Portfolio at NYU

Posted 09.09.03
Grief: A Personal Struggle

By Lela Moore

One year ago, I watched doctors disconnect my boyfriend, Greg, from the life support machines sustaining him at the end of a long battle with an autoimmune liver disease. First they removed the ventilator tube from his throat. Later, the medication that kept his heart beating and blood circulating to his organs was shut off. The rhythmic beeping of the heart-rate monitor, once a comforting noise, became a shrill alarm as his labored breathing slowed.
I've heard people say that the hours and days immediately following a death pass in a blur. I remember scenes, people, and events sharply and clearly, like snapshots. I remember choosing the clothes to send to the funeral home so he could be laid out in his best blue suit and a pair of boxer shorts with lobsters printed on them.
I remember greeting people at a memorial service, separate from his funeral, and being so frustrated with the rent-a-preacher there that I stood up at the conclusion of the service and implored Greg's friends to remember him the way he really was.
I remember the long drive from New Jersey, where Greg and I lived, to Rochester, New York, for his funeral and burial. I remember putting my hands on the edge of his coffin. I remember talking to friends after the service.
Things began to blur for me after my friends went back to work and my family went home, after I started back to work and waited to hear from graduate schools. I am very lucky to have a large group of friends, all of whom proved tremendously supportive in the days and weeks immediately following Greg's death. Greg was one of those magnetic people, the kind that never meets a stranger, and his death took our friends, many of whom did not know the extent of his illness, by surprise.
The minister who gave the eulogy at Greg's funeral approached me afterward and said he had written his speech thinking of me as Greg's widow. I was surprised that someone had articulated what I'd felt all along. During the course of our relationship, I quickly grew out of the role of "girlfriend." I became a confidant and a caretaker as well as a romantic partner. Greg told me once that he didn't know why I stood by him, why I took the chance with him. But I couldn't imagine life without him.
Losing a partner young is to lose your dreams, your hopes, your what-ifs and could've-beens. Heidi Snow, 30, lost her fiance, Michel Breistoff, in the crash of TWA 800 over Long Island Sound in 1996. Snow later founded AirCraft Casualty Emotional Support Services (Access).a nonprofit organization that provides assistance for relatives and friends of air crash victims. Snow was 24 when her fiance died. "You lose your whole future," she said. "You don't know what the negatives might have been."
But the lack of a wedding ring, I've discovered, means that people see your relationship as something less than permanent. Several support groups I contacted after Greg died weren't willing to stretch the definition of "widow" enough to let me in. Meanwhile, my friends were encouraging me to date again just two months after Greg's death.
"Your loss is very diminished when people aren't willing to fit you into whatever criteria they have for a 'real relationship,'" said Snow. "There's a definite lack of acknowledgement." Snow said she has met several women who lost boyfriends and fiances on September 11 with painful stories of friends' attempts to console them.
"People say to them, 'oh, you're so young, you're so pretty, you'll meet someone,'" Snow said. "It kind of belittles what they're going through."
I tried to date. One fledgling relationship came to a quick end when the guy yelled at me to "just get over Greg" after I rebuffed his attempt to kiss me one night. Some guys reacted with shock, others with teary proclamations of "I'm here for you." But no one acted comfortable with my situation.
I found my solace in alcohol. By summer, I was going out four or five nights a week. And while I previously drank the occasional glass of wine with dinner or couple of beers at a party, I now found myself drinking hard alcohol -- about five drinks per night, plus complimentary shots from the bartenders at our favorite places. I went to work hungover several times that summer, my cigarette-scented clothes and bloodshot eyes earning me the reputation among my coworkers as a hardcore party girl. As I'd always been a wallflower type, I basked in the lushness of my new lifestyle.
But grief is isolating even when people surround you. For most of the year following Greg's death, I don't think I was at home alone more than two nights a week. But I cried myself to sleep nearly every night. Even when I was out at bars or parties, I felt alone. People simply did not know what to say.
I was invited to several weddings in the year following Greg's death. At the one I did attend, for the friends who set me up on a blind date with Greg, I burst into tears at a pre-wedding party when the DJ played Eric Clapton's "Wonderful Tonight" and had to be ushered off the dance floor by a friend. I sobbed into my hands as the bride walked down the aisle the next day. After that, I turned all the other invitations down.
Even if, as in my case, you know you will lose someone, it is impossible to understand and prepare for all the different emotions that constitute grief. Sadness is a given, and it comes in horrible, heaving waves. But there's also anger, and frustration, and helplessness, and even, sometimes, happiness and calm. Sometimes looking at pictures or smelling the Cuban restaurant we used to go to will trigger a burst of emotion for me. But sometimes I am overwhelmed just walking down the street.
You can, however, prepare yourself to confront the grief. For me, the process took nearly a year. Every anniversary hurt, from the one-week to the one-year. It was much easier to immerse myself in activities that didn't require me to think at all, much less think about Greg. But last fall I went back to school to pursue my journalism career, which I had put on hold to take care of Greg. Writing about Greg helps me talk about him. I also began speaking with a grief counselor. People had mentioned counseling to me since I stepped out of that cubicle in the ICU, but I firmly believe that you have to be in the right frame of mind to get anything out of counseling.
I had a lot of pent-up anger inside -- anger I had long been afraid to express for fear that people would think I was angry at Greg for being ill, or angry at my role in helping him cope with illness. A counselor told me that being angry at a disease and being angry with a person were two different things. It's a simple concept, but one that required time and distance from the chaos surrounding Greg's death. I had to wait until I was ready to walk away from all the well-meaning friends and family whose embraces had gotten me through the worst of times, and to face the isolation.
Part of Snow's motive in founding Access, she said, was to recognize her loss for what it was. "Partly because I was not the next of kin, to lots of people, I wasn't that important," she said. "This means having a place in it all."
Instead of all the beginnings I thought my relationship with Greg would bring, I found myself tying up the relationship's loose ends. I have never forgotten the sense of togetherness, but I have found in myself a surprising strength in the aloneness.