Meetings

Last night I attended my first meeting for the Relay for Life team. It was a nice meeting and it was great to meet the team members I don't know and other mother's from the Livermore Mom's group. It also brought up a lot of feelings about Carl's death.

To their credit, none of the women there responded with either pity or platitudes about how strong I must be. Those thoughts or statements never sit quite right with me and end up weighing on my shoulders when they are offered. I think it is always uncomfortable to be pitied, and whenever someone tells me how strong I am I feel like a fraud.

Asking to share my story stirred up a lot of things that I don't think about that often. The initial denial of the diagnosis. (Of COURSE it's not cancer, it is going to just be a benign tumor, they will remove it and everything will be fine.) Getting pregnant, not entirely on purpose or by accident, when we were still a little in denial that the "post surgical changes" in the CAT scan was maybe not necessarily a recurrence of the cancer. The need to FIGHT to get anything done as the doctors discussed and studied the options to death while Carl's tumor grew bigger by the day with no treatment. The fights with Carl about trying to fight when he had resigned himself to death. The numbness of new widowhood when your skin just hangs on you wrong and you feel like you have stepped into an alternate world in which everything is just shifted slightly and you can't quite get your bearings.

I think widowhood, or maybe it is just profound grief, changes a person. Even now I have a hard time feeling like a part of a group. No matter how welcoming or wonderful the people are, there is always a veil between me and the rest of the world. I have heard that people who have lost a parent feel some of the same thing. You have joined a group that those who are not in it have a hard time imaging how fundamentally it has rocked your world.

Every time I am attending a get together where I am going to meet someone new, I always think that maybe this time will be the time I DON'T tell them I am a widow. Maybe this time I will just not bring it up, when husband's enter the conversation I will just be silent and let them draw their own conclusions. In the end I always end up telling them my husband died. Usually around the time they start to ask about whether Audrey will have a brother or sister some day. Maybe it is because I am still trying to process that this is part of my story. Somedays it is an excuse for something I feel is a less than ideal parenting decision. And sometimes it is just because I feel the need to clarify why I am a single mom before other assumptions are made about me.