Do Not Go Gentle: Epilogue

Excerpt from Epilogue

“A death blow is a life blow to some.” Emily Dickinson

Part One: Five Years Later

When Frank died, it seemed to me that my life had stopped—and that therefore everything in the world must surely stop, too. I could scarcely believe that the sun came up as usual, that stores and offices opened and people went to work, that ads still came addressed to Frank Sartwell (“We know a lover of the outdoors like yourself would appreciate the comfort of these hiking boots”).

Sometimes the feelings of sadness, guilt, longing, and despair were almost overwhelming; and sometimes there were no feelings whatsoever, just a kind of numbness where I observed my body moving about doing familiar things. I could never tell whether I was making “progress.” One day the sadness would lift a little, and the next day I’d feel washed overboard  with no land in sight. Somewhere in a book I came upon two wise observations: recovering from grief will take longer than you expect, and you will not be the same afterwards.

Grieving is a solitary process, although it doesn’t seem so at first. Like many widows, I discovered that there is an immediate outpouring of sympathy and support. For two or three weeks I was inundated with cards, letters, phone calls, and invitations to dinner. Then they stopped. Except for a few close friends, almost nobody made a second sympathetic gesture. I was surprised to find out how fast the world is finished with your grief—and how fast it expects you to be done with it, too. The message is: Take a couple of weeks to deal with it, then pull yourself together and go on as if nothing significant has happened.

I soon realized that my presence often made people uncomfortably aware of their own mortality. And some friends, despite the best intentions, simply could not be in the presence of so much raw pain.

About three weeks after Frank died, Mary and Geoff, good friends for more than two decades, invited me to dinner at a Georgetown restaurant. I was looking forward to an honest talk, but when I got there, another couple, whom I barely knew, was also at the table. After the obligatory, “We’re so sorry about your loss,” conversation moved to safe topics—weather, children, movies—with much light banter intended to be cheerful and distracting. I tried to join in, to be light-hearted and pretend that nothing had happened, but it is an ordeal to do that when, in fact, your heart is broken. When it was over, I put the evening down to good intentions gone awry.

A few weeks later Mary and Geoff again invited me to dinner. To my surprise, we were joined by the same couple, and so we repeated the previous evening’s superficialities. This time I realized that Mary couldn’t take me as I was. I guessed that my grief must be almost palpable to her and that she didn’t like the feel of it. My very presence was so unsettling to her that to be with me at all, she had to have a buffer between us. Perhaps I reminded her that one day she, too, could lose a beloved partner, or perhaps she lived so much in her own intellect that she could not tolerate intense emotion. At any rate, I understood that under the circumstances we could no longer be friends. I sent her a thank-you note and did not see or hear from her again for nine years.

I felt isolated. I feared that never again would there be a place for me in the mainstream. I would live forever on the fringes of society—the third person in the car or the seventh at dinner, always feeling like an outsider. With Frank gone, I had little physical contact with anyone, and the well-meant pats on the shoulder from friends scarcely replaced Frank’s warm bear hugs. Sometimes I felt that an invisible space surrounded me and that no one could break through it.

I experienced grief as physical pain. I felt that in the back of my throat I had a golf ball, which I tried constantly to swallow down, and between my ribs I occasionally got a pain that pierced like a knife. I also had the strange sensation that a piece of me was missing, blown away somewhere.

I operated much of the time in a fog. My voice sounded strange to me, as if I were under water. It was difficult to concentrate. Once I set out to purchase something on the third floor of a five-level department store. I stepped on the escalator, forgot to get off, and rode it all the way to the top. Annoyed at myself, I got on the down escalator and did the same thing again, riding it all the way to the basement. When I got on again, it took an enormous effort to remember to get off on the third floor and then to recall what I wanted to buy.

I managed on the job because I didn’t pretend to be more on top of it than I was. For many months, I slogged through on automatic most of the time, relying on ingrained habits and familiar routines. Most of the time they were enough to get the job done adequately. When they were not, two wonderful senior staff members rescued me, tactfully nudging me in new directions: “Are you sure you want to do it that way? I was wondering if we might try. . .”

When the day was over, I took the elevator to the parking garage, got into my car, put my head on the steering wheel, and let the tears flow. There in the car, I didn’t have to hold up any more. No one noticed me; no phones rang; no one could even hear my noisy sobs. I drove home on roads that were a watery blur.

Nothing really mattered. In the back of my mind was a thought that kept edging itself forward: “If it doesn’t get any better, I can always . . ."

About three months after Frank died, I realized that the decision had been made. There was no reason to go on. I could end the heartache and the struggle. It would be a cop-out, I realized, a selfish thing to do, and a terrible legacy to leave one’s son. But at least Dan was through college and on his own. One day perhaps he would understand and forgive. The immediate problem was that my financial affairs were not in good order. I would need to straighten them out and make a will so that I didn’t leave a tangled financial mess to further burden Dan and my two stepsons. Every time the thought of suicide came up, I told myself, “Yes, but not now. My financial affairs are a mess.” And every time I told myself to call a lawyer and make a will, I put it off. It was as if the healthy part of me was playing for time.

For months I stood at the edge of this abyss and looked down. All through the first winter, when I came home to a big, empty house, I promised myself that I didn’t have to go on doing this much longer. The abyss became almost a real presence, a dangerous, darkly reassuring one.



Marcia Sartwell

 And yet I kept on going. After six months, I noted in my journal: “I welcome the passage of time. It does make things hurt less. Or maybe it’s just that, in going on, we prove to ourselves that we can go on. And there is some comfort in that.”

Copies of the book can be ordered through Amazon.com