I believe that early on, I reached an intellectual understanding that my wife and I were dealing with grief differently. When I was up, she was down. When I was down, she was up. When she needed company, I needed to be alone and vice-versa. I sort of knew that but it didn’t really sink in until a number of months down this road.
Most Friday nights we try to have dinner out. So on this particular Friday evening we’re in the middle of dinner and Kathy tells me that I don’t seem to talk about Lance as much as I did early on. It’s as if I am forgetting him and that is of considerable concern.
Having been married a good number of years, I realize that things of concern to my spouse are not likely to resolve themselves and require considerable attention on my part.
So during the following week I thought about what she had said and realized that she was probably correct and resolved to correct this situation.
So the next Friday we are out to dinner again and I began to talk about Lance. I didn’t get more than a minute into it when Kathy leaned across the table and said, “This conversation is really inappropriate”.
We can laugh about it now but it really highlighted the differences. It also was the catalyst for us to sit down and try to figure out a solution. From that we decided three things:
1. We could not fix each other and would stop trying to make each other better.
2. We created these children together and wanted to stay together. To do that we had to do a better job telling each other what we were thinking and feeling.
3. And perhaps most important for me, we needed to do a better job of listening. We have to try and be there for each other on our good days and we must not leave our partners isolated when we are both having a bad day.
Patrick T. Malone
Tags: grief, hope
