Holding space for third act of wonder, gratitude and grief

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/03/2025 (551 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Since my husband’s death in March 2017, I have been marking my life’s passage. I have my rituals. A candle and incense, an urn, family photos — an altar of sorts, immersed in memory.

I hold this space dear.

I do not light the candle or incense at the same time every day. Rather, the moment announces itself variously: twilight, a grandchild’s visit, preparation for an event I am hosting; an early morning snowfall.

The light and the incense gentle the air, and animate my appreciation for the presentness of the past.

I enter this eighth year after his death astonished that third-act time passes with what feels like increasing swiftness. I am baffled, in part, by “widow” as a still-new dimension recalibrating my identity.

Yet, even as time seems to quicken, it makes room for a deepening understanding of loss continuously informed by the enduring, though altered, presence of our 50-year-old partnership.

The immediacy and urgency of grief and mourning soften into poignancy: gratitude for a shared life and the luck it held; and sorrow for the loss of the care and attentiveness that partnership fostered.

This understanding of poignancy in relation to the co-existence of gratitude and sorrow extends to absorb positive and negative values often assigned to agedness.

There is praise for our experience and legacy. There is reprove conferred by fear of the burden we may represent — our inevitable decline, dependency and our lack of worth within systems dedicated to narrow definitions of productivity and contribution.

I understand that a culture so often besotted by youth and youthfulness “sees” me, at best, as invisible, at worst as a cost to safety nets and social services stretched beyond capacity.

None of this is easy to catch hold of, for I so often feel myself to be 21 years old, I cannot imagine the further losses that may ensue in the time gifted to me, and find challenges such as downturns, downsizing and relocating daunting.

In terms of limitation, there are daily episodes of fogginess and forgetfulness — the stumbles of mind and body along the downward slopes of aging’s cognitive decline — alarm.

If I discover my keys still in the garage door, my cellphone in my sock drawer — however, I might sometimes counter alarm with an increased awareness that such stumbles existed in earlier stages of my life, though they were experienced with less foreboding, unattached to what I now read as the predictable and natural dissolution of my grey matter.

Instead of reprove and limitation, I turn to the wisdom achieved in aging, as time both quickens and slows.

A single moment in the garden with growing things expands in duration and significance, especially in relation to contemporary worlds addicted to speed, virtuality, hyperconnectivity and disposability.

I dedicate myself to sharing the intrinsic value of such experiences. This sharing enlivens my grasp of how my life’s ongoing purpose and value, as tempered by time’s passage, can find expression.

I become more dedicated to meaningful conversations with my children and grandchildren. I want family stories, my stories, to find life in their memory.

Furthermore, my awareness of limit paradoxically includes the expansiveness that comes with dreaming about what these children and grandchildren might become when I am no longer here: a toddler’s antics, a granddaughter’s insight actualizing within a world that will evolve beyond my recollection.

This sense of abundance within limitation leads to respect for vulnerability and fragility within the cycles of life and death that bind us all.

The courage and attentiveness it takes as the one left behind who might bring life to those taking their leave because of illness and/or accident — casseroles to kitchens; presence to mourning — a gentle discernment in this attentiveness as a measure of the creative, caring responsiveness sustained while I remain on the ground, not yet entirely broken.

Abundance within limitation allows me to touch poignant awakenings: to feel how my husband’s name lives on in the grandson he did not know but dreamed of; to learn from my granddaughter’s devotion to glitter and design; and to rejoice in my capacity to discover and honour these findings.

In this final act, I can encourage mayhem and seriousness to intersect, find humour in my reduced clarity and agility while accepting the serious consequences such reductions signal.

I can celebrate tree root and tree branch, this glory of living things advancing within, because of, and finally beyond my reach.

Eight years. Incense and candlelight, rekindled, sometimes stuck.

Invisible yet visible, dissolving yet fluid, declining yet adaptive, diminished yet resolute. Poignancy, abundance and limitation co-existent.

arts@freepress.mb.ca

Winnipeg writer Deborah Schnitzer explores life lessons from women in their Third Act.