On grief and guardian angels

It never dawned on me that, by planning to marry on a holiday devoted to memorializing the dead, I might be tempting fate.

But tempt fate I did, and fourteen months to the day I became a bride, I went from newlywed to widow.

For a few years after John’s death, when my circle was birthing babies and I was sleeping with his ashes in a perfume bottle by my bed, my perspective was so skewed that I really believed that no matter life’s mundane miseries, if you didn’t end up in the morgue by nightfall, it had been a lucky, lucky day. 

Gloucester’s words in King Lear echoed through my head: 

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods.
They kill us for their sport.”

Faith? Grace? No way. God was for me a vicious, hairy-knuckled monster that reached down from the sky and snatched my love, my life, away. Forget the physics of the stall, the spin, the crash. John may as well have been a fluffy air-borne pussycat flailing against the talons of a ravenous owl.

It took a while for John to morph from dead husband into guardian angel, but his spirit eventually found new form, and he hasn’t stopped looking after me in all the decades since. I let go of the black-and-whiteness of mere survival as the standard against which I measured good fortune, and eventually I was back in the trenches with everyone, bemoaning the accidents, arguments, mishaps and glitches that legitimately suck, acknowledging that avoiding them can be embraced as good luck. 

That was more than half a lifetime ago, and once again, I feel like I’m back where I began life after John: I’m grieving. 

While that grief was sharp and raw and disassociating; this COVID grief is dull and muddying. Just weeks ago, in my beloved New York City, the morgues were full. I’ve circled back to my life’s defining trauma; my definition of good fortune has once again shrunk: During this ghastly catastrophe, we can count ourselves lucky if by day’s end you or someone you love hasn’t been loaded into a refrigerated truck. 

But the intervening decades have been rich and wondrous. They’ve taught me to have faith. And grace? My definition of grace is finding exactly what I need, and on this wedding anniversary of a marriage not to be, I gratefully acknowledge that everything necessary has been ushered my way by the gentle flapping of my guardian angel’s wings. 

John, Blue, and my ubiquitous flip-flops. Door County, Wisconsin.