Los Angeles, California
Have you ever had an experience that changed your life, in a moment, in a hugely dynamic way? There are certainly positive experiences of that. Say, you learn that someone unexpectedly has left you a large inheritance. Or you get the phone call informing you that you are being offered the dream job that you didn't think you had a chance at getting. Or the person of your dreams proposes marriage, or you learn that your IVF treatment has worked and you are now happily anticipating. The list could go on and on.
But what if it's not a positive? What if it is the worst thing? What if it's the worst thing that you never even imagined could happen? A crime committed against you. Or what if you learn something about someone with whom you share your life that you never, ever saw coming? What if it is as if on one gorgeous, sunny day you are driving on your favorite road in your convertible, listening to your favorite song, and suddenly a brick wall appears just in front of you. You can't go around it. You can't go over it. The only way out of it is through it. And that damage will be tattooed on your consciousness and soul forever.
I like to tell people that there are three things that have occurred in my life that are rather rare and special. I have seen three no-hitters at Dodgers Stadium. I have seen the northern lights. I saw The Beatles in concert. But I have also had a few collisions with that brick wall, and each changed my life forever.
Without throwing my mother and my late husband under the bus here, I want to convey what I learned from these experiences. I learned that you will survive the things that you cannot ever imagine surviving. You won't even know how you survived it. Our innate ability to survive is an instinct buried deep. You won't know that you have it until you need it, and even then. I walked as if through water for years after the first incident with my husband. After his death, it never ended.
My mother once said about my father's death that you never get over it, you just get used to it. And this is so true about those losses in our lives. It's just that the process of getting used to it changes you irrevocably. People might tell you that you're not who you used to be, or that the light has gone out of your eyes. Or that they cannot imagine how you are still standing. All of it is true. And, you just go on.
A friend has recently lost her husband, and I am at a loss how to provide help for her. You can ask what is needed. But, truthfully, had someone asked me I wouldn't have been able to tell them. What is needed changes from day to day, from hour to hour. Sometimes from minute to minute. One of the things I remember in those first days after my husband took his life, was the presence of my friend, Carole, who stayed with me and made me sandwiches that would appear on the coffee table in front of me as friends came and went. She didn't ask me if I wanted turkey or chicken. She didn't even ask me if I wanted a sandwich. She just made sandwiches, but didn't admonish me to eat. Because of her, and the sandwiches that magically appeared, I did eat.
One of the things I have learned from all of this is that you should offer an ear and a shoulder. And at all costs, avoid offering advice and input. If a favor is requested, you can make sure you are there to do it. And for the love of God, don't say things like: I hope you don't get sick, as someone kept saying to me while I was trying to keep my head above water. It's like telling children not to stick beans up their noses when they had never thought to do that!
I am not the person I was before it all. But even if you have not experienced any trauma in your life, you are not the person you were. We are all evolving, for better or for worse. And, in fact, the unexplainable horrors that I have experienced in my life provided me with growth and a strange confidence. Having been through it all, I believe I can meet whatever comes. Am I grateful for it? Stephen Colbert has said that he is grateful for the grief he lives with after losing his father and two brothers in a plane crash. I do understand that. But if I had my life to live over again, I would move heaven and earth to have not experienced tragedy in my life. In spite of all, I'm just not that courageous.
In our thirties, we liked to repeat a saying that went Life is hard and then you die. We're halfway there. But there are blessings. There is joy. There is dancing. And the balance of having those things in your life, even as you experience them while bearing the tattoo of past, unrelenting pain, does in the final analysis make our lives worthwhile. And that analysis along with that tattoo, my friends, is the triumph of our survival.
