Becoming Candice again...

I was poking around on a new (to me) widower's blog tonight, trying to decide if it was one I liked well enough to continue reading (or to continue including in my blog list at left), when I saw one thing he wrote that resonated with me:

After my first wife died, I labeled myself a widower.

I was no longer Abel. I wasn't a brother, a son, or a friend. I was a widower – a victim of my first wife's suicide. And for a long time, I thought I'd never be anything more than someone whose wife had died when he was 26.

Looking back I see the widower label hindered my ability to grow emotionally. And I started thinking that everyone else viewed me as a widower instead of Abel.

When I started dating again, I worried that the women I dated would only be able to see me as a widower. I never thought that someone out there would be able to see the positive things about me.

But someone did.

As my relationship with [my current wife] Marathon Girl become more intense, I realized a choice needed to be made. I could continue to think of myself as a widower, or I could become Abel again.

I chose to become Abel.

And with that choice came emotional growth, a wonderful relationship, and a more positive outlook on life. So what does that have to do with being a suicide survivor?

Labeling yourself a suicide survivor is will stunt your spiritual and emotional growth just as much as labeling myself a widower did.

You're not a suicide survivor. You're a friend, a son or daughter, a brother or sister, a husband or wife, a mother or father. Think of yourself as James or Betty – whatever your name is. Think of yourself as anything other than a suicide survivor.

--Copied from http://abelkeogh.com/writing/suicide_survivor.php

Abel's words echoed in my head and reminded me of a piece I wrote in college for one of my writing classes, Personal Essay, for my writing major. I titled the piece "Becoming Candice"...but I have no idea what the piece was supposed to be about. I was the queen of procrastination and--in my defense--I was horribly stressed and stretched thin that semester, the last one of my five-year collegiate career, between carrying a full load of classes, being the editor of the college's literary magazine, participating in and choreographing a dance for the spring dance recital, and working an additional twenty hours a week. I hadn't completed the early drafts of the essay as I was supposed to earlier in the semester, so I was left finishing up my portfolio the last week before finals and graduating. My parents named me Candice because they wanted to call me Candi (a nickname I'm not terribly fond of--hated even, at times--but am stuck with...and no, please don't start calling me Candi), and the piece was supposed to have something to do with my transition from being Candi to becoming Candice...growing into my adulthood self, or something equally lofty, I'm sure. But I never finished the piece, because my parents told me my father had just been diagnosed with colon cancer the Monday before finals week. I was 22. I tried really, really hard to focus that week and finish up my portfolio, but I ended up stopping in defeat, too overwhelmed with the (then) biggest shock and difficulty of my life. I asked my professor to give me an incomplete for the class to allow me time to finish my portfolio over the summer, or else dock me a grade for not completing the work. I ended up with a B+ in the class--his compromise to respect my wish to not be given anything higher than a B since I didn't finish my portfolio. (Me and my big mouth. I think he'd have given me an A still otherwise.) I never finished the piece...and I have no recollection now of anything about what I did manage to write in it.

But Abel's words reminded me of this unfinished essay and, in turn, echoed a slightly different vocabulary for thoughts that had already been swarming around my grieving mind.

I alluded to it in a much earlier post (if you even read it), but these past three months or so have seen a slight shift in my outlook. Much of it was borne out of necessity, because I couldn't continue to live in such a state of all-present, all-consuming grief like I had been since late August 2007. I didn't want to be that miserable anymore. Couldn't be that miserable anymore. It wasn't consciously worded this way in my head at the time, but in essence I was ready to start living--not merely surviving--again. If I didn't, then whatever minute fragments that were left of me, of the me I was separate from being a wife or mother or widow or a successful working professional, would wither away and die too, and it would be years before I'd be anything at all again.

As one widower in our support group would say, it was a fight for my very life.

Technically the shift was the result of applying for a tech-writing job in downtown Portland in March, and the decision to (most likely) try to sell the house is an extension of it. I'm trying to move from surviving to thriving, to grow and find some new happiness in this life, despite what's happened...and in honor of it too.

And I have, to a large extent, identified myself as a widow, as a griever, since Charley died...or at least since the first anniversary of his death. For the first year, I still identified myself as Wife. Widow, Griever--they came later, once I realized he was never coming back, that this state was permanent. I've added other labels for myself too in the past three years:

Single Parent.

Full-Time Stay-at-Home Mom (which many days often has a much darker undertone or qualifier: Unemployed).

Undecided.

Limited.

Widow.

Griever.

None of these labels are terribly positive, though. They don't give me warm fuzzies about my situation, about myself. But I've always been something else too.

A Survivor.

There's never been any doubt in my mind that I wouldn't pull through this, wouldn't come out on the other side. I'm just impatient with how long it takes.

These past three months I've been working on adding new labels. Writer. Amateur Photographer. Socializer. Reader (even if many times it's just reading blogs now). Dancer (even if I'm just watching it on TV, or intending to buy tickets to a live performance at Oregon Ballet Theater). They're not new labels for myself, by any means. They're actually all old ones, ones I had before Charley died--indeed, even from before Charley and I started dating. Some of them were ones I let go of as I adopted new roles: Wife, Mother. I've been going back, sifting through the things that fit my life now, rejecting ones that don't, finding new ones I never even considered before (like a Blogger).

I hadn't really thought of it this way until I read Abel's words above on his web site, but he helped focused it for me.

I'm becoming Candice again.