For this final installment of this series on my journey with grief, I’d like to focus on two themes. Since Kim passed, I have been aware of and navigating my way through these, but they have not fit into a specific chronological time frame. So here we go.
 
Resiliency.
In the epilogue of my book, Big Breath In, which I rewrote after Kim had passed away, I said that my resiliency was “running low these days.” Well, I admit to you now, that this was, in fact, not entirely true. My resiliency is, in fact, not “running low these days,” it is actually nonexistent (I felt I had to provide some hope at the end of the book).
 
I have always prided myself on being able to function well under pressure. I’ve always been attracted to areas of leadership in crisis, being able to lead and act in a calm and reassuring way even when the present was in chaos and the future uncertain. It is what attracted me to hospital chaplaincy work and other leadership areas in which I have worked and volunteered.
 
However, as I mention at the end of my book, after living through the loss of my brother Warren, the effects of respiratory failure due to Cystic Fibrosis, waiting for and receiving a double-lung transplant, walking with and caring for Kim for the past five years, and then, of course, the grief over losing her, I admit that my resiliency has run out. I feel like I have no backing to hold me up so that when any challenge comes my way, I simply fall over. Something as simple as a machinery breakdown on the farm has had me walking away from work and simply going home (my family has become very understanding of my antics). The slightest drop in my daily lung function test has had me canceling appointments, commitments, and work for a week or two. My lack of resiliency has led me to be panicked at the slightest setback or confusion. 
 
Now, there have been moments when I've felt that a fragile wall has been built behind me, something to prop me up so that when a challenge or hardship comes my way, I can feel myself rebounding back a little. However, that doesn’t last long. If any negative pressure or challenging situation is not resolved quickly, it is game over, and I am back to my huddled position at home. It appears that the person who used to thrive in times of crisis, who prided himself on being able to take on burden after burden, is finally burnt out. 
 
I wonder if resiliency is like trust, that once broken, it takes a very long time to build back, and maybe it never truly comes back as strong as it once was. But perhaps resiliency isn’t the key either. If resiliency implies returning to the original shape, I know that is impossible. Maybe it is not resiliency I should focus on, but transformation. I know there is no returning to who I was; there can only be transformation into who is now taking shape in me. I'll have to think about that some more.

​If one thing has understood my grief or best reflected my experience of grief since Kim passed, it has been the Netflix show, After Life. My good friend Leann recommended the show to me about a month after Kim’s passing. The main character, Tony, played by Ricky Gervais, has recently lost his wife to cancer and is now trying to navigate life. The show has some crude language and humour (Ricky Gervais is the writer, after all), but for me, the writing of the show, and Gervais' acting, has resonated so deeply with my own experience. 
 
At the end of the first season, however, I got worried. Tony, the widower, was beginning to show positive signs. He seemed to be emerging out of the darkness and grief that marked the show's first five episodes. I was worried this would be like every other show about grief or loss, and this was going to be the start of a trajectory of recovery and happily ever after. But when I apprehensively began episode one of season two, I was met with a surprise. Tony was once again down in the dumps and had slid back down the snake of grief. 

What struck me while reading this quote was not its subject matter. Instead, while reading this sentence, I remembered a conversation that Kim and I had a couple of times. The crux of this discussion, or Kim’s expressed desire in those conversations, was that she did not want me to become depressed or sad after she was gone. What grieved Kim the most in her final months was not so much her own death but what it would do to me and others. She didn’t want me to live in the paralyzing fog and sorrow that I indeed found myself in for much of October.
 
For some reason, reading that sentence by Thomas Merton woke me up to the fact that Kim would be heartbroken and most likely a bit angry if she knew how I had been doing since her memorial. I realized that this was no way to honor her. By not seeking to come out from under the depressive fog I was lost in, I was, in a sense, re-enacting her death all over again. Now, it wasn’t like this was a miracle-fix or anything, but again, it was something that helped lift the clouds a bit more and made me take another step in trying to find a way through this grief. There was now the incentive to honor Kim with my life going forward.
 
The next domino fell two days later, on a Sunday afternoon. I went for a short walk along the Nicomekel River in South Surrey. I was contemplating my mood and season of grief, wanting to find a way through. During that thirty minutes in the cold wind, I decided that I needed to get busy. I had to begin filling my time with routine and work (anyone who has read my book will know I like routine).

