Long-term life maintenance

The grieving life will always require varying degrees of attention

Like most who live in our Western culture, I like solutions to my dilemmas, answers to my questions. While I am not a black-and-white sort of thinker, sometimes my predilection for nuance is wearing on my soul. There are moments when I would really like crystalline clarity to invade my psyche, but I find that the shadows in my life that will probably always cling closer than I might want.

The experience of loss is one of those soul-clinging realities of my grieving life that will always require some degree of attention. Life invaded by loss is like purchasing a new car. In the first months after such a purpose, the vehicle is pristine. There are no chips in the windshield, no scratches in the pain, and all the accessories work perfectly. The ride is comfortable because the alignment is factory-fresh, the seats gradually adjust to your body type and the interior is immaculate. At some point, though, something happens and your vehicle is marred through an unexpected rock catapulted into your windshield, or something even more consequential happens when you collide with a deer or other solid object. Your life as an auto owner shifts, and you necessarily tend to the issue at hand, but even after a $10,000 auto body fix, your once new car no longer handles the way it did. Even if you encounter nothing catastrophic, you will need to maintain your vehicle for the remainder of its useful life.

Today it has been ten months since several of my children and I surrounded Claudia with deep love and fractured emotions as we entrusted her soul into God’s hands. The ninety minutes we spent together in the OR as her life support systems were withdrawn were the hardest moments of my six decades of life. To make the life-or-death decision on behalf of your life partner who is unable to do so for herself is beyond gut-wrenching; there are really no words to describe it.

In the past ten months I have been transformed by Love’s continuing presence in my life, poured upon me by kind and faithful friends, extraordinarily thoughtful parishioners (from across the years) in Virginia and Minnesota and supportive family members. I am able, most days, to speak of Claudia without my voice shaking or tears forming in my eyes. Grief’s work is hard, it is daily and, ultimately, a griever returns to some semblance of a life.

As I’ve already expressed on this platform, I no longer believe that I will “resolve” my grief. There will never be a day when my life will miraculously return to what it once was. It’s kind of like a stubborn weed in the garden: my efforts to work through my grief are like removing the visible, above-ground eye-sore that it is, but beneath the surface is a complex maze, deeply rooted in my psyche. Even when I think I have dug beneath the surface sufficiently to remove the unwieldy roots of my grief, there are still pockets which remain, and which spring up here and there again and again, requiring my attention. In other words, this life I now have is going to require intentional long-term maintenance.

As you might imagine, knowing me as you do either in person or through this Substack, I am by nature a researcher, a lover of knowledge, and acquirer of experiences. I read widely, I view and listen to podcasts; I am always alert to what someone shares with me about their own painful happenings.

In that vein, I want to share with you one of the best podcasts I have happened upon, from a media name you may recognize, Anderson Cooper. Before I stumbled upon his podcast, “All There Is,” I only “knew” him from his silver-haired presence on network television news broadcasting.

All There Is with Anderson Cooper
CNN Podcasts

Listen on Apple Podcasts:

Through his podcast, though, I learned his story. You may know that he is the son of a famous mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, who died in 2019. His life has been checkered with loss. His father died when Anderson was ten years old, and his brother Carter died by suicide when Anderson was a young man, by jumping from the balcony of their mother’s apartment while she watched, helpless to prevent his death. The nexus for his podcast was his need to confront the grief that haunts his life. He speaks eloquently of what it means to be the last in the family, and his interviews with others are always moments combined with vulnerability, honesty and glimmers of hope.

His podcast continues to be of immense help to me, and it is in my long-term grief maintenance plan. Because he exposes grief’s reality, does not offer flaccid answers in the face of life’s most difficult slog and reveals his journey with candor, he has become one of my favorite “listens.”

So it’s been ten months in for me, and I’m still learning how to rebuild my life. Often in this quest I will ask myself, “What Would Claudia Do?” I learned in our thirty years together that she always had an answer to any question — whether I wanted to hear it or not — and it always filled exuberant confidence (IYKYK). If the question I was toying with required more confidence that I could summon within myself, she would stand up from where she was seated, look me in the eye and belt out in her own inimitable, slightly-flat, but always in fortissimo volume, this song from the 1972 musical, “Man From LaMancha”:

The impossible dream for many of us who grieve is “Will my life ever be as good as it once was?” I don’t have an answer to that question yet — I may never have one — but as I stretch forward I know that this is going to require continuing, intentional maintenance of my part.

I have to believe that while my life will never what it once was, with long-term maintenance it’s going to be okay.

And that may be enough.