I am enveloped in a fog, a mist; I\nreside in a magical place, a place between two worlds. One commonly spoken of\nas reality, and another place, the dream world where I can once again live with\nPeg. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is dusk now, figuratively in the\nsense that I am coming to the end of my own life, and actually dusk, a\nforbidden time for me. Dusk can be a time of incredible beauty or a time of\ngreat sorrow. A time for crying and for dying. A time of gratitude for a day\nand a life well lived. Or a time spent reflecting on a great loss. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The yin and the yang, happiness and\nhopelessness, richness and loss. A jumble of emotions, which overload my neural\nnetworks and cause me great confusion. A place of in-between. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have been living here, in this place\nof in-between for months. Not fully being able to understand what happened to\nme, what happened to us<\/em>, the us<\/em> forged over a lifetime of living\nin each other\u2019s company. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is worse now. Four months from when\nshe died and my daily grieving is unrelentless. Everything I think about, even\nmy dreams, trigger my realization that Peg is gone. The worst times are when I\nawake from a dream state where I actually can hear her and feel her body next\nto mine, exactly as it was, perfect in every detail as if I had gone back to\nthe morning when we both got up to start the day, the day when she died. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Grieving upsets my whole body, not\njust my mind. My body has been finely tuned, tuned to operate on a schedule\nlearned and reaffirmed from all of my daily experiences. Tuned to live everyday\nwith Peg. With Peg\u2019s death, my mind and body suffered a terrible shock. Now\nnothing is as it was before. A huge part of me, the part that was Peg, is now\nmissing. I can barely function with the pathetic part, me, that still exists. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It is common wisdom that the longer\nour loving relationship was, the greater the depth of despair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Looking through the research online\noffered for the bereaved, I found a number of similarities to my experiences\nand the experiences of other widowers. Confusion, chest pains, headaches, heart\naches, shortness of breath, depression, unexplained body pains, weight loss,\nweight gain, nightmares, not enough sleep, too much sleep. The list is endless,\nall caused by a mind\/body combination seriously compromised by a great trauma.\nThe trauma of losing my dearly beloved.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first month after her death I\nwas stunned, falling into a condition of doing the daily chores and finishing\nthe needed paperwork caused by her death, I was on auto-pilot. Then as weeks\nwore on, I was forced to create a new daily routine without Peg. The persistent\nreminders of our life together and the realization that she was never coming\nback got the best of me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n One day the pain in my chest became\nvery great and would not subside. I knew I didn\u2019t have heart trouble, for in\nthe past I kept a regular schedule of physical exams, no heart abnormality was\nfound. I began to believe it was the well-known broken-heart syndrome, Takotsubo\ncardiomyopathy. Although serious, I read the symptoms tend to lessen over time.\nI decided not to pursue it with a cardiologist, preferring to wait longer and\ncall my doctor. <\/p>\n\n\n\n My doctor, a man younger than I but\nexperienced with the elderly, returned my call promptly. I told him of my\nplight. My doctor knows I prefer not to take prescription medicines unless I\nabsolutely have to. He prescribed a medicine used to treat surgery anxiety and\npain. The medicine did not have to be taken every day to be effective. I could\nuse it on demand. The downside is that it is a powerful sedative and I\nshouldn\u2019t drive or expect to be a productive writer while it is in my system.\nOne pill a day when needed is the prescription. It is very effective. I take it\non occasion when my grief becomes overwhelming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I know what I am doing, I am buying\ntime to allow me the needed consideration of what has happened. Time to piece\ntogether a new life, a life without Peg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n It is 4:30 a.m., I awake fully\nexpecting to hear and feel Peg lying next to me. It is not to be, she is gone\nand never coming back. I burst into heaves of crying, tears upon tears, sob\nafter sob without any breaks until I am finally spent of that memory, which\ntriggered such strong emotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I lie in bed not wanting to get up,\ntime passes, 5:30, then 7, and my Protestant work ethic prods me from my\ntear-stained pillow and the warm comfort of our bed. It will be another day of\nvery little productivity and great pain. The medicine works well, almost too\nwell. My chest pain subsides and I enter into a quiet, peaceful wakefulness. