Zibby Mag

By Cheryl Espinosa-Jones

I have now lived more years since my wife’s death than I had known her before she died.

How can that be? Even after almost twenty-six years, the fact of her death sometimes brings me up short. She is very much alive in me, yet also undeniably dead. Our relationship now bears very little resemblance to the one we had when she inhabited a body.

I met her when I was sixteen. I still remember with unusual clarity the moment I realized her importance to me. (Of course, I could never have imagined what shape that importance would take.) She came to a party at my apartment, and, standing in front of a window in the dark, her eyes seemed to pierce my soul.

This was during a time of questioning. Norms were being upended; everyone I knew was bucking convention. Monogamy was “the man’s” way to imprison women. Marriage made us property; love was free. But even early in our relationship, it was hard to deny that she was special. She was already out as a lesbian; I was labeling myself bisexual. When I called to ask her if I could travel west with her caravan of women, I still remember saying, “Would you consider taking a bisexual on the trip?”

I later asked her what made her so patient with my process of coming out. She said, “I always knew you’d get there.” She also remained patient at other points in our relationship: during our free-love period, the decades when we were friends, and when we were sometimes friends with benefits (although that wasn’t a phrase back then).

She was my roommate when my oldest child was born and, uncharacteristically, my partner at the time was not jealous of her. When I thought about what old age might be like, she was always the one I saw myself sitting with on the porch, swinging back and forth. When we finally committed to a life together, more than a year after her cancer diagnosis, I liked to say that we had been in every kind of relationship possible for two humans — except enemies.

She was expected to die quickly. By the time we found our way back to each other, she had already outlived her prognosis by a year and a half. Months into her life with cancer she had asked me, as her friend, to be her power of attorney. When I questioned why she was asking me, a person with absolutely no experience, she said, “I don’t know anyone else, including me, who could pull the plug if needed.”

As it turned out, this was prescient. Almost a decade later, I had to withdraw a medication that was keeping her breathing but, honestly, not alive. Some of her last words to me when I told her we were ending that medication were, “I don’t want to.”

“I know, my love,” was all I could say.

My own transformation had begun when I threw my life upside down to commit to our love.

The first few years were terrifying. Her cancer and disability were a reality of our everyday lives and created a level of terror I had never known. But I also had to let go of my very shy personality.

She was loved by hundreds, and for her to have the life (and death) she deserved, I could not avoid closeness and community. I made a commitment out of love to at least act open. But over time, I became open. Our home was a gathering place for at least a hundred people who were in and out, helping us, loving us, supporting us. We could have written the book on how “it takes a village.”

Somewhere along the way, after death and dying workshops, long conversations, and learning to feel all of the emotions, life became excruciatingly beautiful. Shortly before she died, a friend who came to give me a massage told me I had the most relaxed body she’d ever massaged. I explained, “I am not pushing away anything. I am here for it all.”

We can’t be prepared to face the death of a person we love. But we can certainly prepare! We faced her death head-on, and, at a certain point, that made life so livable, so beautiful.

When she died, I committed to grief as the new form our love was taking. Crying every day was an honor and a privilege. I experienced each feeling as it came and then I let it pass. I had never loved myself so much.

It’s ironic that caregiving for her had boomeranged and taught me how to care for myself. Knowing I couldn’t be prepared for her death, I simply decided that for at least a year I could have anything my grief asked for, providing I could find the money and good childcare.

We cannot know what will emerge from our losses. Sometimes they redefine a life, as my loss did for me. All my work in the world since has inexorably referred to what she and I made of her illness and what I made of her death. Even my second marriage of twenty-three years has been deeply affected by my experience of loss.

I remember sitting on Joanne’s deathbed and telling a room full of people, “If I ever love again, it will be someone with whom I could die, and who I would willingly help die.”

One of them said, “That is an awfully high standard.”

“That is the only standard,” I replied.

Sometimes our losses redefine us completely. But even when the effect is not so extreme, it is loss that changes how we relate to life. It alters the ways we love, support, and care for those who are important to us. The program for Joanne’s memorial simply quoted the meditation teacher Jack Kornfield: “In the end, all we can ask is, did I love well?”

If we are willing to grieve, willing to enter that most human, painful, and transformative of all territories, we will grow. And the world will be better for it.

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Cheryl Jones is a grief counselor, educator, speaker, and radio host. Her weekly radio show, Good Grief, focuses on the transformations that occur after deep loss. She developed and taught a three-year Continuing Education program as Manager of Professional Education at the Women’s Cancer Resource Center in Berkeley, California. Her novel, An Ocean Between Them (Sapphire Books 2018), received an honorable mention from Rainbow Books. Her interest in illness and grief originated in the ten-year period in which her first wife lived with cancer before her death in 1995.