I also realized I couldn’t hit my grief head-on. I believe there are times when we need to face our grief and sorrow face-to-face. To look it in the eye and feel the total weight of its powerful blow, to let it break us so that we can begin to put the pieces back together. But having done this a couple of times, I also began to see that to survive, I had to start hitting it from an angle. I had attempted several times to catch grief out on the open ice, line it up in the trolley tracks and take it down. Though this worked in the summer while I was in shock, I was now feeling the full pain of these head-on collisions. In taking on my grief from an angle, I could make contact, deal and wrestle with it for a bit (such as writing these blog posts), and then spin off and get busy with something else when I felt the balance of power shifting against me, when it became too much. 
 
Throughout the following couple of weeks, now transitioning into November, I also did some work for my close friend, Garrit, who owns his own contracting business. There is nothing like spending a day shoveling dirt, carrying drywall, or loading a tonne of broken concrete into the back of a trailer to help get those mind-cleansing endorphins going.
 
I began setting up a schedule for my week, with specific days on the farm and certain days at home, writing or spending time volunteering in the CF community. ​

What kept me focused during the difficult early days of writing was Kim’s excitement and positive feedback to my early drafts. If you have read my book and read the very last page, you will know that when Kim was diagnosed for the final time, in August 2020, she made me promise to finish the book and to get it published. At that time, we had hoped we would have been able to do this together, but of course, that didn’t happen. Kim had a hand in editing my manuscript and giving her thoughts on the physical shape and design of the book, but she didn’t get to see any of the proofs. 

This sense of the emptiness of accomplishment was not new to me in October. Already in the summer, I shared with some people how it felt like nothing was worth doing if I couldn’t share it with Kim. Not until Kim was gone did I realize how much I enjoyed the things I did because I could share them and talk about them with Kim. Last week I met with my spiritual director and shared with him that I am not yet at the point where I can enjoy something just for the sake and dignity of it. I trust and hope I will one day get there, but still, now, my sense of accomplishment in life is attached to being able to share it with Kim. With her gone, my accomplishments don’t mean all that much. They are just a way to pass the time. 

​I feel guilty for feeling this way, especially as it relates to my book. You, as my readers, have been purchasing my book and spending your money on it. Many of you are taking hours out of your life to read it, and I appreciate that so much! I don’t want to disrespect that. But when life changes so radically in the middle of an emotionally charged project, it’s hard to maintain the original spirit of accomplishment; it becomes tarnished. When I began writing, the dream I had was to do this with Kim. That dream is unfulfilled. 
​​

On Community
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, a couple of people texted me, communicating their support and sorrow that a weekend so focused on the theme of gratitude must be difficult for me. That idea never actually really occurred to me until I got those texts. I’m not one for major holidays. I value the meaning behind them, but I'd rather focus on cultivating a spirit of thanksgiving throughout the year rather than artificially manufacturing it on one weekend. The same goes for Christmas. I like getting together with family, and that it feels special, but overall, whatever, I’m a bit of a scrooge. 

Therefore, I floated through the weekend without much thought to the contradiction of my grief and the weekend's theme of gratitude. All of this, however, left me unprepared for what did happen. My family got together the Sunday evening. We had a nice dinner, and we all had a good time. We finished up dessert, coffee, and drinks and were cleaning up. I then decided to make my exit. However, it was then that something I had done so many times before without too much thought or emotion hit me: I was going home alone. 

Now, of course, this was not the first time we had got together as a family since Kim died. And it had nothing to do with Thanksgiving. But that five-minute drive home served as a reminder and manifestation of just how lonely and empty my life, my future, felt. No matter where I went––family dinners, social outings, drinks with friends, work, or church––I was always coming home alone and walking into an empty house.  

It is as if the joy and laughs experienced during times of community, with family or friends, disappear into a vapour as soon as I get in my truck and the passenger door remains closed. When I leave the house for the evening, I always turn a light on so that at least there is some sense of warmth, of life, when I come home. But no matter how many lights I leave on or how good of a time I have when I am out, it can’t compete with the empty, silent house that awaits me. 

Often, which is a common thing for widowed people, when I come home from work, I will turn on Netflix or some music right away, and then I will go shower. I do this so that there is at least some noise in the house when I come back downstairs. 

Again, this wasn’t something new in October, and it is not always a painful experience to step into the house. Still, the grief about this reality was so much more profound, so much more depressing throughout October, especially on that Thanksgiving Sunday. And this leads me to my third categorization of the ever-deepening grief of that month.

On Experience & Time
Before these two experiences happened, another one actually set up the slide into the depression that I felt I was falling into for most of October. 

Since my transplant, I have been involved in advocacy work for Cystic Fibosis Canada, and for our local clinic here in Vancouver. During the summer, I decided to plug myself back into that advocacy work. Over the past couple of years, the big push in the CF world has been getting access to new medications coming online that are a real game-changer for people with CF, especially the latest one, Trikafta, a miracle drug for many people.

