Moving On
I always hated the term “moving on.” I heard it frequently after my husband died. When I asked Ian, “What does ‘moving on’ mean exactly anyway, because I don’t get it?” he replied without hesitation, “In your case, Donna, it means getting unstuck.”
Ian, no doubt, would say that I’ve been much more stuck than unstuck in my time with him, so stuck is my established fallback position. This is on me. I don’t always embody the courage to heal. Counterproductive? Yes. At first, it was understandable. I was reeling from the upheaval Kim’s death brought into our lives. He was a stay-at-home dad, our child’s primary caregiver. I went to work every day. A readjustment of roles born of crisis was in order, but it took time. Of course, this is something that single moms and dads do every day, but the acute grief I was feeling, and the fog and XX of grief, hindered my progress. I did everything poorly. I also had a grieving child to take care of, who had just turned thirteen at the time. We were both hurting. Reconciling ourselves to our new roles took time. She wasn’t used to me taking the lead, and she didn’t like it.
At the end of that year, we attended a memorial event in which all the people invited had lost a loved one in the past calendar year. One woman who spoke gushed about her new husband, whom she had met and married six months after her first husband had died. She came across to me as feeling a little guilty about it, given her audience, but reconciled her choice, citing the role serendipity played in her life with this new husband. Serendipity, I can get behind, but still, given the anguish I was feeling, I marveled at how “unstuck” she seemed and how quickly she had “moved on” with her life. All this time later, I wonder if the new marriage lasted. I hope so, for her sake and her kids’.
I had a friend once who had lost her mother. The friend was in college during her mother’s illness, and it was fast. Diagnosis, and then three months later, the beloved mom was gone. Dianne said to me once, “It doesn’t get better, it just gets different,” and I think this is true for a lot of us, especially in the early years after a death. It stays with us, it sticks. Are we really meant to “get over” the death of a loved one? I don’t know what it means to “get over” a death either. I suspect that Ian would say it means getting unstuck, too. Getting over it means getting unstuck, too.
But we can’t live happy, productive lives stuck.
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