#2: Why I wouldn't trade away the grief.

While I would give anything to have my late husband back, my life is more vibrant, more meaningful, more miraculous thanks to the lessons of grief and loss.

A recurring word you will see here in The Luminist is ‘aliveness’ — somewhat cheesy but sincerely meant to convey the flamboyant richness of life that can light up our minds and bodies. 

The abundance. 

Aliveness is an apt description of the technicolor way I now experience the world. “Now,” as in since my husband unexpectedly died six years ago.

It doesn’t mean that it’s all rainbows and unicorns.

What it means is that I process life with depth and feeling — high highs, low lows. I see the details, feel the connections, and regularly experience awe that moves me to tears.

I did not wake up the day after my husband’s death feeling this way. I earned this worldview — this aliveness — on my Joseph-Campbell-style hero’s journey. 

I’d say I earned it the hard way but it is not as if there was another option. The hard way was the only way on offer. 

So I want to offer you, dear reader, a glimpse of how I got from there to here.  

Don’t get me wrong — I’d do crazy things to get Mike back. In the early days I even used to shout out to the heavens, “You can come back now!”

But I can’t deny that his death transformed my life in ways I could not imagine.

Not the substance of my life — my children lost their father after all — but the quality of it. And I’ve discovered that’s what really matters.

So I offer my story as a testimonial. A lighthouse perhaps… to anyone lost in the dark early days. Or anyone who dares to face — and prepare for — their eventual voyage through grief before it's forced upon them.

I offer my story as a promise that there is a light on the other side of unimaginable loss. (The rest of The Luminist’s posts will be the directions, short-cuts, and scenic detours.)

The beginning of Mike & Sue

I don’t believe in coincidences. Serendipity (another word that you will see repeatedly here at The Luminist) is my term of choice. It reflects my view of the world that connections are made in mysterious ways our brains were not meant to understand or explain away. 

The first mysterious connection for Mike and I was the picture-taking line on the first day of business school. 

Here we are at 24 and 26 years old, moments after we met.

We exchanged a quick handshake and introduction. I said in my head, “Wow, he’s so handsome! He must be a real jerk. I’ll avoid him for the next two years.” Clearly that did not last. 

Soon I learned that he was kind and intense with a surprisingly beautiful singing voice. An antique lover, a world traveler, and the owner of a silky terrier named Molly. It seemed like a ridiculous dog for a 20-something college student to be taking care of…

Turns out his beloved mom had died just four years before and Molly was his last remnant of her. 

As for me, I was confident, determined, and independent. We met in the middle as we worked our way through his traumatizing losses and my communication shortcomings.

After graduation we both jumped into consulting gigs that required us to travel most of the time. We didn’t worry about seeing each other. We knew we would find a way to make it work. 

My first assignment was in London. His, much to his chagrin, was Little Rock, AR. Once a month I would come back across the Atlantic to see him. And every visit I would think, “Is this the time? Will he propose?”

I knew we’d get there eventually but the healing from his mother’s death — his ability to trust, to jump in, and risk another devastating loss — had its own timing I could not predict. 

My London assignment was wrapping up. Mike joined me for my last weekend. “Surely this is it…” I thought to myself. I had arranged for dinner at a brand new restaurant with wide-open views of the Thames river, St. Paul’s cathedral, and all the beauty of the city. When we stepped out the door to do some touristing before dinner, Mike said, “Oh, I don’t think I need my jacket.” It was a cloudless May day after all. 

No jacket, no pocket. No pocket, no engagement ring. Damn.

We hit the Tube, toured the Tower of London, walked the ancient, winding streets, sipped coffee on the South Bank. We had a lovely dinner followed by a stroll along the Thames. We stepped out onto a pier to take in the sparkly lights and sneak in a kiss.

Suddenly he produced a tiny box from nowhere and asked me to be his wife.

After tears and a resounding YES from me, I asked, “Where have you been carrying that thing all day?”

“In my sock!” he responded.

A year later, we were married. 

Since our engagement, London had become the city of our heart. Every five years on the big anniversaries, we would steal away for a weekend… and rediscover why we married each other. 

Our last milestone anniversary was at the 15 year mark (we were married for 18 by the time he died). 

Life was particularly hectic at that anniversary. We were on the “ebb” end of the ebb and flow.

But even on the drive to the airport I could feel us reconnecting. Kid-free, errand-free, work-free, face-to-face time, really looking at and listening to each other, brought that thread that always connected us taut again. 

We did our usual miles of walking. We held hands. We took in the Tate Modern, talked about the kids endlessly, and fell back in love.

I teased him, “Oh, I remember why I married you!” 

And the final story of the Deagles before we went from four to three… here is a snapshot five months before Mike died: our last Father’s day.

Mike and the kids played “I’m still on the raft” in the swimming pool. Connor and Kendall would try to toss Mike off the raft while he clung on for dear life, laughing the entire time. 

Then came a few rounds of our favorite card games — Go Fish and Bullshit — always searching for the mysterious missing cards stuck under someone’s leg.

At the end of the day we headed out for oversized ice cream cones that sent us into comas as we watched an Avengers movie. 

The worst part

What came next? 

There are no pictures of these days.

Sadness, tears, despair. Anxiety, memory loss, flares of anger. Sleeplessness. Endless worry about the kids, the finances, my job. Feeling untethered.

50 times a day I would think, “I need to tell Mike this,” only to realize over and over and over again there was no Mike to tell.

And a fleeting desire to no longer be in the world…

But also during that time appeared the support of friends, family, schools, and even strangers. You would be amazed at how many strangers. (I’ll write about them in future posts.)

On the back of that support, out of the ashes, I gradually built my new life. 