The downside of these drugs is they are costly, therefore it takes a while for publicly funded healthcare systems to get on board with funding them. When I re-entered the world of advocacy this past summer, I joined in on the final push to get Canada and the province of BC to approve Trikafta and make it available for CF patients. To say that Oct. 5 was a milestone in CF care here in BC is an understatement, as this was the day that our provincial government approved Trikafta, thus changing the lives of hundreds of people here in BC. 

For me, however, this day came with mixed emotions. I was thrilled to be part of this final push to get this drug approved; I was happy for my CF peers, who can now have access to this drug, but for me, it comes too late, as being post-transplant, I do not qualify to be on it.

On Oct. 6, there was a Facebook Live event to celebrate this momentous day, but I felt myself slipping into a pit as the meeting wound day. It was as if the bittersweet emotions of the day cracked open a dark door that was then quickly flung wide open by the realization that Kim would never know that this day in CF history happened. 

This idea and sorrow over Kim not knowing something was not new on that day. Already back in the spring, I came to the painful realization that everything that happens in life from here on out, Kim will not know about. Kim’s knowledge base, her experiences stopped on the day she died. I find it very painful that Kim doesn’t know what's happening in the world or in the life of those she loved. Kim doesn’t know about the heat dome or the wildfires of this past summer.  She doesn’t know about the flooding and how it is affecting our family in Abbotsford. She doesn't know about the mundain ordinary things in life. She doesn’t know how my book is being received. And she doesn’t know what is going in the CF or transplant world, or even about my own health (which is fine).
  
This idea is almost the most heartbreaking part of my grief, other than her not being here. Kim loved knowledge, and she loved to know what was going on with people, and she loved real-life stories. Learning and experiencing things she hasn't known or experienced is where I feel such a significant separation from her now.
​
I continue to change, but she stays the same. The world keeps going; life goes on, but Kim stopped. I want to stop. I want to hold time back, tell others to stop, hold on, and not go any further without her, but that is impossible. Time can’t be stopped; whatever is coming will come, and whatever is past will continue to grow further and further into the past.
​

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​“Loss stuns us into a place beyond any language ... Language is a cover for that annihilating stillness, and a poor one at that.”
(Megan Devine, It’s OK That You’re Not OK)
 

It was as if there was this open space, this empty silence in front of me. It felt like I was expected to move on, that any excuse of not making plans for the future, of finding stability, were now over. There was nothing to look forward to, no more ending point; there was now just a future without Kim. It felt like the chapter, whose title still included Kim’s name in it, was now done, and from here on out, the chapter titles would only have my own name. From this moment on, it felt as if Kim would now exist only in my memory. And each day after the memorial would feel as if I was moving further and further from her. 
 
Again, in this book, Lament for a Son, Wolterstorff writes, “It’s the neverness that is so painful. Never again to be here with us––never to sit with us at the table, never to travel with us, never to laugh with us, never to cry with us, never to embrace with us ... All the rest of our lives we must live without [her]. Only our deaths can stop the pain of [her] death. A month, a year, five years––with that I could live. But not this forever.”

Here is something I just thought of in writing this (writing always helps me process things). The word “widowed” means “to be empty.” Since Kim's memorial, I have been saying that I have this sense of “openness” in front of me, but I always need to qualify that by saying it is not a good thing. It is like being unanchored in a storm or staring out the door of an airplane with no parachute. But maybe instead of saying I feel this sense of “openness,” I should say I feel a sense of “emptiness” in front of me. I know I feel empty inside. I feel like the shell of the man I was a year ago. But maybe that is also the word that best describes how I feel about the future: EMPTY. ​

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​“The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered of ... Some things cannot be fixed. They can only be carried.”
(Megan Devine, It’s OK That You’re Not OK”)

As I reflect on the past seven months without Kim, I see that what I might call a “first chapter” of my journey with grief happened during the spring and most of the summer of this year. There are two defining features that I see at play throughout that time. The first was shock; the second was a complete loss of identity.
 
Shock.
Back in May 2019, I broke my arm. I was mountain biking in Watershed Park, just minutes from my house. I was riding a downhill trail, one I had done many times before. I came to a tabletop jump whose landing went immediately into a sharp right-handed bend. I hit the jump fine, but in landing, my rear wheel hit the edge of the tabletop, which then ejected my bike forward straight into the high-side of the lefthand berm. My front tire hit this wall of dirt, and my bike and I went flying through the air, wheels over handlebar. While flipping over in the air, I remember thinking, “don’t worry, you’ll be okay, you’ve crashed hard before.” However, when I hit the ground and came to a stop (sitting upright), I noticed that I was covered in blood. I then looked at my right arm and saw that it was bent in a way it was not supposed to ever be bent, and there was a bone sticking out of it. In the three seconds it took to realize how much trouble I was in, I remember thinking, “Please, shock, do what you were made to do!”

