I had dinner recently with seven high school friends, some of whom I hadn't seen in over 20 years. If you've been fortunate enough to have had an experience like this, you already know how fascinating it is to look around the table and see how remarkably differently the lives of cohorts can and do turn out.
All of these women are lovely and smart and thoughtful. Only one of us had a daughter. The rest, only sons. Three hadn't had children. One is a lawyer. Two are teachers. Two are divorced. And one, Melissa, had just lost her husband, in his 40s, to an untreatable cancer after a long, blissful marriage.
"I've really never seen a marriage like theirs," another friend recounted as we drove to the dinner together. "From the minute they met in high school, it was electric. They truly were soulmates. And it continued that way until he died."
I happened to be sitting across the table from Melissa. In high school, she was a petite redhead with an easy smile. And she really hadn't changed at all. I had gotten news of her husband's death from -- where else, these days? -- seeing mutual friends posting their condolences on Facebook. Ugh, I had thought at the time. How awful. How terribly sad.
When Melissa mentioned her husband at the dinner, I took the opportunity to express my sympathies. "Thanks," she said, "but I really am fine." Knowing how close they had been -- they were not only married but ran a business together -- I offered that it must be really hard, that she must miss him terribly.
And here's what she said:
"I do miss him, but it's really okay. More than anything else, I just feel grateful for the time we had together. I look at my life and I realize I'm luckier than 99.9 percent of people, so how can I be bitter about it? I learned so much from him. I never thought I could run our business without him but, it turns out, it's going well. I feel him with me all the time. I got a little aggravated with him the other day when I was faced with a business dilemma I wasn't familiar with, but I got through it."
I'm a therapist and no stranger to a range of grief responses, including my own. I've witnessed folks virtually fall apart after the loss of a spouse. Understandably. And, yet, somehow Melissa's attitude just made sense.
Her husband was sick for a year before he passed but she said he didn't want to talk about his prognosis so they didn't. Did he say he didn't want to talk about it? "He didn't have to say it. I just knew. That's the way our relationship was," she said.
Melissa hasn't stopped living for a day since her husband passed. She's busy with renovating their summer cottage, a labor of love she never got around to before. She travels with friends. She's helping her children through their grief. She's looking at ways to expand the business she owned with her husband. Her wedding rings hang on a chain around her neck -- a healthy acknowledgment of both the importance of the marriage and the reality that the marriage is no more.
Melissa doesn't believe that God or The Universe owed her something as precious and precarious as her husband's health. She accepts that life, often, is a crapshoot. And sometimes you get lucky, and sometimes you simply don't. And sometimes you get a mix -- and that's what Melissa got and she's grateful for it.
Melissa's grief response is a living, breathing reminder that we have a choice in how we react to the difficult events in our lives. And her choice is to experience her husband's too-brief life as a gift to be celebrated. She sees her wonderful marriage -- not as a right that should have been extended to both of them into old age -- but simply as one truly glorious phase of her life.
I don't doubt that Melissa has her moments. Nor do I believe we can all hope to be as accepting as she has proven to be. But we can all learn something from how she has peacefully and lovingly chosen to process the death of her beloved husband. And, that in the face of unspeakable loss, we, the living, still get to choose how we grieve.