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Excerpt from Seven Choices: Finding Daylight After Loss Shatters Your World

From Chapter One:

I noticed a man standing in the middle of the road. He seemed to be directing traffic.

"What happened?" I asked, rolling down the window when I got abreast of him.

"We found a man in the ditch," he answered.

"Well, I’m looking for my husband," I said. "My husband went for a six-mile run, and he hasn’t come home yet."

For a few seconds the man said nothing. Then he spoke in a voice so low that I could hardly hear him. "Ma’am, I think you should pull your car over to the side of the road." I felt no emotion. If there was any connection between what was happening beside that road and my life, it still was not apparent to me. But I did what I was told. I pulled over to the side of the road. It was only then that I realized that the man they had found in the ditch and the man I was looking for were probably one and the same.

"Is he dead?" I asked. There was a long silence.

One of the men finally answered. "Yes, ma’am. He is." I got out of the car. One man stood by my right side and one on my left. We began to walk, not touching, toward the ambulance. Greg, my husband, was dead.

When I was mourning, William Stafford once sent me a poem he had written called "Rescue," which goes like this:

A fire was burning. In another room
Somebody was talking. Sunlight slanted
Across the foot of my bed, and a glass of water
Gleamed where it waited on a chair near my hand.
I was alive and the pain in my head
Was gone. Carefully I tried thinking
Of those I had known. I let them walk
And then run, and then open their mouths the way
It used to cause the throbbing. It didn’t hurt
Anymore. Clearer and clearer I stared
Far into the glass. I was cured.
From now on in my life there would be a place
Like a scene in a paperweight. One figure in the storm
Would be reaching out with my hand for those
Who had died. It would always be still in that scene,
No matter what happened. I could come back to it,
Carefully, any time, to be saved, and go on.

It seems so long ago now, that July afternoon when, driving along the road to find my husband, I instead found myself a widow. And today I think I can say that I understand the poem that Bill sent me.

For there is something redemptive—“come back to it, carefully, any time, to be saved, and go on”—about the mourning process, something that resides in the power and opportunity we have to make choices. These choices, of course, allow us to make for ourselves a new life in the external. For instance, I now no longer teach school but, instead, write books, consult, speak, and lead retreats. Several years after Greg died, I married a wonderful man with whom I deeply enjoy the adventure of living.

But the real impact, I think, of the choices we make when we are grieving resides in their power to alter our very way of being. As Emily Dickinson once wrote,

Heavenly Hurt, it gives us—
We can find no scar,
But internal differences,
Where the Meanings, are.

And, as awkward as our progress may have seemed as we mapped our own movement through loss and grief, we created these internal differences, these Meanings, by our personal choices. In so doing, we have given shape to our here-and-now most precious life.