​Do you remember the board-game, Snakes and Ladders? It was a simple game where the players would roll the dice and see how many spaces up the switch-backed game board they could go. On some of the squares that the players would land, there would be a picture of a ladder extending up the game board. The player could then move their playing piece up the ladder to whichever square the ladder ended on. Thus, you could be propelled forward anywhere between 10 to 60 spaces. On other squares, however, you could land on the head of a snake, in which case you would slide back down the game board to wherever the snake's tail was, and thus you would lose anywhere between 10 to 60 spaces. 

I liked playing this game because it was a game of chance, thereby meaning that as the youngest in my family, I had a chance of winning; probably the only game I ever had a chance of beating my older siblings or parents at. 

Snakes and Ladders is the closest I've come to finding an appropriate metaphor for my journey of grief over Kim’s death. Each morning I wake up, and I wonder what kind of square I will land on that day. Will it be a neutral square where I'll sit where I am, and the day will pass with either a sense of numbness or relative peace? Will it be a day where I will find a "ladder," and I'll feel like I'm making some progress in finding a new normal and some new meaning; an advent of joy perhaps? Or will it be a day where I land on a "snake," find myself once again losing a grip on life, and sliding back into what feels like ever-deepening pits of sorrow and despair. 

What I’d like to do over the next couple of weeks is begin writing about some of this journey I have been on since Kim passed.  As I reflect back over the seven months and two days since Kim died, I can see four or five chapters to this short story. 

My first blog entry about my journey with grief will be on the shock I experienced throughout the spring and summer. For some reason, I used to think that shock was a bad thing. I’d hear that someone was in shock and believe that it was something they needed to overcome, or maybe it was a sign of weakness. However, I’ve come to see that shock is the natural response of the body to survive a situation that is too painful to experience in full. I can see now how much of the spring and summer were spent in shock, and my body and emotions were taking a bit of a summer holiday from the hard work that it subconsciously knew it would have to do. 

The second chapter of this mini-series will be on Kim’s memorial. I felt a growing fear and anxiety in the week leading up to it. I felt that something was going to change, but I could not put into words what that was. Then, the Monday morning following her memorial, the realization of what that anxiety was hit me, and it felt like a dark abyss opened up in front of me.

The third blog entry, Lord-willing I get there, will be about the ever-deepening darkness and numbness of October, precisely the complicated emotions over finishing up my book, Thanksgiving, and dealing with some challenges and unpredictability related to my health.

​The fourth entry will have to do with the season I am in right now (hopefully, I will still feel up to writing about this in a week or two). The last two weeks have seen a reprieve of the dark emotions. Some self-realizations during this time have even brought some glimmers of contentment. This all has to do with the little things of life and beginning to take a few tentative steps into the unknown.

And lastly, I will give an update on how I am doing when I finish this series. I can’t begin to imagine how I will be feeling at that time, so I’m not even going to try.  

I think a big part of this, and something I am thankful for, is that the memories I have of Kim are primarily of the good times we had. I don’t know if it is due to trauma, or shock, or just the way our brain and memory works, but the difficult memories, the memories of Kim’s final weeks and months, or all the time we spent in the chemo-clinic or recovering from surgery, are not memories that often come to mind. They are there when I think about them, but the good memories come to mind most naturally. Of lazy nights sitting and watching TV together. Of Kim sitting cross-legged on the couch, puzzle board on her lap, while I read in my chair. Camping at Christina Lake or sitting on the beach in Hawaii. Of making dinner and doing the dishes together, Kim still in her work-sweater and dress pants having just come home from work. These are the memories that come most naturally. But it is these memories that make me wonder over and over, how did this happen? How could that vibrant, beautiful, amazing woman be gone? And yet, she is. 
 
This past month has been significant. On the farm, we started and finished corn harvest for another year. We held Kim’s memorial service. And I announced my book project. There have been sparks of joy and excitement, of accomplishment and pride, but the prevailing emotion I find myself experiencing is one of numbness or indifference.   ​

If you want to do something to mark this six-month anniversary of Kim's passing, then all I ask is you take a moment to reflect on Kim and what she meant to you. Raise a glass of your favorite beverage to the unforgettable person she is. 

​As was clear from her memorial, Kim touched so many lives and lived such an authentic life. I am so proud to have been her husband.
I miss you, Kim.