Grieving for my wife is a mix of sadness and reflection, including some survivor’s guilt. I always figured that with my history of heart disease I’d be the first to go, but life turned out otherwise, as it so often does.
In the two months since my wife of fifty years, Norma, passed away suddenly, I’ve repeatedly asked myself if I screwed up. Was there more that I should have done? What signs did I miss or not take seriously enough? Would Norma be alive today if I had taken better care of her?
All these coulda, woulda, shoulda thoughts swirl around my head from time to time as I reflect on the past year or so. My imagination can be painful, particularly since Norma, in her words, hated my “treating her like a patient.” To call her willful is an understatement; Norma was fiercely independent, which did not always combine well with my insistent paternal style. “I’m in charge of my own health,” she’d sternly remind me, “stay out of it.”
That said, my bouts as caregiver were frequent. Her recovery from breast cancer treatment in 2012 (radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy) was a year-long episode. So too, her recovery from each of four joint replacements over the past ten years (two shoulders, one knee and one hip), required considerable caregiving. She expressed sincere gratitude to me for it all, but as resilient as she was, she was always anxious to be back on her own. I admired that; she had great fortitude and courage. But the feelings that I could have done better still nag me.
I try to cope with my survivor’s guilt not by squashing it or willing it away; instead I indulge in what I call “quantum reasoning,” treating all my coulda, shoulda, woulda thoughts as indicators of probability. Each of us is constantly making choices, choosing to do this or do that, think this or think that, many of which are not even conscious decisions. Whether it’s to take a right turn out of the driveway instead of a left, or have a glass of milk instead of water, life is made up of actions that have consequences. Those consequences may be anticipated and often are not. As my father used to say, “Life spins on a dime.” Buddhists call it Karma.
Theoretical physicists, however, offer another view, i.e.: the myriad probabilities generated in each moment manifest in another dimensional reality; the coulda, woulda, shoulda probabilities generate outcomes in differing dimensional timelines. This sounds crazy, of course, but given the craziness of quantum mechanics, it’s actually possible. Each moment is, accordingly, propagating a nearly infinite number of probabilities, only one of which we experience as real. So, in another timeline, I’ve taken Norma to the hospital much earlier, she is still alive, and the two of us are happily shopping for melons at Sonoma Market.
I’m not advocating a supernatural solution to grieving; this is just the way my mind works. And I should add, such thoughts are only minimally comforting. From what I’ve learned, survivor’s guilt is quite common, just one of many reactions to the death of a loved one. The realities of quantum probability are unfathomably complex, but I’m limited to living only in one, and in this one Norma is gone. I feel like I coulda done more, and I miss her terribly. Thus it is.
