An Overworked Brain

I am tired.  I’ve been trying to keep myself busy, so maybe a hectic schedule is to blame, and it could be my wonky sleep patterns too.  For a while I thought maybe I was depressed, but I don’t think it’s that, at least not in a clinical sense.  I’ve decided that maybe my overworked brain is the main culprit.        

Did you ever hear of an elderly person dying a few months or weeks or even days after their spouse?  These occurrences always seemed like a sweet reflection on love to me: after 50 or 60 or more years together, the surviving partner cannot bear life without their love and dies of a broken heart.  Now in the early months of my own separation, I have to wonder:  did they die of a broken heart, or from a broken brain:  the inability to bear the disconnect between their perception and reality?  Because my brain is having issues coming to grips with Ken’s absence.

We had almost forty years of togetherness, starting when I was barely out of childhood.  Ken’s face, his voice, his presence: those neurons flashed repeatedly, hundreds of times every week, whenever I saw him or heard him or felt him.  The synapses still exist even though now they are only sparked by photographs and recordings and memories.  The messages embedded in my brain softly echo: I am a married woman - I have a husband - we face the world together.  But  those thoughts are no longer true and the new messages insistently whisper - I am a widowed woman - I have no husband - I stand alone.  There are many parts which comprise the person I am, but the biggest roles I play pertain to my closest relationships.  Who am I if I am not Ken’s wife?  For others, how is one a mother or a father without a child?  Or a daughter or a son without a parent?  These huge parts of our identities develop over long periods of time but death alters that bond in an instant, so my brain is struggling to understand life without him.

I was reading an article in our local newspaper recently, a human interest story about a middle-aged man who had lost both of his parents in a tragic accident four days earlier.  The reporter noted that the man “…was still emotionally processing…” this enormous loss.  Really?  A whole four days later?  I am over five months in, with prior awareness of Ken’s precarious health, and I’ve been told I will continue to emotionally process the different stages of my grief for years to come.  This poor soul has unexpectedly lost both parents.  Four days later he has not started to process anything, he is trying to keep from collapsing from the shock.  “It doesn’t seem real” or “I can’t believe it” are the refrains after a sudden loss.  How can we comprehend the world without the people who have given it the most meaning?     

Every morning since his death, at some point between when I awaken and when I put my feet on the floor, I remember.  Sometimes it is as soon as my consciousness returns, sometimes an unrelated thought or two passes through my head first, but in those early moments of the new day, I remember that he is gone.  166 days of remembering the same thing, when will my long term memory catch up?  When will the knowledge of his absence become so ingrained that it no longer has to be recalled at the start of each day?

And of course my brain is also dealing with the minutiae of settling an estate and dealing with the administration of account and ownership changes and learning how to do things like work the television.  There are so many new tasks to deal with on top of regular day-to-day survival and self-care.  Add in emotional overload and brain rewiring, and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I am exhausted.

I’m getting along - the cats make sure I get out of bed every morning - but most things are at least a little harder to do and some things are impossible.  The worst part of this is that when I have fully internalized the reality of what it means to live without my partner, then the enormity of my broken heart will be more apparent.  Maybe after that evolution I actually will be depressed.  But that is a problem for another day.  Right now I need to be patient with my limitations, take small steps when I am ready, and rest when my brain is telling me that’s enough.