Adventures in Grieving -2-
In 2016, I devoted a month of writing to the healing practice of walking in the months after my divorce. The Latin phrase, Solvitur Ambulando, “it is solved by walking”, came back to me recently. I joined my employer-sponsored walking challenge, Walktober. I even elected to join the team made up of colleagues in my suite. The program offers points for reaching daily graduated levels of steps: 4,000, 7,000, and 10,000. It also tallies points for other wellness practices sprinkled throughout the week. The first day of the challenge I felt really gloomy. The weight of the grief my daughter and I are bearing (more on that later) was feeling heavy. I had steps to take, and I took them. As I did the exhaustion persisted, but the weight of grief shifted.
Eight weeks ago, when my ex-husband didn’t report to work, our daughter who had become his newest co-worker, was alerted to his absence and drove home to check on him. What she found had long been my worst nightmare.
I married a man built like the football player he’d been until a knee injury ended his time on the field. In other words, he was a big guy. But in the months and early years after our wedding, I watched him morph into a spectator and leave his active days behind. I carried a quiet worry that this inactivity would summon an early heart attack, and I would become a young widow. Years passed. He put on more weight. We had a baby. I provided most of the heavy lifting of childcare both emotional and physical.
When our daughter was four, her dad began losing his job at the rate of every two to three months. It was an exhausting chapter that ushered in new patterns. I would pick up our daughter at daycare. On days he’d lost his job, we’d open the garage door and find his vehicle parked. My old fear creeped back in. I tried to race my daughter to get inside the house first. If it wasn’t a job loss and instead a bout of sickness, I wanted to find him first. She was always too fast. I never dreamed that when she called me on the last Thursday of August, that my imagined nightmare would have become a living one.
Now here we are, finding ways to settle into this new, stressful, and heartbreaking reality. I am back where I started nine years ago—grieving a marriage and now my role as widow-adjacent. The walking won’t solve his death, but now over halfway through the challenge, I can feel in the achy muscles, the improved appetite, and the readiness for sleep each evening, that the walking will solve the way I carry my grief and navigate the months where so much uncertainty lies before my daughter and me. I am welcoming grief to accompany me, but the walking will enable me to manage life’s new chapter without grief knocking me off course.