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Key points
- In some ways, a relationship doesn't end when one member dies.
- The perspective of time provides new insights into the relationship.
- Even after death, we carry the person and the relationship within us.
When I was early in grief, I sometimes heard others talk about how their relationship with their lost loved one continued to evolve even after death. They weren’t speaking metaphysically, but emotionally and psychologically.
At the time, this made zero sense to me. All I could feel was the end of my marriage, my relationship. Without Tom right here where I can touch him, talk to him, hear him, what is left? What’s the point?
Four years in, I am starting to understand. As I contemplate Tom and our marriage from the growing distance of time, my perceptions of what we had, who we were, and who we were together are developing. My marriage is complete now—in this sphere of existence, it has had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And just as you might turn the last page of a book and sit quietly and mull it over for a while, digest it, and start to see in full the story arc; or how you might sit in the dark after the credits roll on a movie and let the story sink into your bones, so am I ruminating on the life Tom and I had together. I am finding new ways of appreciating the relationship we built, who we were within it, and who we became over its duration.
The perspective of time
I am also, from this distance, seeing Tom perhaps more clearly than I was able to when we were in the throes of being two people trying to live within the complicated bonds of intimacy. And, although this is sheer extrapolation, of course, I am thinking about how he might have seen me, or, should he be somewhere in the metaphysical world, is seeing me now.
I think about how he might react to things that are happening today, and what he might say about them. Tom was pragmatic and suffered no fools, and so when I find myself suffering a fool—even if that fool is myself—I let him swat away my doubts and anxieties in a very particular way he was able to, a way no one else in my life ever could.
I talk to Tom often—not unusual among the bereaved, I assure you—and even ask his advice, letting what I know about him from our 30-plus years together invent responses that I factor into decisions.
Marriage is a melding
The metaphysically minded would say he is actually responding, and I choose not to discount the possibility because we don’t know what we don’t know. And in some ways it doesn’t matter because the things I know and love about Tom are now a part of me; all our years together created a sort of mind meld. We were two but we were one. I contain multitudes and that includes Tom. (The only thing I can’t seem to access, to my eternal regret, is his very particular, very dry sense of humor. He could slay me with one muttered aside.)
Tom was a complicated man and I’m a bit of a handful myself, and from where I sit now, I can see how well our wonky gears meshed and understand more clearly what the monkey wrenches were. Our marriage continues to evolve, if only in my mind, and I find myself loving and appreciating and forgiving Tom—both of us, if I’m honest—in new and profound ways.
Forgiving us both
For example, Tom was not physically affectionate, and I struggled with that, but his acts of service for me were endless and uncomplaining and generous. Now every time I lug a heavy laundry basket from the garage to the house, I think about and appreciate those million little things he did for me and forgive him for his awkwardness in expressing love in other ways. I also forgive myself for wanting things from him that were just not in his nature to provide; I understand that more fully now in ways I didn't before, when I was feeling deprived and sometimes resentful. But I also appreciate that even this frustration didn’t stop me from showing him the kind of affection I would have liked. He deserved that affection, and I am grateful that I didn’t withhold it out of some sort of misguided bean counting. I suppose this is part of post-traumatic growth, but it also feels like a marriage continuing to mellow and ripen and develop.
As grief expert David Kessler says, when a loved one dies, part of you dies with them, but part of them lives on in you. And so does what we created together. Our marriage is over—and yet it hasn’t ceased to exist.
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