taking care

When a widow/widower suddenly loses a spouse there is a period early on where there is help and support from friends and family. Everyone is there to take care of things and at the same time take care of you.

People will do things for you without asking. For us there was a close group of friends and family that rallied around us to take care of things without any direction from us. Part of this was necessary because the first few days I was at the hospital day and night with my youngest daughter. I didn't have to ask anyone to take care of things at the house, it just happened. That was a tremendous help for me. It allowed me to focus what little sane mind I had on taking care of my injured daughters, and also to start the process of making all the arrangements for the funeral, cemetery, etc.

Also at that time we were all really fragile and quite emotionally destroyed. It was comforting to have people taking care of us. We to some extent gave up any sense of privacy or concern about what was ours. People did laundry, dishes, yard work just about anything. There wasn't any thought that we needed to keep any part of our lives private at that point.

Looking back on those days I think that all of our friends and family that were taking care of us were filling in some of the space that was now empty without Cindy there. It was a very comforting thing and helped us to ease in to the realization of all that we had lost.

The realities of life are that all these friends and family had stopped their lives to take care of ours and they would only be able to do that for a short time. Some live in other parts of the country and had to return to their lives sooner that those that live nearby. Those that could helped for a longer period of time. This slow process of giving us back all the responsibilities of taking care of ourselves was a tremendous help in easing us through the initial grief and preparing us for our longer term recovery.

As time goes on the types of assistance start to return almost to the level of neighborly sharing that we did before losing Cindy, except that our family was in a place where we were unable to carry our part of the load. As much as I would like to be able to do all the things that Cindy did for our friends and neighbors as far as carpools, picking kids up after school, and helping the other moms do all those things that moms do, there is no way I could do it.

Cindy had organizational skills and abilities to track and manage not just our kids and all of their activities, but also those of the families and friends around us. I can't even keep track of our own "stuff", much less help anybody else. I have been able to some small extent keep track of how everyone is helping us so I know who is taking the girls where for me, but, even with that there are times when I know that the week is taken care of as far as rides to all the events and which days I am picking up or dropping off, but sometime I can't remember who is doing what for me.

So as we move on there is a realization that we will always, to some extent, require the help and assistance of our friends and family, and will be limited in the amount of help that we can return.

So I look back and realize that we all need to be taken care of in some way or another. Especially couples who get used to taking care of each other. Part of what happens is we give up our privacy and sense of self to allow someone to take care of us. We give up our independence and that giving allows someone to give to us in return. It happens without thought as do so many of the daily interactions between spouses. We are (were) a team that do things unconsciously after years of playing together. There are so many things couples do that just happen without having to ask each other to do them.

I and continuously finding out just how many of those things there are, and each realization reminds me again of something more that I've lost.