Living in Pieces

“To say the patient is getting over it after an operation appendicitis is one thing; after he’s had his leg off it is quite another.”  C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

What is “healing” when it comes to grief?  Does one indeed “get over it”?  Jack Lewis talks about his loss as an amputation of a limb rather than the removal of an unnecessary organ.  That description rings true for me.  I have told people that it felt like my right arm had simply been ripped out of my body.  Worse yet, I would never get that limb back for any kind of reattachment.  Anne was gone, out of my life, clean cut off.  And nothing I could do would put her back where she belongs.

To be bereaved is to be cut into pieces.  That is the literal meaning of the word.  It is related to the word “riven,” as in “he was riven in two by the stroke of the sword.”  I was cut apart, segmented and dissected, and someone took a piece of me and hid her away.  I felt like I had been attached to the four horses of the apocalypse, one to each limb, and the executioner has shouted “Giddy up!”  What I had left were torn and bloody stumps, open and gaping wounds.  About all I could do in the beginning was to try to staunch the bleeding any way I could.

If I broke my leg, the process that followed would be one kind of healing.  I would still have that leg.  In fact, the location of the break might become the strongest part of the bone in the long run.  A broken leg changes a person’s life temporarily.  It is an inconvenience.  Crutches may be part of a person’s identity and behavior for a while, but at some point you put the crutches back in the closet or give them away to someone else.

An amputation is a permanent change, not only in one’s body but in that person’s identity.  As Lewis notes, the site of the amputation heals.  In that sense “He has ‘got over it.’”  But even with a prosthetic limb, life will never again be the same.  It worth quoting Jack at length here:

“…he will always be a one-legged man.  There will hardly be a moment when he forgets it.  Bathing, dressing, sitting down and getting up again, even lying in bed, will all be different.  His whole way of life will be changed.  All sorts of pleasures and activities that he once took for granted will have to be simply written off.  Duties too.  At present I am learning to get about on crutches.  Perhaps I shall presently be given a wooden leg.  But I shall never be a biped again.”

That was my experience as well.  So a major part of this process is not “healing” in the sense of the medical model.  This is not restoration of a previous function.  Anne is gone, and no amount of grief work or process or writing or support group work is going to bring her back.  That isn’t the purpose of such work.  The purpose of that work is to help me to integrate my loss into a new understanding of myself.  

I am a man who lost his first wife at the age of fifty-three.  That is now part of my curriculum vita, a permanent entry on the resume of my life.  I don’t have a choice about whether to include that information on the list.  My choice is what to do with that information, that reality, that experience, as I continue to live.

I wrote most of these words just weeks after Anne died.  Now, eighteen months later, many things have changed.  I have remarried and share a wonderful life with my beautiful Brenda.  Jack Lewis had only a few years of solitary life remaining when he wrote his incredible book.  My experience is different from his--and yet the same.  I am a man who lost his first wife when he was fifty three.  Now I am also a man who has found love and life again.  It's all me and the story continues to be written.