Personal Blog #21 ... Full Acceptance of a Spouse’s Death Due to Alzheimer’s ... 3/3/21

Next month makes it 5 years since I lost my wife, Clare, to early/young onset Alzheimer’s disease (AD).  Having experienced years of “anticipatory grief,” I thought I’d be able to move on quickly after Clare’s death … but I was wrong.  I ended up dealing with depression for 2 years, followed by overwhelming sadness for more than another year, until finally able to move on with the rest of my life. 

For me, the most important part of moving on was trying to find love again. With online profiles posted on 4 dating sites, meeting women was not a problem but meeting the “right” woman seemed impossible.  After nearly 50 years of a “fairy tale” marriage, I just could not find someone as special as my late wife.  I was about to give up and then … serendipity!  The “right woman” turned out to be someone I’d known for 25 years, and I have now been in a wonderfully loving relationship during the past year.   

I consider myself incredibly lucky to have found love again and look forward to spending the rest of my life with my “second act.”  But if I am so happy and in love again, why do I still sometimes cry about losing Clare?

I recently watched a TV show where 2 characters, I’ll call them Joe and Bob, are discussing the grieving process.  Joe is trying to comfort Bob, who is struggling to move on after losing his wife earlier that year.  Joe asks Bob if he knows the 5 stages of grief and Bob says yes …  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  Joe says to Bob that it’s only been a few months since he lost his wife and to give himself more time to reach acceptance.  Bob, knowing that Joe also lost his wife decades earlier, asks Joe how long it took him to reach acceptance.  Joe says he’ll let Bob know if he ever gets there … that he is still stuck in stage 2, anger.

I thought I had reached acceptance, and that allowed me to move on to try to find love again.  I no longer mourn Clare’s death on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.  But sometimes I still experience anger … anger directed only at myself, expressed in the form of guilt.

I sometimes see something while watching TV that makes me feel very guilty … that I fell short of giving Clare more happiness.  I think, “Why didn’t I do more with Clare during her final days of clarity?”  Fortunately, each time that happens the tears and anger pass quickly because I know deep inside that I did all I could.

I think that what I am really saying to myself is that I wish I had some sort of “advance notice” of the exact time when Clare’s last moments of clarity would end.  I wish I would have known in advance that her final downward spiral really was her final downward spiral … the one she would never return from, the one that was never-ending and ever-deepening, that black hole where there is no awareness and from which there is no escape.  I wish I had more time with Clare as best friends, as husband and wife, as lovers before I became a total stranger to her.

I have gone through the 5 stages of grief, come out “the other side,” and moved on.  Yet, in some ways, I think that I have remained stuck in that second stage of grieving, anger, even though it has been so long since losing my wife.  I am happy again, smiling and laughing again, in love again, and looking forward to spending the rest of my life with my second act.  But some anger, expressed as guilt, still remains.

Maybe it is more common than I had thought for some surviving AD spouses to still feel angry at themselves after many years as a widow or widower.  Maybe after many years in a loving marriage, grief … in one form or another … never truly ends for surviving AD spouses.  Not even when surviving spouses are lucky enough to find love again.

Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, who is credited with describing the 5-stage grieving model, states that my grief will never truly end.  She wrote: “The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not ‘get over’ the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again but you will never be the same.” 

Whereas I feel extremely lucky to finally feel “whole again” with a woman I love, I have also finally accepted that I will forever grieve the loss of my wife.  Other surviving AD spouses who may occasionally find themselves re-experiencing painful memories must also accept this reality, with or without new love in their life. 

Unlike “Joe,” I have now made peace with that statement by Kubler-Ross.  I have acknowledged that it is “okay” for me to continue experiencing brief intense feelings of loss on occasion.  It has taken me 5 long years to get to this point in my grieving process … but I think I can finally say that I have reached full acceptance.