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I talk to Peg, asking her to wait for\nme. I will be along soon enough. I ask for her forgiveness for any transgression\nand pain I may have caused her during our time together. No answer is\nimmediately forthcoming, I wish it was. These are the questions I will have to\nanswer on my own, making the pain of her loss much greater.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To those of faith in the power of the\nUniverse, it is known the answers may not come immediately, nor in a form I\nwould expect, but the answers will come over time. Time is one of the problems.\nThe first two years after a great loss is a dangerous time for widowers. The\nodds of taking my own life to be with Peg are very high. The thought of being\nwith her considerably outweighs the life of pain I am enduring now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Several years ago, Peg and I put\ntogether a plan of yearly spending in case we needed help several times a week\nor daily to keep us in our home as long as we could. Those plans and the proper\npapers to allow an orderly transfer of joint assets to the survivor allowed us\nto create a budget to pay for the needed help. We have been fortunate in having\na number of qualified people willing to serve us if the time and need came.\nWell, that time and need is here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The way I feel now, grieving so\nintently, I wouldn\u2019t be able to care for myself easily without help. I do not\nwant to burden our children or our friends with what has become my daily needs.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our world is in the grip of a global\npandemic, Covid-19, greatly complicating my basic needs of shopping and\nhousekeeping and taking care of the cats and our goat, let alone satisfying my\nneed for contact with another person. The nights are the worst, I am alone.<\/p>\n\n\n\n When Peg had her stroke in October of\n2020, the Covid-19 lockdown had been lifted at the hospital, I was able to be\nwith her in the ICU and arrange hospice. I came to the realization Peg would not\nwant to live with her considerable infirmities caused by her stroke. Peg\u2019s\nhealth power stipulated she did not want extraordinary health care\nintervention. Peg would rather die in the comfort of her home with her beloved\ncats, her children and me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Peg passed away within four days of\nbringing her home. Still, I ask myself daily if there was anything I could have\ndone, in retrospect, that would have created a different outcome for Peg. These\nare the questions that make my grieving so difficult as well as the constant\nvision and remembrance of Peg\u2019s last hours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During our fifty-two-year relationship,\nwe were together most of the time, except for nights when I traveled for\nbusiness or the few times I indulged in a hobby where I would need to stay away\novernight. We were always together, which included the fact we slept in the\nsame bed for our entire relationship. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Peg and I often discussed the cases of\nelderly couples dying within hours of each other. We felt we were always\nconnected to each other\u2019s hearts. I seemed to know Peg\u2019s thinking intuitively\nwithout asking. In our bed during the night, I was awakened before Peg moved\naround in bed. She would ask, \u201cDid I wake you?\u201d \u201cNo,\u201d I would reply. \u201cI was\nalready awake.\u201d Which was the truth, I had anticipated the change in Peg\u2019s\nnatural sleeping rhythm even as I was sleeping. <\/p>\n\n\n\n In a study done by Emilio Ferrer, a UC\nDavis psychology professor who conducted a series of studies on couples in\nromantic relationships, he found that couples connected to monitors measuring\nheart rates and respiration get their heart rates in sync, and they breathe in\nand out at the same intervals. This fact was important to me when I read this\nquote from Mimi Guarneri, MD, \u201cCouples at night, their heart rhythm goes into a\nsynchronized pattern, which raises some very interesting issues. What happens\nwhen that pattern is broken? Or it\u2019s not there?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Peg is no longer here with me. Not\nonly is the synchronized pattern broken, no familiar pattern exists for me. I\nam broken, trying desperately to make a future out of the torn remnants of our\npast. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I am enveloped in a fog, a mist; I reside in a magical place, a place between two worlds. One commonly spoken of as reality, and another place, the dream world where I can once again live with Peg. It is dusk now, figuratively in the sense that I am coming to the end of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":880,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[206,214,209],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=879"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":881,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/879\/revisions\/881"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/880"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=879"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=879"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.angelchroniclestories.com\/chronicle\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=879"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}