I worked on school assignments with the kids. I managed projects, emails, office politics at work. I laughed until I cried over terribly dark jokes with friends who “got it.”

There was always another wave of despair around the corner, but likely a generous helping of “I will survive this” after that. 

Honestly, the rollercoaster of emotions was one of the most exhausting parts. Never knowing what emotion was going to show up next — and if it would be in public or private. 

When the aliveness started to trickle in

One day on a hike, I reached out and felt the spring leaves with my hands, rubbing their tissue-paper newness between my fingers. 

I never knew leaves felt like this when they first unfolded. 

And I never would have checked if I hadn’t just spent months with all my senses dampened with grief. 

My early-days walks in the woods had been tear-filled treks spent in my anxious and despairing mind. It’s like I had been moving through water, unable to see details, ears stuffed and muffled, taste and smell non-existent. And now — without meaning to at all — I was re-emerging.

Maybe it was by some unconscious choice, or maybe it was just time for the season of grief to change.

Whatever the reason, I began to notice my surroundings in a new way. I made a new discovery in the natural world every day that lit up my brain and my body with curiosity and wonder. 

I felt like a child, but with the gratitude and appreciation of an adult… who never thought she would touch joy again. But now, I would never take it for granted again.

Here is a one-dimensional glimpse of that wonder:

Another aliveness ally: Books

Reading had always been my comfort and escape. Could it now become a place where I didn’t feel so alone?

With the ferocity of desperation, I consumed any book I found on the topic.

Who had experienced what I had? Could reading their stories help me with my deep sadness? Could someone show me that I was not going to feel this horrible forever?

Yes. Relief.

Joan Didion made me feel not so alone in my occasional belief that maybe Mike was just around the corner and wasn’t really dead.

“I was thinking as small children think, as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, to change the outcome,” she wrote in The Year of Magical Thinking. 

C.S. Lewis filled me with hope that Mike was there even after he died (and that I wasn’t losing my mind) in A Grief Observed by writing about his late wife, 

“Suddenly, at the very moment when, so far, I mourned H the least, I remembered her best. Indeed it was something (almost) better than a memory; an instantaneous, unanswerable impression. To say it was like a meeting would be going too far. Yet there was that in it which tempts one to use those words. It was as if the lifting of the sorrow removed the barrier… And the remarkable thing is that since I stopped bothering about it, she seems to meet me everywhere.”

That final bit, “she seems to meet me everywhere,” has saved me many times.

The discoveries here were just as rich as those found in nature. These writers had suffered in similar ways. There was wisdom, candor, humor… and a hope for a thriving life further down the path.

My first tentative steps toward aliveness were made with these books in hand — teaching me by example how to turn grief into life:

Get my full “grief canon” list here!

My final aliveness piece: Service

Pre-catastrophe, I was an intense and devoted corporate executive focused on climbing the career ladder at a large company that runs US military bases all over the globe.

Surrounded by people, I was still mostly about “me me me.”

Afterwards? My focus changed.

I needed to provide for my family, but I wanted to impact other human beings — more human beings! — in the same way people had impacted me by helping me through my grief. 

My job gave me a platform and I seized it. 

I spent hundred of hours listening intently to women who work in dining halls and water treatment plants, cyber centers and mailrooms on bases off the beaten path. They spoke proudly of serving young soldiers so far from home, and never complained… though there were more than a few things to complain about.

I discovered these women shared a profound need for community and connection, and I poured my life force into it.

As I write this today, I’m at our third Women’s Summit in the Middle East. Every year the women of my company gather here to ensure we are continuing to build a community of support, skill, diversity, equity, inclusion, and allyship in our defense contractor workplace. 

Thanks to grief, I no longer have any propensity for shying away from hard topics… In fact, I welcome them.

And at the end of the first summit, many women personally thanked me for “going there.” 

Because once the proverbial elephant in the room has been acknowledged, grappled with, learned from, and eventually thanked, everyone stands a little straighter, shines a little brighter, hugs a little tighter. 

Also thanks to my experience with grief, I know the power of embracing one’s innate strength. That “dig deep” place.

Sometimes we’ve forgotten it and need to be reminded. Sometimes we have never even been told we have it. 

So at this conference, we don’t just talk about “why it’s so important to have strength and power and purpose…”

We recognize it in each other, point it out so we can see it in ourselves, and, through community and support, breathe life back into it. 

And that’s how we end up smiling like this, with power and purpose and communal confidence all over our faces:

Six years later

So here we are, my kids and I, just a few months ago. 

Can you see the light in our eyes?

Many people still expect us to be dressed in sackcloth with faces covered in ash, yet we are very much alive. 

We are taking full advantage of our time on earth, because we know how short it can be. We connect deeply, feel fully, express freely because our hearts have been cracked open.

We are very much living.

We have been too close to the other end of the spectrum to ever forget how important this is.

Is it always a walk in the park? Absolutely not. Do we carry the scars of our loss deep in our bones? 1000% yes. 

The scars are just signs we live. And in some mysterious way, Mike lives too. 

He lives in the way we talk about him, about his absence, about what he might think of our lives now, about funny stories from the past.

He lives in the way we choose to be more present, more courageous, more true to ourselves.

He lives in this newsletter, in the passion that pours from me to change the way the living dance with death and grief…

And that was the long version of why because of — not despite! — my loss, I am living a vibrant, technicolor life today.

This story is not an outlier. I said it in my last post and I’ll probably say it a thousand times more.

How my kids and I have survived and thrived shows how anyone can survive and thrive as individuals and communities. 

And that’s what I want to bring to this space — LIFE.

Rich, vibrant, pulsing with meaning and connection. Not despite the grief. Because of it.

Sincerely,

Sue