The Joyful Widower

Two weeks from today will be one year since the doctor declared Tracy dead.

There’s something (I was about to say “indescribable,” but then realized that I’m describing it) about reaching the one year mark. The first year is full of adjustments. It’s full of “firsts.” The first Valentine’s Day without my wife (just 3 days after her death). Her first birthday after her death. The first Mother’s Day. The first big family trip where it’s just the kids and me. The first of the kids’ birthdays. My first birthday. First wedding anniversary alone, without our names read out on Sunday morning when birthdays, name days, and anniversaries are commemorated after Divine Liturgy. First Thanksgiving and Christmas. The first of Tracy’s name day without her (St. Geneviève, January 3). Each one a hurdle anticipated, cleared, then left behind as the next one loomed ahead.

Next weekend, my dear friends, Iulian and Daniela, will come for dinner and we’ll make Koliva, the traditional dish of boiled wheat berries that Orthodox Christians have at funerals and memorial services. Then Saturday afternoon we’ll visit Tracy’s grave, put the finishing touches on the Koliva, and attend Vespers followed by the memorial prayers for Tracy. Having a plan, having time with good friends, and having the prayers to look forward to, gives some shape and form to what could otherwise be amorphous dread.

In my head, I know how this goes. I remember 24 years ago, reaching the one year mark after Melinda’s death. It was a time to look back over the year before, and to look ahead at whatever years lay before me. It was the time that the head and the gut realized together: yes, there was a completed course behind me, but the next lap was about to begin. Grief is not a sprint, but a marathon.

The second year after Melinda’s death was harder than the first. I found, looking ahead, that yes, I’d gotten through the first of everything, but then there was the second of everything. And the third. And however many, God only knows. The second year of grief turned out to be harder than the first, for precisely that reason.

I’ve faced every “first” this past year after Tracy’s death with that knowledge. In some ways, forewarned was forearmed. My “hurdling muscles” are in shape. But this time the course was different. Each “first” was also a “twenty-fifth.” This time was marking these occasions with my children, who were working through their own grief in their own way, and looking to me to be their dad, to help them with whatever they need.

What will this coming year bring? I don’t know. I have a sense that, though my head knows how this goes, my gut will be reacting like it’s the “first second time all over again.” But I know that, like the first second time, Christ will be with me at each hurdle. It won’t be easy. It won’t feel good. Frankly, I expect it to hurt a lot. But I’m not a Christian because it feels good. I agree with C. S. Lewis: “I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” I also agree with our mutual friend, Dorothy L. Sayers: “It is fatal to let people suppose that Christianity is only a mode of feeling; it is vitally necessary to insist that it is first and foremost a rational explanation of the universe. It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting, and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism. ” And what is that hard truth? That God does not abandon us to suffering, nor does He tell us that it is an illusion, nor does He pull us out of it, but rather He enters into suffering with us, and will bring us to the other side of it all, no matter how bad it is, no matter how long it takes. It might hurt like hell, but hell doesn’t get the last word.

There are many days that I struggle with prayer. There are many times that I don’t even struggle, God forgive me. But I believe that God is merciful, and that He will pick me up at each hurdle where I fall, and He is the one who carries me over each one I clear. I will continue this race, come what may. I can do no other.