After the first month of river-flowing tears, the expression of grief for my husband shifted into what I can only describe as alarming emotional sneezes.  Air-gulping tears volcanically erupted at odd times and places, and then, just as quickly, subsided—leaving me unnerved and afraid to be out in public.  So, I decided to try therapy. What did I want from it? To do more than sneeze. To unplug emotionally.

“What are you looking for from therapy?” the therapist asked at our initial consultation.

“You practice body and energy therapies rather than relying solely on talk.  I talk and think circles ‘round myself, and lately, I feel my mind beginning to hold my sorrow at a distance, other than in unexpected emotional sneezes that come and go so suddenly, I hardly know what’s happened. The sorrow is heavy, at times crushing, but it’s where I feel real and sense Philip closest to me.”

“Go on,” she said.

“I understand that my mind wants to protect me. This is how I’ve habitually coped with pain—thinking my way into and through it.  But now, I want my heart to lead and the wisdom of my body to guide me. I want to be open to whatever this enormous thing we call grief offers: the pain, the love, the loss, and the connection. All.”

“Yes,” she said. “Working with the body’s energy-flow, sensing how your body expresses what’s going on in your mind and emotions, we can move toward healing the trauma of Philip’s illness and death.”

“I don’t want to hold onto grief,” I said, “but I do want to find my way to embrace the love and the loss as integral parts of who I am now, who I’ll be from here on.”

“You are changed and rearranged by Philip’s death and your grief,” she said.

“Thank you. That gives voice to what I feel and fear others can’t understand,” I said. “I need to listen to what my body knows of this loss, not just my mind, to become more heart-whole. I also want the wound to teach me to be even a tiny bit wiser, a bit more loving,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“I’m also seeking a deeper, more loving connection with Philip, one that passes through and goes beyond this pain to embrace the depths of the love. And, finally, I want to be better prepared for the inevitable deaths of others, as well as my own.  To come closer to understanding what living and dying well might mean.”

“I don’t know how to grieve, how to live with grief,” I said at the start of our first session.  “I wander about not knowing if I want to sit or stand, go out or stay in. I’m sure I’m not the first, last, or only person to feel this way. So, why don’t they teach this in school?  I mean, who needs algebra when we don’t know how to deal with death or how to die?”

“These feelings and the puzzle related to grief are unique to each of us,” she said.  “Yet, they’re also universal. You’re not alone, yet you feel terribly alone.”

I relaxed into the warmth of being seen and understood. “I need to learn how to be present with myself in this unspeakable absence.”

Before my next therapy session, I listened to an odd story on NPR about survivors of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Seven years later, people are still seeking contact with those they lost.

The narrator spoke of one survivor who set up a phone booth in his yard with an old rotary phone connected to nowhere.  He uses this phone to “call” and talk to his lost loved ones.  The narrator described how others who have also lost family, friends, and lovers to the tsunami drive many miles to use this man-made phone-line to heaven, to have one-way conversations with their dead or disappeared.

“Just like I long for contact with Philip, so these people still seek connection,” I said to my therapist.

The narrator then explained that some Japanese Buddhists believe the spirits of the dead may linger close to the living in cases of sudden death; the spirits may be confused, unable to pass beyond, or they may be worried about those they’ve left behind.  So, in some of the phone conversations, the bereaved give reassurances to the dead.

“We’re OK,” one young man says to his father. “We miss you and love you, but we’re all right.  You can go on.” Tears choke his voice and startle me into crying.

I asked my therapist, “Is this what I need to say to Philip? These people seem to have a cosmology that includes setting the dead free.”

“Try it,” she said.

Philip, my love, may you be free, but please know how my love longs to fly with you.

Another young man talks through heart-rending sobs.  The sole survivor, he speaks to his whole family.

“Sometimes I don’t know why I go on living,” he says.  “Without you, it all seems meaningless.  I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.”

Yes. Meaningless without you, Philip. And, I am so, so sorry I couldn’t save you, my boy.

