Time Heals Some Wounds
By: John Robinette
Tags: Love, Grief, Time, Memoir, Grief And Loss

Nine years ago was also a beautiful sunny day. We said goodbye, I walked our seven-year-old to the school bus stop then left for work. She drove our four-year-old to preschool and never made it to work.

By all measures I have a good life. I’m remarried to a wonderful woman, the boys are now 16 and 13 and managing as teens do, which is to say, brilliantly and troublesomely. I have a job I enjoy that gives me lots of flexibility. And my mortgage, thanks to life insurance, was paid off eight years ago.

Nine years. It doesn’t end in a five (5) or a zero (0) like 10 years will. Or 15. Nine years should feel like seven or three, I guess, but I’m not sure it does. I’ve become somewhat used to the sadness of this time of year. The weather starts getting warm, the azaleas pop. It’s a time of renewal and rebirth and I’m sad like I was last year. And the year before that.

Amy loved our “Barbie Pink” azaleas

Time heals all wounds, they say. I don’t know that I would say that. It’s true I am not incapacitated like I was nine years ago when I lost 20 pounds over a couple months and subsisted on a diet of coffee and scotch. Last night I had a more normal dinner: A quarter pound of salted caramel fudge with soy milk. So that is different. I’m not curled up in the fetal position on the living room floor. I’m sitting here, in a proper chair, typing on my computer. And I no longer curse God for what he did or didn’t do. Letting go of whatever lingering belief in god relieved me of that direct anger. Now it’s more of a free-floating ennui punctuated by sadness.

My younger boy was able to participate in a little league team that travelled to Cuba for spring break and play baseball with Cuban little league teams. I took his older brother and their grandmother, my late-wife’s mom, along. It was a trip of a lifetime. I asked myself: Would we have gone on a trip to Cuba if Amy were alive? Would this have happened? She loved travel and would have jumped at it. My new wife chose to stay at home — it’s not so much her thing and she had broken her leg (a dog walking incident — that’s another story). She is off crutches and walking, but still doing physical therapy, so a trip to anywhere would have been complicated.

There are other times when I question my current reality against some parallel world where she stills lives: Would I have my current job? No. I wouldn’t have needed to drop to part-time. Would we have renovated the house? No, I used the rest of the life insurance. Would we visit friends and take vacations in the Finger Lakes? No. It’s my new wife’s friends who live there. Would we have pets? No cats, she was allergic. Dogs? Maybe. Would we have watched Downton Abby? Probably. Would we have watched Game of Thrones? Yes, I think so — she loved Sci Fi and Fantasy. In this life, though, I haven’t seen one episode. Would we have stayed married? I think so, but I’ve seen other friends get divorced. Would I think of her death every time I approach a pedestrian crosswalk in my car? No.

When I was in ninth grade, I tried out for the football team. On the third day of practice I was tackled awkwardly, twisting my leg, and breaking my tibia. It was the worst pain, to that point, of my life. This morning I tried to remember that pain. Tried to remember the night in the hospital before they set my leg in surgery the next morning. I tried to will my left leg into feeling the searing pain of that fracture. I couldn’t do it. I can’t conjure up the feeling. I remember that I felt pain, I remember that it was a very painful experience, but I can’t even create a mild discomfort in my left leg right now. It feels fine. I also can’t recover the feelings of a concussion, another broken leg, a fractured elbow, various torn ligaments and even my plantar fasciitis, which reoccurs from time to time. Physical injury — time does heal those. But I have tears in my eyes right now, along with a dull ache radiating from my throat to my bowels. I am not at all hungry and would love a shot of scotch in my coffee right now. That pain, the pain of death, I can easily recover.

I can say it is different now, my pain of grief, but has time healed it? Not yet. Not completely. Maybe in nine more years, 18 years after her death, I can report something different. Or, if I live 36 more years, when I’m 88. Maybe then. Maybe senility will help. Help me at least. My sons will carry whatever they carry, fading though it may, I suppose, to their graves too.

And it is the pain I imagine my boys experience that I feel as much as my own. Losing a life partner at 43 years old is hard. But I was able to actually find another partner. I call her my wife, not my step-wife. For my boys, they only got one mom. And now they have a step-mom. As loving and caring as my wife is as a mom, it isn’t the same. How much time to heal those wounds? One generation? Will it affect their relationships with their future mates and children, should they have any? This could take a lot of time to heal their wounds and those around them they wound.

I imagine my life traversing down the branch of a tree. For a while, my wife and I shared that same branch. It was bumpy and lovely, but we got to a point where we diverged. I kept down the branch to the right and she forked to the left and I found myself on a new branch that no longer included her. And on she travelled, her new branch growing ever more distant from mine. There was a time, right at the divergence of those branches where I desperately wanted and tried to get us back on the same branch. But I couldn’t and at some point, the awareness of our separate realities, where I am on one branch alive, and she is on another, became too real to fight against. And now, from time to time, if I look off in the distance, I get a glimpse of the far away branch she is on and for a fleeting moment we are together again and that dull ache in my throat returns.

Time heals some wounds. Not a very catchy aphorism. And “time separates our past realities from our current realities sufficiently that each day is no longer incapacitating,” is a long-winded mouthful. No one will recite that, let alone even remember it, next time they are trying to comfort someone.

But that is the best I’ve got. That and an appointment with my shrink later today.