It’s Complicated

Life. Love. Death. Grief. It’s Complicated.

Insert the angsty teenage soundtrack circa 2002 here…

“Why do you have to go and make things so complicated?
I see the way you’re acting like you’re somebody else gets me frustrated
Life’s like this you
And you fall, and you crawl, and you break
And you take, what you get, and you turn it into
Honesty and promise me I’m never gonna find you fake it
No, no, no…”

Thank you for the snappy tune that always plays in my head when I declare my frustrations Avril Lavigne.

There wasn’t a lot of real angst for me growing up, perhaps some mild manufactured teen dilemmas that supported my need for chokers, black nails and lips, and a trench coat before they became truly taboo. No, I grew up in the middle class, in a sleepy suburbia, the older, wiser, more academic and musically inclined sibling of a picture worthy nuclear family. Life was good, I had great friends, and was an active member of our church, albeit many years begrudgingly. Not the kind of girl that ends up in this type of story, although the landscape has certainly changed over the years, I may have said as little as one, two, or certainly three years ago, we will never be that family.

The trouble is, its a lot more complicated then we think it will be. Life, love, death, grief. Its so much more nuanced than we realize until we have to live it. Luckily for me, I either don’t look like the type of person that tolerates “If it was me…” style advice or I just don’t keep that type of looky-loo in my life or I tuned it out, regardless I just didn’t hear much of it. But you know that advice, the kind you get when you are definitely not asking for it, when what you are looking for is just someone to see you instead of give you their two cents like you were holding a tin cup out in some highly peopled area. The problem with that advice is it rarely, if ever, takes into consideration is complications.

As I write this I keep assuming I have to back track a little, take two steps forward and one back, and maybe that is because I need to be reminded of the story before the story you are here for, because the context matters. It matters to me and my kids and for some reason I need you to know, maybe so I don’t look like I was one of those women from one of those families. As I typed that I cringed, for the sheer fact that I still feel sometimes like I need to defend myself, my choices, my life, which is in the biggest way, me still defending him. It’s complicated; life, love, death, grief.

I was reminded of that as I set about decorating the house for Christmas. I can count the number of Black Friday shopping trips I have ever done on one hand, after my stint in the world of retail I had almost no desire to ever be involved in those types of sale induced shenanigans ever again, save the couple of years we had two toddlers and the sales were actually still great. Instead I picked up the habit, er tradition since it is the holidays and all, of putting up the Christmas Tree the day after Thanksgiving, but not a moment sooner. This year, as I unpacked the ornaments from their neat boxes and bundles of tissue or bubble wrap I was struck by the most complicated thoughts of all…I have no idea how I feel about this or what to do. I lined up the monogramed and carefully dated, the military themed, and the Purple Hearts, nine of those so far, wondering how I would feel if one shows up in the mailbox this year like it has every year since he retired. I debated hanging them on the tree to remember the life we once enjoyed, the first year we were married, those first ridiculous ornaments that made us laugh so hard we started a tradition of finding the worst/best every year; I thought about   pretending I didn’t see them at all and packing them away, starting fresh and trying to forget; I settled for a little of both and a family vote about the rest.

The weird thing is that in feeling nothing I felt everything as I looked through the bins of decorations. I was angry, sad, frustrated, lonely, scared, nostalgic, it was complicated; life, love, death, grief. It continues to be as complicated in the PS (post-suicide) life as it was before.

It was complicated because: he wasn’t always that way; he was sick; he was not prepared well for this world; he did not find meaning after the loss; I did not always know how deep or how old the pain he carried was; sometimes he was who I had met that first day; his big heart still had a way of shining through right when I was ready to throw in the towel; he was a product of war, his job, a thing he chose and yet didn’t.

It continues to be complicated, life, love, death, grief, because his “stuff” became my stuff too, because I was the one gathering up and reassembling the pieces as they scattered over and over again. I was the one apologizing on his behalf and feeling the weight of the things he had said and done to the people we cared about most. I was the one pleading for him to open his eyes and see what he had, rather than what he didn’t. And then I wasn’t anymore.

Even though the vacuum was filled mostly, at first, with a sense of peace, complications arise, of course. Life, love, death, grief are complicated. The pendulum swung from anger to sadness, love to hate, hopelessness to hopefulness for so long and so often that stillness, once it arrived, felt like an alien planet most times.

Peace, now that is complicated, holding all of life, love, death, grief and everything between in it. Finding it, holding it, and living in it, is equally so, but the beauty in it, is finding grace, the fierce kind. The intense kind that knows all, sees all, and yet loves all. That is the gift of the complications and I try to do my best to live in that grace every day. For me. For my kids. For you. And for him.