How to make room for your late partner and simultaneously be able to live your life?

Last night, I was searching for a photocopy of my passport when a picture of me and my late husband popped up on my screen. In this photo, he looks healthy, although we were most likely oblivious to what was already happening inside his body.

A part of my mind remembers this state of being a couple and struggles to let go of it. You don’t get a divorce because one of you died, but another part of you understand that you are no loner married. It is a strange concept to grasp.

What is that place between death and marriage?

Another photo of me pops up on my screen, taken a while after his death during my trip to South-East Asia.I am standing on my own, leaning against the wall in central Saigon, Vietnam. At the time, my mind seemed to operate in an altered state of consciousness. I am floating above the ground, slightly elated, while my body was somewhere left behind, detached from the world around me. It is a strangely soothing state. The bubble encapsulates my grief and sorrow, equally separating me from the world around me.
I was in an acute phase of grief.

It took another few months for me to begin to register the concept of time, and the life that happens outside my bubble. The life I used to be a part of. And once I registered those two separate states in my mind, I realised I had been feeling trapped for quite some time, unaware of the passage of time. Drifting in a timeless and aimless state of grief.

Feeling stuck between the past and the future? Is your grieving stopping you from living?

When you lose a life partner, you suddenly find yourself being confronted with a gap between how things used to be before the death, and your life after death. This dichotomy between before and after seems to be crucial in understanding this issue. Think of it as a gap that designates two separate worlds in your mind, and they both seem to be fighting for your attention. It might feel as if there is not enough room in your mind to host both, and therefore you end up moving in between them. When one of them lights up, the other one has to be temporarily switched off to allow the other to exist. It might feel as the only way to live your life is to put your grief on hold, or ignore it. When your grief world takes over, there is no space to live and think about your future. Living in two parallel universes is rather exhausting and consumes a lot of your mental energy. Your mind is trying to keep them separate.

Perhaps you find yourself feeling like you have to pick one over the other, which is an impossible dilemma. If you pick your life, you end up grappling with guilt: How can I enjoy life when my husband/ wife is no longer here? It might feel like a betrayal, so you try to avoid those guilty feelings by stopping yourself from enjoying your life (read more about guilt in grief). Others might be trying to ignore the elephant in the room by moving on with life without addressing their loss.

Both of these extreme solutions are probably going to backfire eventually. If you don’t make room for life, you end up wasting your valuable time in a state of perpetual avoidance. You might be holding on to the phantasy that you can keep your partner alive as long as you stop the time from passing, at the cost of your liveliness and enjoyment. On the other end, if we ignore the loss, the likelihood is it is going to come out and sabotage your life at a later stage. As Freud used to say: “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come out later in uglier ways.”

What is the way forward from this impossible situation?

The answer is somewhere in between. We have to allow those two parallel worlds to meet by reducing the gap that keeps them apart. In fact, the only way to mourn the loss is to come to terms with what has been lost and how it affected your life. It is always a messy and complicated process that probably never comes to an end, but you can make healthier choices by slowly introducing grieving into living. How can we do that?

Download my guide to life after loss: 7 ways to grieve so you can live for the young and widowed. 

10 ways to address the loss of your life partner so you can live your life

1. Acknowledge your avoidance of complex feelings concerning your loss. The more honest you are with yourself, the easier it is to make room for your unwanted reactions.

2. Observe moments when you begin to feel sad, angry or guilty and pay attention to what happens to them. Are you making room for them or trying to suppress them?

3. Remain curious about your feelings instead of judging yourself based on how you think you should feel about something. You are allowed to have contradicting and negative feelings concerning your lost partner. In fact, it is a sign of a health grieving process if you notice yourself changing in the way you see your late partner.

4. Think about ways in which you avoid your feelings. Are you distracting yourself with work, alcohol, keeping busy, or other ways to numb your feelings? Keep a record of those activities.

5. Think about the reasons you might be avoiding your feelings. We all learnt different ways of coping with feelings, some of them are coming from our childhood. Do you remember how your parents coped with losses or difficulties in their lives? Can you see similarities between them and your ways of coping with loss? At times, you might be unconsciously repeating your parents’ behaviours. Other times, you might be painfully aware of their behaviours and trying to do the opposite, which might also be unhelpful to you. Just make a note of those learnt behaviours whenever they arise again.

6. Talk to people you trust about your feelings: friends, and family, attend grief support groups, and start therapy. Talking might help you process your feelings when you let yourself connect with them, and it is simultaneously being witnessed by others who are receptive of your experiences. Any activity that helps you feel your feelings is going to help you.

7. Express your feelings creatively, for example by writing a grief diary, painting, or making music.

8. Read about grief and find out how other people cope with it, it might help you normalise your emotional reactions and behaviours.

9. Attend to your body. Grief is often stored in the body, and you need to find a way to listen to it. Yoga, especially slow poses that allow for sitting still with whatever happens in your body, are helpful gateways to your feelings.

10. Notice how your body is grieving. If different parts of your body were able to talk, what would they say to you now? What is the pain in your stomach or headache trying to communicate to us that you are actively ignoring? It takes a lot of energy to understand your body. Taking good care of it by eating healthy, exercising and attending to yourself with care is only going to help you feel better. Many of our physical complaints in grief are representations of unacknowledged feelings that are blocked away in our bodies.

If we find a way to listen to what your body is trying to communicate, you are more likely to be in touch with your feelings instead of your feelings attempting to communicate with you through your body.

To find out more: download my guide to life after loss: 7 ways to grieve, so you can live for the young and widowed.