The Volcano vs. The Timeline - My Messy Beautiful

The Volcano vs. The Timeline

We think in numbers and time.  We earn salaries, go shopping, pay bills and buy houses.  We state our age, our graduation date, how long we've lived somewhere, and how old our dogs are in "dog-years".  I truly believe we cling to numbers and time because they are concrete.  They can't fade or morph from one fact to another. With our clingy-ness to numbers, though, comes human expectations.  "If I make so much, I'll be happy at last."  "Once this child is five, parenting will be a breeze!"  (Or potty-trained, or in school, or out of braces, or driving.......on and on.) "When a whole year has passed, I'll feel better!"  My mind tells me that last one again and again - that I need to physically push time ahead to get past the one-year anniversary of my husband's death to start feeling better and moving on.

Only guess what?  Feelings don't happen in number or time order. Feelings are the mercury you spilled (on purpose) on the science lab table in high school just to watch how randomly it squirmed and propelled itself around. Feelings do not follow the number-line or the timeline.  That is why recovery has been so messy and beautiful.  Grief recovery is messy because I don't know which feelings will rise to the surface on any given day or even moment.  Grief recovery is beautiful because - somewhere in there - there is recovery.

My first true feelings when I realized that my husband would not recover and wake up from that heart attack were nothing but fear.  I think I said over and over "What will I do?"  It took weeks and months of sorting, filing, notifying, phone calling, visiting, etc. etc., to get to the place I'm at now.  By place, I mean the numbers place.  The cost, the income, the security.  I actually am in an okay place as far as that goes.  The fear still attacks every now and then, though. And that is what is Messy, Beautiful about my journey.  I had a BEFORE and now I have an AFTER.  BEFORE was still regular life.  So happy together, but with the usual disappointments at work, challenges with children, unexpected expenses that threw us for a loop.  AFTER is a volcano.  AFTER left me with a fighter's attitude that was totally in conflict with the curled-in-fetal-position mourning widow that I thought I should have been.

 I plunged right back into work, opportunities, vacations:  in other words, life.  I had to learn that the volcano could explode whenever it wanted.  When my elementary choir sang "Keep Your Head Up", and one asked me afterward "Mrs. McCarty, were you crying because we sang so pretty?".  Yes, sweetie, of course.  You're too young to know about the volcano.  When I clicked on the wrong button on the computer screen during a training session, lost someone else's work in the process, and broke out sobbing so hard I had to leave the room to recover: explosions.

 Some have been big, some small.  Some have been predictable, some completely out of the blue.  I like an agenda.  I like a schedule.  (I also liked to check off what had happened on the church bulletin with the little pew pencil when I was young.  Keep everything in order!!) So the randomness of AFTER has left me searching for order.

I started writing to find order.  I wrote about the fear, the fighter's attitude vs. the public perception of who I should be.  I wrote about feeling happy when I shouldn't.  I wrote about feeling as if I would be alone forever.  I wrote funny things the kiddos at school said and did - I wasn't even scared to tell about the third grade girl that told me I had hair on my toes!  I also went online to understand grief.  Surely if this happens to unsuspecting humans every day, there must be some rhyme or reason as to how to control the volcano!  I joined a grief forum specific to loss of spouses.  The writing and the forum then joined hands to shake the volcano even more.

A man on the forum followed a link to my writings and read every single one of them. Then he messaged me.  Then we started talking on the phone (in spite of the fact that I wrote what I did about my toes)!  "WAIT!!"  screamed my sense of order and propriety.  "It hasn't been a year!!"  My logical self wanted the numbers and time in order.  My old-fashioned self wanted to make sure I did nothing wrong or unseemly.  The volcano, however, does its own thing.

We actually met in person a few weeks ago, and it was beautiful. We met again two weeks later and it's even more beautiful. In our case, the beautiful makes it messy.   It's messy because we don't live in the same place, and we have both recently lost spouses. If we hadn't liked each other, (beautiful) it wouldn't be as difficult (messy).

I can say this, though:  If mercury belongs to nature and can take that unexpected little dart across the table, then why can't human feelings?  He and I will find out; we're going to see each other again.  Sometimes you just have to let the volcano do its thing and blow up the timeline.


This essay and I are part of the Messy, Beautiful Warrior Project — To learn more and join us, CLICK HERE! And to learn about the New York Times Bestselling Memoir Carry On Warrior: The Power of Embracing Your Messy, Beautiful Life, just released in paperback, CLICK HERE!