Wow, I had meant to post a lot more here, but September was a brutal month. I’ve been planning this post for awhile, and I think I’m ready to share.
Time is a constant in our lives, we almost never have enough of it, or we’re waiting for it to pass, and if you’ve recently lost a loved one, it becomes a foreign concept. I wasn’t prepared for the moment my husband passed, since it was unexpected and he was far too young – and I certainly wasn’t prepared for how I would lose any sense of time in the aftermath. We perceive time as a measurement, and act according to the markers of that measurement (seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years). In shock, and for a loss of words, I rambled in my home, not being able to sleep and not being able to gauge time. I’d look at the clock and find myself completely surprised by the reading. I suddenly lost the ability to know if it had been 5 minutes or 30 minutes. As I’m sure you can imagine, my mind was racing, trying to catalogue as many memories as possible while also knowing that I had to plan a funeral, write a eulogy, contact family and friends..Thank God for family and friends that were there to help me. But that was just the beginning, after the funeral and everyone goes back to their lives, I was left with just myself. Alone in a home and still in shock and finding a reality I never wanted or dreamt of. Some of the problems I had with perceiving time also had to do with widow’s fog (that’s another long post to come), but all alone in my home, I found myself out of time; oh, not necessarily out of time in the normal sense, I had lots of time on my hands, but out of my place in time. I felt strangely like a relic of the past, all my memories were in the past, everything I wanted to remember and hang on to were in the past, and I couldn’t perceive a future without my husband. Suddenly, the present seemed foreign to me and the future, well, that was inconceivable. Time stopped for me on that fateful day my husband passed, and it became more and more apparent, the more time I spent with other people, be they family, friends or strangers. Everyone has things to do, plans to make, schedules to keep and I felt like the world moved on without me and I was watching it move away, quickly.
As a child, I was very good at planning, wanting to grow up and get to the good things in life. I was eager to drive, get a job, go to college, just eager to live my life. I was good at making plans. I had dreams to fulfill and things to do. When I reached adulthood and could control every facet of my time and life, I was still planning. One of the things that endeared me to and eventually caused me to fall in love with my husband was his ability to live in the present. Something I’d never really done before. He taught me so much about life that I had missed (that’s another blog post. ;-} ). But the present was painful, the future was unthinkable and I retreated to the memories of the past and hit play. The sun came up and the sun went down, I couldn’t pay attention, except when a date passed through my brain and I realized more time had passed and it was another anniversary of the day I was stuck in, a day that I couldn’t move past.
Of course, no one can stay in that day forever, and life has a way of forcing you to put a step in front of the other and slowly, I could perceive time again. While I could feel myself stepping back into the flow of time, it came with a sting. I still have a date on the calendar that can reverse all the progress I’ve made, a landmine that I step on every month. There’s also a strange mechanism in my brain that classifies time and life events as Pre-Death and Post-Death.
I still feel a little out of step with the rest of the world when it comes to my perception of time, but that’s to be expected. Predictably, I’m still not able to think or plan a future, but maybe that requires more time.