruise ship to Alaska so I could just sit it bow of the ship and watch the world come to me and fade away. Unfortunately, it was the off season and I couldn’t get ride. I just wanted to sit, think of nothing in particular, and let my body find another “me”.

I wish I had known about some of the things that I have been going through. I wish I had known I was going to be so disoriented that I couldn’t keep track of time or place, so confused as to not be able to make sense of what I was reading to distract myself, so fragile that I could break down in tears at any time and any place. I wish I had know that I was going to have to create a new “me” from scratch, and that might take years (or decades). We never talk about the actual experience, we talk about the “safe” topics, but almost never the actual ones until we have experienced it when perhaps (if we are lucky) we meet someone who is willing to share the “real” experience of grief.