After fasting at a retreat in Costa Rica four months earlier, symptoms from an undiagnosed illness—that he had hoped to cure at the retreat—had only worsened. I rushed him back to the United States, just in time for him to die in a hospital two-and-a-half days later.

I left the therapist’s office to walk the easy 15 minutes to my apartment. She worked out of a house that Philip and I had walked past regularly, only a few blocks from the cozy 1906 bungalow where we lived together in another lifetime. Passing slowly by the old house, I saw him sitting bare-chested in the summer sun of the yard, a bowl of fruit in his lap. The same old wicker chair was still there. My heart folded and took a few moments and deep breaths to expand again. With my head full of tears, eyes red and swollen, I pulled out rarely-worn sunglasses. For the first time, I understood why people love dark glasses – beyond the looking-cool-factor.  With my eyes hidden, I felt less exposed, more privately held within my own psychic space.  In the coming days, I reached for this surprising psychological protection and felt uncomfortably naked without it.

In our next session, another concern surfaced.

“I haven’t experienced the giant sea swells of grief described by some.  I actually wish for them,” I said.

“Why?” she asked.

“Why am I not more devastated?” I countered. “Was I less in love than I think? Why doesn’t grief knock me down instead of sneaking up on me in surprise moments, only to sink back to wherever it is that grief hides in people like me, people who cope competently and without drama?”

“Introverted people,” she said, “which you obviously are, don’t tend to emote in an outwardly demonstrative way any more than they do anything else in an extroverted manner. Does that make sense?”

“Say more, please.”

“The quiet, river-flowing sadness, the wish for solitude, the aching for his arms around you in the night, even those emotional sneezes are an introvert’s way of grieving,” she said. “It’s very different from the swells, upsurges, and wipe-outs that a more extroverted person feels and dramatically expresses as they surf through grief.”

“Introverted grieving,” I said. “Who’d have thought of that?”

But I was relieved. There was nothing wrong with me; I wasn’t cold-hearted. Our love was not less simply because I wasn’t experiencing grief as it is portrayed in movies with background music tugging at our heartstrings.  As much as people continue to say, “There’s no right way to grieve,” somehow this new understanding of how different personalities mourn in different ways was more helpful than anything I’d been told thus far.  While there’s no right or wrong, there is a unique way for each of us. We need to discover our own navigational maps to traverse this strange and unwanted new world in which we find ourselves.

“You advise staying fully aware of and inside this grief, having the courage to sit with pain,” I said. “But this wars with my competently coping self. I’m apparently very good at coping.”

In these first months, I explained, it often felt like there was a civil war going on between carrying on and falling apart.  I knew I didn’t have to choose one or the other – cope or collapse, but more often, I instinctively coped.

“Where does one go to get permission to fall apart?” I asked. “I suppose it’s easier to present a strong front than to deal with the sympathy that threatens to undo me. I don’t want to dissolve in a pool of tears when meeting a friend over the cucumbers at Whole Foods.”

She gently laughed.

“And yet, I’m afraid my expert coping cuts me off from my feelings, and hence, from Philip,” I said.

“We don’t choose when or how we feel, do we?” she asked.

“Yes and no,” I said. “I think some overly active and subconscious defense mechanism is choosing coping over crying. Crying with others has never been something I’ve done, except with Philip.  In the first weeks following his death, controlling my tears wasn’t an option. But now, my coping-self pulls me back together, says, ‘Wait until you’re alone to break down.’”

“As long as you recognize what’s going on, and as long as you give yourself permission to let loose, to come undone when you feel safe and private, there’s nothing wrong in this, is there?” she asked. “Just because you’re not breaking down over those cucumbers doesn’t mean your love or your connection to Philip are lost. If you stop worrying and judging yourself, I think you’ll realize that love is never lost, even when life is.”

In another session, I asked if other couples have idiotic conversations about who should die first.

“We did,” I said with a sad, wry smile.

“Tell me,” she said.

