Contributing writer
“Loss is paradoxical: It is at once enormous and tiny” Meghan O’Rourke said in the April edition of “The Week” magazine.
As I read her words six months ago, I copied them down so that I could look at them again and again. Her words comforted me.
While I knew loss before — one cannot live this long without it — I did not know the twists and turns of the particular loss of losing Tooltime Tim. Each loss is unique in shape and size, length and depth.
Some of you readers who have written to me have lost mates that have been in your life for 50 or 60 years. This kind of loss is so profound. I can only imagine the devastation.
I remember watching my mother process the loss of my father, her companion for almost 65 years. She’d listen to tapes of him preaching — which seemed to bring her comfort — just to hear his voice. She didn’t talk about him. She just listened. My sister and I tried to comfort her —and in small ways, we did, but her loss was still omnipresent.
Grief is a lonely experience. We each traverse it in our own way. Trite phrases do not help.
“He’ll always be there with you,” doesn’t help, really, even though on many levels it is true. I know this because I am reminded everywhere of the life we shared with Tim, but he is not here. I see pictures of his face. I smile at the glint in his eyes, but I do not feel the warmth of his hand.
I miss those hands. It was his hands — his knocked up, abused, battered, hardworking hands that I bent over, bandaging a finger, trimming a torn nail, soothing with creams. It was the touch of those hands, carefully, protectively, on my back as I maneuvered through a rodeo crowd that drew me to him all those years ago.
The days go on — it’s been more than six months, now, since Tim died. I can tell that healing is happening. This grieving process is working. Grieving is like the mending of a broken bone — the pieces, over time, knit back together and life continues.
When only a month had gone by after Tim died, I may have looked normal on the outside but I was devastated on the inside. When I looked into the mirror I felt every year of my age, and then some, and the eyes looking back at me were haggard and sad.
Six months later, I can tell that the spark of life is returning.
The other day I started gathering pictures of our life with TTT, these past 10 years. With the help of a computer program on Shutterfly, I put them all in one book so that I could look at them in one location. This was quite an exercise and a cathartic experience. What a precious volume that book has turned out to be and the making of it, another bend in the road, like coming through a dark tunnel into sunlight.
It is not a sad book. It is the happiest, most joyful volume, filled with gratitude for life.
Just as there was no way around Tim’s dying, there’s no way around the grieving process. You slog your way through it. When a loved one is desperately ill, you slog your way through that, too. Tim was a trooper — we were a slogging team, sometimes crying, sometimes laughing at the inconvenience of it all, mostly just holding on to every fragment. We did not flinch.
I’m glad now, that in all the moments of living with TTT, I was able to cherish his unique traits. I guess I’ve learned something through the years, because I haven’t always been that tolerant.
Sometimes I yelled “Tiiiiim,” when I stumbled over his boots in the middle of the floor, but usually I just grinned and muttered, “Yep, he’s home.”
These days, my house is less cluttered — cleaner, and definitely quieter; but I’d trade this quiet for his clutter any old day. And I’m glad I knew that paradox of trade-offs, then. I’m grateful it wasn’t a recent revelation — look what I would have missed, on another day in the country.