Stage 5: Dealing with the Grieving of Others

Day 66: Drunken Architect: 2 parts Lemon Juice, 2 parts Fernet Branca, 1 part gin

If there's one thing I've learned, and hope to get across with this blog, grieving is a strange process. It twists peoples' perception of the living and the dead and the entire world around them. They withdraw and lash out in the strangest way possible. These reactions are understandable, but they're also at times inexcusable. Learning how to react to these situations is one of the hardest things for me about being a widower.

LOLz. iknowrite?

I'm an introvert. I could show you about 500 animated GIFs on Buzzfeed to tell you what that means, but I'll save the platitudes for a Facebook post. In this case, it means I don't always react to others in a way which is socially acceptable. I laugh when I should act serious and I sigh when I should smile. In my interactions in the last two months, strangers, coworkers and acquaintances have reacted in ways that represent an amount of grief which, in my estimation, they have not earned. Dahlia was my world, the entirety of my being. I had countless emergency room trips and held her hand as she died. I'm doing okay, trying to move on with my life. Complete strangers should react with a less shocked and terrified response than I feel on any given day. I get it. They just found out someone they never knew died, and I've known this thing was going to happen for the last two years. Outside of that perspective, though, their reaction seems... laughable.

And I laugh. I laugh a nervous laugh, and in response, they never know how to react. They ask why I'm laughing when my wife just died. I just shrug and tell them i don't know. It's a partial truth, but for the most part it's because I don't want to tell them I'm laughing because I don't know how else to respond to their overreaction.

The reaction of the strangers is frustrating, but understandable. The reactions which seem absolutely mind-boggling are those of my former in-laws. Dahlia had a strained relationship with both her parents. She stopped speaking to her father shortly after her diagnosis. His tendency was to make her diagnosis a reason to act out. Dahlia needed a parent, not a child, and as a result decided to no longer put up with her father's bullshit. She still loved him, but her diagnosis left her with no mental energy to put up with outside stress.

Her mother was a good parent. She came when required and helped her when she was ill. She gave me a break from the day to day caretaking, for which I am grateful. Her flaws arose from her religion. Her mother is an evangelical Christian. God has an answer for everything and He has a plan for everyone. God's plan was to take away Dahlia in her early 30's. Her mother has to come to terms with the fact God wanted to kill her daughter and make her feel an immense amount of emotional pain.

Both of them reacted to Dahlia's death in difficult ways for me to process. Her father didn't show to her funeral. He scheduled a colonoscopy for two days earlier than he was to fly out to Seattle. For one, he knew about the date a month in advance, and could have scheduled the scan for whenever he liked. Number B, there is no way he couldn't have flown if he wanted, despite the amount of the gas he was dealing with. His decision not to show at Dahlia's funeral was selfish and frightened, but I'm happy he made it. It's much easier to have a selfish and frightened father 3000 miles away than it is to have one at a funeral.

Her mother's reactions were much more discomforting. I can only imagine the anger and fear going through that woman's mind. Her entire faith was put into question by her daughter's death. I knew it would cause her to mourning to be front and center when she was out here, but I had no idea the amount of vitriol that would spill from her when she was out here. During Dahlia's wake, she ended up telling my sister-in-law that it was good of her to come out despite the fact that Dahlia hated her.

She said what? Okay, maybe I'm spending
too much time on Buzzfeed

Let that sink in a bit, because it took me a while to wrap my head around it. She told a woman she never met, a woman related to a grieving widower who would no doubt hear about it, the most vile, despicable thing you could say to a person at a wake.  Dahlia had frustrations with certain people at certain times, and voiced them a little too loudly to the wrong people on occasion. I've been the victim of this, and I know her friends know more of my faults than I'd care to admit. None of it meant she hated anyone, and her mother knew this. Besides, even if it were true, that would never be an appropriate response to any sort of conversation. To top it off, she planned on telling me, before she was talked out of it, that she would be glad to take Dahlia's ashes when (not if) I remarry.

After being told these things, I felt an emotion, one of the five stages, I don’t feel very often: anger. I wanted to take this woman and destroy her very core. If she called, I wanted to take her faith and shove it down her throat. Her God had killed her daughter. She was so angry at Him that she lashed out at anyone she saw. She was angry at the one entity she could not be angry at. If I talked to her in the days after the wake, I would have told her that God was the only needed target for her anger. Her faith made her bitter and manipulative, and she backed the wrong horse in this race for eternity.

In the time since, I’ve calmed down a bit. I still believe all the things above, but I'm lucky enough to have a choice to just never speak with her parents again. I can walk away from the parts of Dahlia that caused me the most stress: the memories of ER trips, my in-laws, etc. If there's one thing I fear about this whole thing, it's ending up, a year from now, unable to adjust and move on. A confrontation would just cause things to linger. Besides, I'm a Seattleite. Passive aggression is how we cope and it's what we do best, and I can't think of anything more passive aggressive than airing this stuff out on a semi-anonymous blog.