Okay, so I wrote that post title with tongue firmly in cheek, knowing it would get you to click. My sarcasm doesn’t necessarily translate through the screen, however, so let me say right up front: whether your relationship was perfect or imperfect has absolutely no bearing on your grief. In fact, everyone has an imperfect relationship, and every grief is valid.
I’m on this topic today after reading what my friend Cassie wrote on the Widows’ Voice blog. She writes about how awkward it feels, how much hesitation she feels, to talk about the difficulties in her marriage. As though to speak about the actual lived reality of love – with all its messy, annoying parts – is to either diminish the love, or dismiss the pain. It struck a nerve for me, as I found out when I sat down to write.
How you talk about your relationship – what details you share, which you don’t – leaves you open for assessment from others. One of the challenges here is that relationships get investigated so thoroughly when out-of-order death shows up. That kind of scrutiny just doesn’t typically exist in the non-grief life.
Widowed folks can get so defensive, and with good reason: so much of what we hear, whether well-intentioned or not, comes through as dismissing our pain. We’ve had so much taken from us. Had so much criticized and dismissed.
Assessment is everywhere.
No matter how you speak of your partner, someone is right there to analyze you.
I know, for me, I felt like I could never speak to the actual reality of my relationship, could never talk about what I missed, without being corrected somehow.
Whenever I spoke of how awesome Matt was, I was reminded how not-perfect we were: “He wasn’t great all the time, you know. You two really struggled on some things.”
If instead, I mentioned how hard we’d worked on our differences, I got questioned as to whether I thought we would “last.”
That kind of scrutiny makes a lot of people go silent.
If we’re corrected when we talk about the good parts of love, it makes sense that we’re wary of ever talking about the harder parts.
The reality is, everyone has imperfect relationships. Every relationship is a mix of awesome and annoying. Everyone is a work in progress. And when one of you dies, that mix does not change. It means nothing more nor less than it meant Before.
You are human, and you love, and you choose to love. You chose to love. Through annoyance and awesomeness and everything in between. That you had things you were working on (or not working on) together does not in any way diminish grief, or love. That you miss and remember the fantastic times does not make you delusional, nor call into question your memory.
I can say right now that my partner was often self-absorbed and moody. So was I. So am I. He annoyed me in ways no one else could. We were perfectly designed to irk each other in very special ways.
We worked on it. Except when we didn’t. When he drowned, we were in what was then the very best phase our life together. We had worked immensely hard in the year previous. We were brave and honest and annoying and kind. We were aloof and angry and sad. That new year, we found our foundations again. We rooted more deeply in us. Those first 7 months of 2009 were fantastic. The next steps, the next adventures, we laid out ahead; we were psyched about what was to come. Psyched to be where we were. Proud of ourselves for the work we had done.
When he died, I lost my love. I lost all of him: not just the good parts. Not just the hard parts. All of him.
I’m not thankful that, because he died, I no longer have to suffer his moods. I’m not thankful that, because he died, I no longer have to be upfront about my irritation, that I can keep it under the rug where it belongs. There is no “up-side” to sudden death. There is nothing I am “free” of now that he is gone.
When I remember his sweetness or the shape of his hands, I am not romanticizing our life. When I miss his awesomeness, I have not put him on a pedestal. I don’t need anyone to remind me that it wasn’t sunny all the time. I miss all of it.
When you talk about your love, your family, your partner, you talk about all of it. Because All Of It is what you live. It’s what everyone lives. That no one’s life or relationship is perfect is no reason to not talk about how great it was, and to pine for that greatness. Nor is it reason to avoid talking about the hard parts. Those hard parts don’t devalue grief.
Your love is your love, and your grief is your grief. It belongs to you. All of it. Every part.
It’s not a metric to determine the validity of grief. It’s love. Every part of it is love.
And all of it is yours. Every beautiful, difficult, annoying, amazing part.
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How about you? Have you found yourself censoring parts of your relationship in order to protect your grief? Let us know in the comments. Or you can send me an email: just click right here.
Thank you for this post. I have been struggling in my mind & thoughts about my relationship with my boyfriend who passed 4-months ago. Our relationship was not perfect by any means, we had endured a lot of struggles; however, if I let myself think about them, I’m consumed by guilt & regret. Some of our disagreements were dumb & stubborn on my part. I feel if I let myself think about or back to the times of struggles I will be taking away from the love we shared or that I’m making our relationship less strong or important. Does that make sense? I’m scared if people, especially his parents, find out that we had more struggles than what they knew about, they will make our relationship less valued in their eyes. We also have a lot of great memories in our 5-year romantic relationship & there is not a doubt in my mind or anyone else’s for that matter that he loved me with his whole heart, when in fact we have memories of each other from our days in Jr. High School, we have been friends for 35 years. Knowing that he loved me keeps me going. Right now I’m in this mode where I’m just going through the motions because I have become just numb inside & out. I feel as though I’m retreating or withdrawing.
Like you, after my husband died, I’ve gained some sort of tunnel vision where I felt I should’ve treated him better while he was alive. He used to call himself useless and I would try to be supportive, compassionate and empowering when he did and I try to remember when I showed him gratitude and appreciation for all the little things he would do. Sometimes, I just didn’t feel up to the task so he would step up to the plate. Now, with him gone, everything is left to me and realise all those numerous little things add up and they, each one, are larger than he made them out to be. I feel like each thank-you was a platitude, just a mere acknowledgement, knowing now what effort and time it took.
I had a lot of power within that relationship and some of it might have been abused but when he spoke to my Mom, according to her, my husband loved and adored me. I asked her after sharing my thoughts on my inadequacy of being a good wife and she, being the closest friend and relative who interacted with us as a couple the most, contradicts this line of reasoning.
We all have regrets and whether through logic or contemplation, we take the lessons learned and then move on. This one is harder because I can’t make amends; I certainly can’t apologize or make our union better because the one person who was my husband, best friend and partner-in-crime for most of my life is gone. My last regret is that I hadn’t come to this realisation sooner. I can’t forgive myself if he doesn’t forgive me.