An Open-Hearted Grief
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been puzzled when, while attending my ex-husband’s memorial service on Cape Cod last month, my thoughts drifted toward the banks of “what if.” After all, when someone with whom we’ve had a long and fraught history dies, we often find ourselves speculating about what might have been while pondering what was.
Nevertheless, I was somewhat bewildered. I’d assumed that in forgiving John for the heartache that his reckless behavior and his inability to parent our daughter had generated—and making amends with myself for the long time it took me to leave him behind and thus protect her—I had, along with my resentments, let go of the hypotheticals.
But three days later, back home and about to set out on an afternoon hike, a new round of conjecturing cycled through my mind: What if you hadn’t carried your bitterness for so long? a voice I recognized as my own whispered. How much better that would have been for Grace!
A wave of remorse swept over me. Without question, I regretted having spent more than two decades rationalizing my bitterness as justified before finally admitting that such anger was corrosive. And yes, I lamented that I’d arrived at my decision to forgive my ex only weeks before his unexpected death in late February. While I was grateful that compassion had helped me see his long battle with alcoholism—one that he ultimately lost—in a new light, not finding forgiveness sooner had come at a cost. There had been no opportunity to experience how this empathy for him might have altered the way in which we interacted over time.
Unsurprisingly, the guilt I felt most keenly was in knowing that my disdain toward John had sometimes undermined my ability to help my girl navigate her challenging relationship with her Dad. “Shoulda done better. Didn’t” I mumbled, as a riot of leaves crunched beneath my feet. If absolution was supposed to be so emotionally healing, I wondered, why did I still feel so empty and sad?
Midway into my trek through the forest preserve I'd chosen to explore, however, I began shaking my head in disbelief: How had I forgotten that, in the immediate aftermath of forgiving the man who was once my husband, I’d experienced a flood of similar emotions—and that I’d written about this episode of internal turmoil in a blog (From Gratitude Blooms Sorrow) that was posted in April? In that piece, I described how grief, like a stone, had settled in my chest and how I hoped that, over time, I might find room in my heart for tenderness to grow.
As I let this memory sink in, I recalled a line from author Stephen Levine’s Unattended Sorrow: Recovering From Loss and Reviving the Heart (Monkfish Publishing, 2019), a book I had read this past summer. Suddenly, the timing of my pangs of conscience—all the “what ifs”—made sense: “As forgiveness decomposes the armoring over our heart,” Levine wrote, “we release the grief that’s been held hard in the body.” Release. A painful image of John’s ashes being scattered into the sea rose up in my mind.
Later, as I retraced my path back to the lot where I had parked my car, I held tight to the truth of Levine’s words, understanding that my remorse and regret, as well as my despondency, were not cause for undue concern. Rather, these feelings, while unsettling, were simply the evidence that my grief, as both a consequence of my act of forgiveness and John’s passing out of this life, had been set free and was delicate still.
As a fall chill fills the air today, I am feeling less badgered by suppositions, while mindful that we all mourn differently. We make sense of our losses, each in our own way. But as for me? I’m anticipating more traipsing through the woods—the ones nearby, and the metaphorical ones, too. I expect that I will be carrying my grief with me, but I hope to also take solace in what bereavement experts assure us is true: that grief opens the heart, making it possible for healing to slowly but steadily seep in.
