How are you, Sam? (#1324)

Topics/tags: Autobiographical, maudlin, rambly, insufficiently edited

I’ve been meaning to write and post this musing for a while now. I even have a draft sitting around somewhere that I wrote the week after Christmas. That draft has disappeared. I thought about writing and posting something similar a week ago, in honor of three months. That was too hard, so I found other things to occupy my time. Now seems to be the right time. I’m back to regular musing, and I need to spend a bit more time grieving. (As you might expect, these maudlin musings encourage me to grieve.) Here we go.

How are you, Sam?

People have been asking me that a lot. And I think they care about the answer. That is, they ask because they want to know how I’m doing, not because it’s a standard greeting. That’s nice. It’s good to have people who care.

My typical response is to hold out my hands, palms up, and shrug my shoulders. I hope that’s a gesture that most people understand. It usually means something like I’m not sure. And it’s a better answer than Tuesday.

Sometimes people press a bit more, and I say something like About how you’d expect me to be doing or About as well as you’d expect. Those answers are almost certainly lies. Not everyone has the same expectation of how one deals with the loss of a loved one, so I can’t be doing the same as everyone expects. There are probably some folks out there who assume that I’m back to normal. (Hah!) There are others who are wondering whether I can even cope with day-to-day living. (I think I can. However, I don’t know what I’ve forgotten to do.) As I said, given the range of possible expectations, these answers are probably lies.

Why don’t I give a more detailed or more accurate answer? In part, it’s that I don’t want to introspect enough to give such an answer. I still need to keep some separation from my emotions, particularly in public. Even the about how you’d expect sometimes has me tearing up. Introspecting would make me break down, and no one wants that. At least, I don’t. Not in public. Not with the frequency that people ask me the question.

There’s also a little voice in the back of my head that has an answer. It speaks in the voice of a prototypical older Jewish person (male or female). And it says, The love of my life is dead. How should I be? Perhaps I should practice giving that answer. It’s good to answer questions with question. I’m a teacher. I know that rhetorical strategy.

A few weeks back, as I walked to breakfast with my children, I found myself crying. I said to myself, I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. Ok, I’m not okay. And I realized that it’s okay not to be okay yet. It may even be okay to never be okay. I won’t see her again. I won’t hold her again. I won’t talk with her again. (We’ll see whether there’s an afterlife. Even if there is, and it’s one in which we have individual consciousness and volition, there will be many years until I reach it. At least, I hope there will.)

A more detailed answer is hard to give, not just because I’m avoiding introspection. There are lots of things involved in thinking about how I’m doing. In some ways, I’m doing okay. I’m getting the bills paid (I think). I’m getting my classes prepared and may even be less stressed about them than normal. I’m doing the laundry. On the other hand, I’m struggling to get many other tasks done, such as writing thank-you notes to all the generous people who made donations in her honor or getting all of my flexible spending account receipts together. And I haven’t even started to think about cleaning out Michelle’s stuff.

She wouldn’t be happy about that last issue. She was always a get things done now type of person. Whenever we moved, she wanted us to unbox things immediately. When we got back from a trip, we’d clean out the suitcases and put them away the same day (or maybe the next). But I lack the emotional energy to even look at some of her things, let alone to think about getting rid of some of them or even to move them from place to place. Time also seems to be in shorter supply than I’d like. Oh well, I think she’d understand. At least I hope she would.

How else am I doing? I cry. Sometimes I cry too much. Is it possible to cry too much? Perhaps not. Let’s just say sometimes I cry a lot. Other times, I don’t cry much at all. Perhaps that’s too little. As I said, I need to grieve. And, as friends who’ve gone through similar losses have told me, it will take time. I have many things that make me grieve, some small, some large. Perhaps they will become further musings. We’ll see.

What else did I want to say? Oh, I remember.

In the month or so after she died, people also asked Are you back in the classroom?, Are you back at work?, or something similar. My answer was usually, Yes; I think it’s better to have work to focus on. And that’s somewhat true. I benefitted from having structure in my life and from supporting wonderful young people (aka my students). However, other issues are also involved. In particular, the College’s policies indicate that,

Up to five (5) scheduled workdays of paid bereavement leave are available to benefits-eligible employees for the death of an immediate family member. Grinnell College defines immediate family as the employee’s spouse or domestic partner, parent, parent-in-law or parents of domestic partner, child(ren), and stepparents and children. [1]

So I had to go back to work.

Five days doesn’t feel like much. It’s not enough time for a funeral, wake, and time to sit shiva. It’s also possible to take more. The Staff Handbook also says that

Employees may, with their supervisors’ approval, use any available paid leave for additional time off as necessary.

Unfortunately, I don’t think faculty get any paid leave. In any case, I’d like to see us be more generous to all staff and more accommodating of religious requirements. Perhaps I need to add that to my list of things to push on. Or perhaps I’d just be tilting at windmills.

In any case, I had to return to work if I wanted to continue to get paid. At least that’s what I understood. I also felt bad asking my colleagues to cover my classes; all of them were busy enough (aka too busy). It was also the best thing for me to do. Certainly better than crawling up into a ball and bawling.

That’s about it. How am I? Sad. Depressed. Significantly less efficient than normal. Making it through life, day by day. Still ranting about the College and other pointless issues. Happy to be teaching. Thankful for the thirty-seven years of marriage I had to a wonderful woman. Hoping to keep our memories close to my heart. Grateful for my kids and my friends. Teary. Lots of things. I’m not okay. But that’s okay.

Perhaps what you’d expect.

The love of my life has died. How should I be?

Shrugs.

[1] Grinnell College Staff Handbook, version of July 16, 2024, p. 56.

Version 1.0 of 2025-01-15.