“He’d say, ‘I should die first because I can’t cope as well as you.’”

“‘That’s absurd,’ I’d answer.”

“‘No, it isn’t,’ he’d counter.  ‘You know it would be much harder for me with my panic and inability to be in the world without you. You’re stronger and would get over the grief in time.  Between my ongoing sickness and growing panic attacks, your life would be so much easier if you didn’t have to take care of me. I knew he was right about the coping and strength parts but not the being better off without him.”

“‘But I hate this,’ I’d say to him.  ‘I don’t want to cope or carry on without you. You are not a burden! I love you.’”

“And now, here I am,” I said to the therapist. “He, having gone first as he wished, and having left me behind to cope,” I said.  “But this coping also makes me feel separated from myself—like I’m playing a part, walking through my days and being with people as an actor with no heartfelt sense of presence or meaning, no joy.”

“You do know this is to be expected for a time – your time, right?” she asked.

“Yes, but in the meantime, how do I muster the energy and enthusiasm to get up in the morning?  For 37 years my meaning and pleasure were intertwined with someone called Philip. What, who, and how am I to be without him?”

In time (a hugely overused phrase in the language of well-intended but useless comfort), people suggest that Philip will gently step aside, though never away. They tell me new friends, creative endeavors, new interests, and possibly, one day down the road, even a new partner will fill today’s emptiness.  I hate this, especially the latter.

A sense of purpose, I am told, is to be attained via volunteer work or a part-time job; by staying busy; by spending time with others; getting a dog, a cat, – a gerbil?  Perhaps—but, right now, life is flat, pointless, devoid of meaning or pleasure.

“What would bring comfort?” asked my therapist.

“I don’t know. I don’t know that it’s comfort I want. Acknowledgment of pain. Willingness to talk about Philip. But I can feel people staying away from the painful topic,” I said.

“Also, I’d welcome invitations complete with the explicit and implicit understanding that I can turn them down if I can’t face turning up.  In fact, I think this is my new definition of a friend: someone who will understand if I cancel last minute, if I say, ‘No thanks.’”

Later that day, I repeated some of this conversation to my mother.

“Philip’s death is unspeakably awful,” she said. “Nothing and no one can take this pain from you.”

“Is this how you felt when Dad died?”

“Yes. It just has to be endured.  I am so sorry, love.” Her words—filled with honesty, empathy, and love—eased me.

The concerns I brought to these therapy sessions seemed endless.

“I just want to be alone most of the time.  My friends are wonderful people.  And it’s not just that they are kind and supportive.  They—each in their own way—are also seekers after meaning and a life well lived. I respect and appreciate who they are.”

“Yes?” she encouraged.

“But after just an hour or two of being with anyone, I feel like I’m straining, forcing myself. When I get home, I’m drained. I don’t seem able to be myself effortlessly in the way I always was with Philip.”

“No one is going to come anywhere near the intimacy you felt and shared with Philip. Maybe ever – certainly not for a long time,” she said.  Hearing this pricked my eyes with tears and brought a bittersweet respite.

“Choosing to be on your own, to honor the longing for solitude for however long it nurtures you, is fine, necessary,” she continued.  “Explaining to friends that you can only manage short visits is understandable; they’ll understand, won’t they?”

Relieved. She wasn’t pushing me to move on, start a new chapter. No timelines, no predictable stages to pass through. Her acknowledgment of time—my time—was comforting; the permission to protect boundaries— liberating.

To be with Philip was to be with myself, to be closer to and even more fully myself; it was being home.  Despite struggles and conflicts, his eccentricities rubbing up against mine, all our stubbornness – there was the certainty of an unshakeable communion, a deep and abiding love.

I tried out a newly unfolding philosophy on her.

“Maybe when a person is so much a part of who you have become, maybe when they die and are no longer physically with you, it’s not such a big change after all because they’re inside you, part of you.  They’re still with you in the ways that matter most.  When this awareness settles around me, I feel connected. He doesn’t feel so gone.”

She smiled.

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