Dawn Picken is releasing a book about her journey. Photo / Andrew Warner
By Dawn Picken
Shouldn't you be over it? and other myths
The myth I despise most about grief is that it's time limited. "Shouldn't you be over his death by now?" a small number of people asked one year, two years, three years after the death of my husband, Sean Stanelun.
Not by a long shot. Never.
I'm sure the inquiries were well intentioned, but they didn't help. I have never felt guilty about missing Sean either. One dictionary definition of guilt is a feeling of worry or unhappiness that you have done something wrong.
Continuing to love someone who's physically absent is not wrong. Grief has no expiration date.
Sean died in 2010. His death launched me on a world tour with my two small children that ended in New Zealand. Our six-month Kiwi sabbatical has morphed into nearly 12 years. A new life has held me here.
I wrote a book not only because I wanted to talk about Sean's death, but to paint a picture of who he was: more than the hospital patient, he was the father who played in the sandpit with his children; the husband who risked broken limbs and death to shovel snow from our roof; the friend who, early in our relationship, insisted on showing my mom around town when I had to work.
We honour our departed when we tell their stories.
My story
Back in 2009, I was a career ladder-climbing, running, mumming, Gen X-er in Spokane, Washington, the United States. I had recently switched jobs from TV presenter and reporter to marketing director, leading a marketing and communications team at the regional chamber of commerce.
At that time, another pandemic was raging, the H1N1 virus, or swine flu. We thought Sean had the flu, and the advice was to keep infected people home unless it was an emergency. Four days into his illness, when I finally got Sean into our GP, his kidneys were failing.
[Excerpt, Love, Loss and Lifelines, Chapter One - In Sickness and in Hell]
At four in the morning, a doctor from the intensive care team found me curled under blankets, lying across two blue armchairs. He thrust a clipboard and pen into my hands, along with a form that would give permission for Sean to be placed on a ventilator. Ventilator? I struggled to understand what that meant. I had seen breathing machines in TV hospital dramas. I once used the theme music from ER in a series about kidney transplants I produced and reported for local TV news. It was the closest I had gotten to qualifying as a pulmonary technician. In the purgatory of the ICU waiting room, ventilator equalled terror, a last resort reserved for the sickest of the sick. Already emotionally exhausted, a cataclysm of terms provoked a cosmic mind crash: breathing/ machine/death/respiratory failure/risk. Even the horror movies I watched as a teenager could not have prepared me for the news Sean needed a machine to breathe, to live. But I didn't have time to cry, scream, or dial a shrink. I had to decide my husband's path — now. I read the disclaimer about potential complications like death. I signed because doctors said Sean needed a breathing machine to survive. That single sheet of paper affirmed I was not only Sean's partner but also the person making legal decisions that would impact his life forever. And mine. I suddenly felt hopelessly and helplessly alone. Facebook Post: September 15 at 4:46 a.m. Dawn Picken: Medical staff just now intubating Sean. He's working too hard to breathe. They think the cause of all this is some kind of bacterial infection. Still don't know exactly what it is or how it started. Sean will remain sedated while on the ventilator. We don't know how long he'll need the machine.
Maybe you've been here, too
Love, Loss and Lifelines sends readers on a rollercoaster of catastrophic illness. What do you do when your partner suddenly becomes critically ill? Even if you're a church-raised American, you don't just pray, you bring your person to the hospital. And if you're me, you share the ordeal via social media, because misery needs company, and company is good at looking after small children and delivering soul-preserving oatmeal bikkies and notepads.
One friend suggested I post my shoe size online, in case someone felt the urge to gift me a pair of groovy boots. I declined to do that, but the point is that people want to help in a crisis. Someone organised a meal roster; another person cleaned my house and others took my three and five-year-old children for play dates, lunches and overnights.
Sean was diagnosed with necrotising fasciitis, aka flesh-eating disease, and had surgeries on his arms and legs to cut away dead tissue. I can still hear the sound of his shrieks as nurses changed his wound dressings. High doses of morphine failed to block the pain. Coincidentally, he also had a large mass on his pancreas. Staff lovingly referred to him as "a train wreck".
Because I had worked for eight years in TV news in Spokane, Washington, our struggle was public. Sean had been a videographer at the same station as me before quitting to stay home with our baby girl. Local news outlets ran stories about us, and friends organised fundraisers to cover anything our insurance wouldn't. Catastrophe needs a village, and this book is a love letter to our helpers around the world.
I still marvel that the people who held us, literally and metaphorically, during the worst time of our lives, also helped us leave Spokane.
World tour with small fries
An impromptu parasailing session featured in the memoir provided a framework for thinking about the trip our family embarked on seven months after Sean's death. Just as I jumped off a cliff at the Oregon coast, I dived into world travel, but with the added complication of shepherding two small children.
