Widowish: A Memoir(30)

When I mentioned my new Joel to Ellie, she said, “Oh my God, WWJD. What would Joel do?”

When I mentioned it to Jillian, she said, “OK, that’s weird. Not that you’re listening to him, well that’s a little weird, but the phone number, too? Actually, never mind, yes, the whole thing is weird.”

When I mentioned it to my sister, she said, “I love him, too! I meant to tell you, I started watching him every Sunday morning. I love Joel!”

We laughed about this. It validated how strange and random this new discovery was.

Not much else held my interest. There’s a phenomenon known as “widow brain” or “widow fog.” Anyone who’s suffered a traumatic loss is likely familiar with this. It’s caused by grief. It leaves you feeling dull, confused, and forgetful.

I’d get home from taking the dogs on a walk. I’d still be holding their leashes but had already unlatched the dogs. Or was I holding their leashes because I wanted to leave for a walk with them? I couldn’t remember if I was coming or going.

Or I would send Sophie a text asking her what she wanted for dinner. But by the time I got to the market, I would forget. I’d stare at her response on my phone for five minutes in the produce section, chicken. But I didn’t know what chicken meant.

I was always distracted. I moved slower than usual. I wasn’t processing.

I could no longer read, even though I was an avid reader and always had a stack of books on my nightstand. My book club, which I had started and led, fell apart. A passage from our grief healing book was just about all I could manage. That and the inspirational bite-size nuggets I received via email from the Other Joel every morning. Even the TV shows that I used to watch with Joel became difficult to bear. They reminded me of him and made me too sad to watch in his absence. Plus, he wasn’t there to explain the obvious: Wait, Don Draper wants to leave Sterling Cooper? or OK, remind me why Jon Snow was sent to the wall.

I blame my widow fog for my increased enthusiasm over The Real Housewives, too. I was already a fan of the New York and New Jersey casts, but suddenly the ladies from Beverly Hills piqued my interest. And then Atlanta. It was such mindless entertainment, like, truly mindless, that I could actually take it in. If I missed a feud or a confrontation or some dialogue between the women, it really made no difference. All of this “unscripted” drama was a salve to my real-life drama, which wasn’t actually that dramatic. It was just that my husband had died. That’s all.

I took comfort where I could find it. I found it with Joel Osteen. And also, Iyanla Vanzant. Oh, how I loved Iyanla! This was before she had her own TV show, fixing the lives of fractured families. The Iyanla whom I loved spoke “universe” and spirit. I first saw her on the Oprah Winfrey Show, of course way back in the early days, and I loved her then. But I rediscovered her when Joel died. I was in my neighborhood bookstore, searching, searching, searching for something that could help me with my grief. I had my journals, which I wrote in consistently, but I needed to hear someone else’s voice, someone else’s perspective, someone who had walked a similar path.

There were a few books on “young” widowhood with cheeky titles, but they did nothing for me. I couldn’t relate. I was selfish in my grief, maybe even a little self-centered. No one experienced my grief because they weren’t married to Joel. They didn’t know what it felt like to have the man you love make you coffee every morning when he wasn’t even a coffee drinker. They didn’t know what it felt like to be married to a person who not only made you laugh out loud every day but also left Post-it notes with sketches around the house that declared his love for you, calling you beautiful, with drawings and doodles of connected hearts, just because. They didn’t know what it felt like to feel love on that level, every single day.

Something on the bookstore shelf caught my eye. Peace from Broken Pieces: How to Get Through What You’re Going Through by Iyanla Vanzant. Strangely, I found it in the cooking section.

I was still tortured by cooking every meal, and I wanted to find a user-friendly cookbook. It was challenging cooking for two. It was there that Iyanla’s book found me. It must have been accidentally placed there, and I took it as a sign.

I sat down in the middle of the aisle to read the prologue. I learned that Iyanla’s daughter had died. I tucked that book under my arm and found another of hers, Yesterday, I Cried, in its rightful place in the self-help section. I bought them both.

Iyanla wrote about lessons learned from hardships, about the abundance of opportunities to heal our broken hearts, and that wisdom can be found in our buckets full of tears.

Her writing was different. It was personal. I felt connected to it. I could read a paragraph a day, and the words were so resonant that that was enough for me. I added Iyanla to my healing arsenal that now included Joel Osteen and The Real Housewives.

I didn’t know that I was “healing,” but I knew that I was broken. Knowing that God, love, the universe, or spirit had me, helped me move slightly easier through the world.

“Mom?” Sophie asked me one night after she shared her memory. (Daddy wanted me to watch The Graduate with him. It was his favorite movie.) “Where do you think Daddy is?”

I was lying next to her, stroking her hair. “I wish I knew. But I think he’s feeling better, wherever he is.”

“Why do you think that?” She wanted to know.