Where do I go when there is nowhere to go?
For a long time, there was always a tomorrow.
Even during Suzzaynne’s illness, when tomorrow became frightening and uncertain, it still existed as something we were moving toward together. There was another appointment, another scan, another treatment, another conversation, another possibility. There was something to research, something to hope for, something to fear, something to do.
Then she died.
What I wasn’t prepared for was the day after tomorrow.
I had spent so much time anticipating the thing I was terrified would happen that I hadn’t really considered what would come after it. How could I? My entire attention had been focused on keeping Suzzaynne here, caring for her, loving her, and somehow getting us through whatever was directly in front of us.
Then the thing I had feared happened, and I was still here.
The sun came up. My body woke up. There were things that needed to be done. People called and sent messages. There were arrangements to make and questions to answer. There were belongings exactly where they had been left. There were rooms that looked essentially the same as they had a few days before.
But the organizing principle of my life was gone.
That may be one of the strangest things about losing the person with whom you have shared your life. You don’t only lose the person. You lose the direction in which you had been facing.
For 26 years, there had been an “us” embedded in almost every decision I made. Even decisions that seemed entirely mine existed within the context of our life together. Where are we going? What are we doing? What do we need? What should we have for dinner? What are our plans this weekend? What are we worried about? What are we looking forward to?
You don’t notice how often you think in the plural until suddenly there is no plural.
I had spent years knowing where home was because Suzzaynne was there. Home wasn’t simply a house, a city, a bed or an address. It was the place where somebody knew the entire context of my life without requiring an explanation.
She knew the old stories. She knew which ones I exaggerated. She knew my moods and fears and peculiarities. She knew what I meant when I started a sentence and didn’t finish it. She knew when something was bothering me before I necessarily knew it myself.
Most importantly, I knew her in the same way.
There is an intimacy that develops after 26 years that has very little to do with romance in the conventional sense. It is the accumulated knowledge of another human being. You have watched one another change. You have seen each other frightened, sick, ridiculous, angry, hopeful, exhausted and joyful. You have disappointed each other and forgiven each other. You have built a private history that nobody else on earth possesses in quite the same way.
Then one of you dies, and the other becomes the sole keeper of that history.
I don’t think I understood immediately how lonely that would feel.
People surrounded me with love. My family was still my family. Friends cared about me. People checked on me, invited me places, sat with me and listened. I was not literally alone in the world.
But grief introduced me to another kind of aloneness.
I was no longer anybody’s person in the way I had been Suzzaynne’s person.
That realization hurt in a place I didn’t know existed.
In the beginning, I kept searching for somewhere to go with that feeling. I wanted something that would tell me what to do next. Therapy, meditation, grief groups, books, conversations, spiritual ideas, memories, crying, distraction, work—anything that might provide some direction.
Some of those things helped. Some still do.
But none of them could answer the question underneath all the others:
Where do I go when there is nowhere to go?
For most of my life, when something hurt, there was an implied destination. You solved the problem, changed the circumstances, learned the lesson, fixed what was broken or waited until things improved.
Grief doesn’t seem to work that way.
There is nowhere I can go that will make May 16 unhappen. There is no insight I can discover that will return Suzzaynne to the chair beside me. There is no amount of psychological work that will transform 26 years into something I should simply “move on” from.
Maybe the question itself has to change.
Perhaps I don’t need to know where I am going yet.
Perhaps there are times in a human life when there genuinely is nowhere to go, at least not in the way we usually mean it. There is only the place where you are, the person you have become, the person you have lost, and the next moment that arrives whether you invited it or not.
I am beginning to understand that grief may not be asking me to find a way out. It may be asking me to learn how to remain present inside a life I never wanted and cannot yet understand.
That is very different from giving up.
I still work. I still talk to people. I still laugh occasionally and then sometimes feel surprised that I did. I make plans. I cancel plans. I read. I think. I question almost everything. Some mornings I feel almost capable of imagining a future, and other mornings the idea of a future feels like an insult.
I am discovering that all of those things can apparently coexist.
Love and anger can coexist. Gratitude and devastation can coexist. Wanting to live and having no idea how to live can coexist. I can know how fortunate I was to have 26 years with Suzzaynne and simultaneously feel cheated that I didn’t get 26 more.
Maybe this is what the day after tomorrow actually is.
It isn’t the future I imagined. It isn’t a destination I chose, and it certainly isn’t somewhere I was trying to get.
It is simply the place I woke up after the worst thing I could imagine had already happened.
So for now, when I ask myself where I go when there is nowhere to go, I don’t have an answer.
Maybe I stay here for a while.
Not forever. Not because this is where my story ends. Not because there won’t eventually be places I haven’t imagined yet.
But because perhaps there is something here that I need to understand before I start walking again.
Suzzaynne and I spent 26 years going somewhere together.
Now, for the first time in a very long time, I don’t know where I’m going.
And maybe, for today, I don’t have to.
— Dale