I had an instructor for parasailing, someone to guide me safely to the beach below. In much the same way, old and new friends eased our path as we travelled from Miami to Paris, Ireland, London, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Spain, South Africa and Australia.
People caution against making major life changes after someone you love dies. I understand the advice, but it seemed contradictory to what I had already experienced. A heartbreaking change had been foisted on our family, and now I wanted to choose change. I couldn't alter history or the fact that I was sad about losing my person. But I could shift where we grieved, see new places and create an "after" that would be much different to the "before".
I could mourn in Spain, Sydney and South Africa before returning to mourn in Spokane. And everyone should experience an opposite-hemisphere Christmas at least once.
[Excerpt - Chapter 23 - Christmas in Oz]
Before dinner, one of the family remarked they usually set an empty place at Christmas for people who are no longer there, and that we had taken that empty spot. Sean's gift: his spirit continued pulling the kids and me in unfamiliar directions, drawing us into new experiences with new friends. My favourite Christmas present was from Vanessa, who gave me a typed letter and a bracelet. She wrote: This bracelet is a symbol of connection. To know what it is to feel grief. To know what it is to feel alone in that grief. That connection can then be passed along to the next person you meet. Happy Christmas, Dawn. I recognize it is a sad one for you and the children also. My wish for you is that these two states can reside together in peace.
Love hurts
People who have suffered a profound loss of anything, not just a person, but their health, their home, a job ... will relate to what it means to feel singled out by the universe and then to start rebuilding a life. There is no grief poker: you can't "see" my dead spouse and raise me a seriously ill child. No one wins the hand because their loss is deeper or tougher. It all hurts.
Grief can drive us to make decisions we later question. In the fog of mourning and the longing to recreate beauty from devastation, we barrel into choices that we sometimes later seek to unwind. We choose our path using the best information available at the time.
I've never regretted my decision to travel and to start a new life in Aotearoa. During more than a decade here, I've navigated challenges, sorrows and joy: creating community from scratch, marriage, divorce, solo parenthood, empty nesting and new love.
Other widows' wisdom
Losing your person means waking up a stranger in a strange land, in a world you never expected to occupy. And when most of your social circle is coupled, you feel like the outlier. That's why it was hugely healing, shortly after coming to New Zealand, to meet other widows around my age. My encounter with them features in the book.
I circled back to some of them recently, asking how their grief had changed over time. Siobhan, from Tauranga, lost her husband 16 years ago. After Steve died, she says she felt angry, then numb and lost.
"Over the years the pain has lessened, but is still very much there. I don't feel numb or lost; I've learnt to adjust to life without Steve. Having people comment that I've done a fantastic job raising the children on my own has been a good booster. In a way, that has eased the grieving."
Helen, from Papamoa, says she used to hate when people said "time is a great healer".
"I wanted to yell back, 'Rob will be no less dead in five years' time'. Part of me wanted to tell them to f*** off with their useless, meaningless platitudes. They could get on with their normal lives. How you offer condolences matters!"
Nearly 20 years after Rob's passing, Helen still mourns the fact her late husband will never see their kids' milestones.
"Grief has simmered down to a sad regret, sad for what my girls lost and doubly sad for what Rob lost. They were everything he ever wanted, and it was all taken away from him, and them, and me.
"Ultimately, all these years down the track I still feel that Rob got the Death Sentence and I got the Life Sentence."
Losing someone important leads us to redefine ourselves. Is a man still a son if his parents have died? Am I still a wife if my husband is gone? Technically, no. But the wedding ring on my right hand serves as a symbol of two people I've lost: my husband, and the part of me that was his wife.
Why a book?
It's one thing to journal through grief, and another to publish a book. I wrote about my why in the memoir's introduction: Sean has left a husband/father-sized hole in our lives that no one can fill. I write to remember. I write because our children have forgotten their father's voice. I write so they will always know the person he was. I write because I still love him and I want to inhabit his universe, if only in my mind through the sweet, small details that surface when I tell Sean's stories. Our experience is something I share because many of you can relate. You have lost a loved one, and whether it happened months ago or decades ago, it still hurts. For those of us who are missing our person, there is no moving past death. We scooch forward in our own way, playing the hand that grief has dealt us.
Not the end
Love, Loss and Lifelines ends shortly after our arrival in New Zealand. It's a time capsule of a turbulent year, one that many people will identify with.
We continue writing our own chapters until we die. Life is a shared adventure, and we can better support each other if we take the time to hear each other's stories.
• Love, Loss and Lifelines goes on sale November 2 online via Amazon, Kindle, Apple and other e-tailers, as well as Paper Plus in Mount Maunganui. More information at dawnpicken.com
• The public is invited to a launch party on November 3 at the downtown Tauranga Public Library, 21 Devonport Rd, at 6 pm. Signed copies of the book will be available for purchase, and refreshments are free.
• More information about Grief Support Services is here: https://www.griefsupport.org.nz/
A woman, 25, has been charged with assault.