Sitting in the sun at the health spa, I was surrounded by beauty, yet felt sad and empty inside. I had come to spend the first holiday after my husband’s death with strangers. I couldn’t imagine spending this Thanksgiving with anyone I knew - giving thanks was completely beyond me. I hoped this week would help me heal. After two years of caregiving and trying to keep my business going at the same time, I felt like a burned-out survivor of war. I was just marking time until I could join Jack. After all, at fifty-four, what did I have to look forward to? The future was bleak.
The concierge approached my table, asking if I needed anything. To my surprise, I said, “Yes. If you know anyone here who is a recent widow or widower, I would appreciate talking to her or him.” Again, to my surprise, she told me about Phyllis, the spa’s health director, who had lost her husband several months before.
I invited Phyllis to have lunch with me the next day, and we quickly established some common ground. We were about ten years apart in age, but she had also been with her husband for about fifteen years. She talked of how they met and what their life had been like, and I could tell by her stories and the warmth of her tone of voice that she, too, had a happy marriage. Then it was my turn, and all I could do was cry as I told the story of my own husband’s battle with cancer and chronic pain.
As an coach, I’m used to asking people what they’ve learned from their experiences, so it was natural for me to ask her for advice on what had helped her deal with the crushing grief. Obviously, she had been doing something right to be so full of vitality and joy after such a short time. She described her travels around the world with sparkling eyes and her plans for the next year with a joyful smile. What a contrast to how I was! Phyllis had been so open with me, I felt encouraged to ask her, “Did you ever feel like you were just waiting to die? I don’t mean suicide. I just mean feeling like all you were doing was going through the motions, with no future and no purpose?”
She emphatically stated, “No, never.” I must have looked incredulous because she shared the following story. When she was a little girl, her family lived in Java, where her dad was an executive with Shell Oil. One day, Japanese soldiers came to the door and took her dad away with a bayonet pointed at his back. Her mother, Phyllis and her little brother all were taken to a Japanese prisoner camp. For three years, they all but starved as they struggled to survive. I listened, open-mouthed, as she told of the horrors her family had gone through. Phyllis finished her story by saying, “Every day, my mother would tell us, ‘They can take away our food and our freedom... but they can’t take away our love of life. If we let them do that, they’ve won.’ That’s why, as awful as it was to lose my husband and have to go on without him, I will never lose my love of life.”
I felt a rush of awareness inside me... a recognition that this was a deciding moment in my life. Here was a woman who had been through so much more than I, yet she had chosen to fully live her life. I had a flash of the future - picturing myself at sixty-four, the same age Phyllis was now. Which did I want to be? An inspiring, joyful woman with peace and love in her heart - or a woman in a cocoon, sitting on the sidelines, full of sorrow, not really living but merely existing. Whichever woman I decided to be was totally my choice.
I left the spa radically changed - I had chosen to live life fully, honoring the gift of a good marriage through my remembrance of it, but also moving on to experience life now, as it was, moment by moment. A sense of peace and contentment filled me. And although there are still moments of grief and loss, there are also moments of laughter and enjoyment.
That’s life!
- Jan Thompson Eve