An experiment
The idea of doing research on animal protection policy to honor my wife is to channel my emotions through the research, in order to help ultimately achieve the peace of her passing (see a previous journal entry on "active grieving" for the idea). Can the research do that? Today I started preparing this research by writing an outline, and I decided to use this opportunity to conduct an experiment. The goal of the experiment is to observe the immediate impact of the writing on my emotions (mainly the sadness).
Around 8 am in the morning, I went to my room office and closed the door. I started pulling out her images in my mind to create triggers. Just as usual, these triggers led to overwhelming sadness so I started sobbing (for a moment I thought about why I went through this torture but I continued). I stayed in the mood for 10-15 minutes doing nothing (as I normally did) because, at these moments, I often felt very tired mentally and physically. The only thing I did was to draw down what I experienced with simple words of describing the experiment (e.g., sadness, mood swing, resting 10-15 min etc.)
I then started thinking about how I can get out of the sadness. Often time at these moments, if I am home, I would just wait it out, take a walk, a nap (if possible), or read or TV. Instead of doing any of these, I began to create mental images of my wife in her last weeks wanting me to do something for animal protection. There were two occasions in which she specifically talked about what she wanted to contribute to animal welfare. After this switch of the triggering process, I started writing an outline for this research, from notes I took in an animal preservation workshop I attended yesterday. During the writing, I was occasionally reminding myself that I did this because (1) animal protection is her will, (2) she (her spirit) is writing it with me, (3) she is watching me doing this, (4) she is in me doing this.
My immediate responses at the beginning of the writing were crying. My tears came out but I was not sure if this was all sadness. I think it is mainly sadness, but combined with a slight sense of gratitude. When I was typing specific words such as "species", "elephants", I had a little more tears. Did I feel calm and peaceful immediately after? I am not very sure. I still feel "unbelievable" that she is gone, and I am doing this while I should have be doing my normal research. But that sense of gratitude is enough for me to think that this process may be working. The bottom line is this experiment generated short-term immediate emotions that may eventually lead to the ultimate goal of grief which is to accept her passing. I will continue the research and my observation of the research process.
Around 8 am in the morning, I went to my room office and closed the door. I started pulling out her images in my mind to create triggers. Just as usual, these triggers led to overwhelming sadness so I started sobbing (for a moment I thought about why I went through this torture but I continued). I stayed in the mood for 10-15 minutes doing nothing (as I normally did) because, at these moments, I often felt very tired mentally and physically. The only thing I did was to draw down what I experienced with simple words of describing the experiment (e.g., sadness, mood swing, resting 10-15 min etc.)
I then started thinking about how I can get out of the sadness. Often time at these moments, if I am home, I would just wait it out, take a walk, a nap (if possible), or read or TV. Instead of doing any of these, I began to create mental images of my wife in her last weeks wanting me to do something for animal protection. There were two occasions in which she specifically talked about what she wanted to contribute to animal welfare. After this switch of the triggering process, I started writing an outline for this research, from notes I took in an animal preservation workshop I attended yesterday. During the writing, I was occasionally reminding myself that I did this because (1) animal protection is her will, (2) she (her spirit) is writing it with me, (3) she is watching me doing this, (4) she is in me doing this.
My immediate responses at the beginning of the writing were crying. My tears came out but I was not sure if this was all sadness. I think it is mainly sadness, but combined with a slight sense of gratitude. When I was typing specific words such as "species", "elephants", I had a little more tears. Did I feel calm and peaceful immediately after? I am not very sure. I still feel "unbelievable" that she is gone, and I am doing this while I should have be doing my normal research. But that sense of gratitude is enough for me to think that this process may be working. The bottom line is this experiment generated short-term immediate emotions that may eventually lead to the ultimate goal of grief which is to accept her passing. I will continue the research and my observation of the research process.
Replies
It\'s lovely what you are doing, and how you are consciously involving Yan. May you find healing and resolution in your project.
I had a similar impulse. Around the time I met Arlene, she was finishing the script for a play, about the night John Lennon was shot, set in an Upper West Side Manhattan bar, the neighborhood where we we lived and where John & Yoko & the kids would be seen frequently. It was only a few years after his death. She was in a playwriting workshop, and the play was acclaimed by the teacher and students, and had a reading with professional actors. Then I got sick, our life fell apart, her dreams of producing the play shattered. She carried the script with us on our homeless wanderings. At some point it disappeared, my daughter remembers seeing it in one place, but we had some messy evictions after that where we left a lot of our things behind when the marshall locked us out.
When we recovered, I suggested trying to find a copy. She was ashamed, a lot of her former psychotherapy patients were actors, and she was afraid that inquiring about the script might stir up old problems that happened as her practice fell apart. She always blamed me for her business problems, my mental illness sometimes disrupted her work, but I don\'t think it was that simple.
So last week I posted that I was looking for a play \"Heroes & Villains\" on Facebook & Twitter & Google Plus. No answers, I didn\'t think it would be that easy. I will have to engage with the theater community in New York. someone must have a copy of it, even after all these years. It was exceptional.
I don\'t think I will try to produce the play, but you never know. It was wonderful though, I was impressed when I read it the first time. It\'s just recovering something that was lost, I guess, a part of my wife, and I\'m sure our daughter, a writer too, would like to have a copy.
I also fulfilled my best friend\'s \"final wish\" at his funeral. His other good friend told me he said he wanted a rosary of roses buried with him, and he wanted me to ride in the hearse to the cemetery with him. Although I am Jewish, I went with the friend to a florist and ordered the rosary. I rode in the hearse.
Tiger...I hope that in doing this you find some comfort. You are very very early in the journey so please take it easy on yourself too. You and I could not be more opposite on our initial start of this grief journey and I admire the way you are \"thinking\" your way through and I think of all the people in the world a highly charged emotional me would not be the best person to give a highly intellectual logical you advice..so we will just call this my little 2 cents. We are one and the same on the broken heart....we are one and the same on the shock that our loss brought us....but I do have time on my personal journey with this and for me I found things constantly changing on my road. One of the things that stand out to me was advice given here that I really hated and that was that there will be a new me. I didn\'t want to be a new me...my husband loved the old me and that was my thinking on that..yet as I continually tried everything to keep it all exactly the same ....I could not move an inch forward because of it.One day and it was not that long ago I had to face the fact that the old me that my husband loved went with him...not to say that he wouldn\'t love the new me that\'s forming but I think it was more about my own personal acceptance that everything in my world did change so it was impossible for me to stay as I was...that realization really hurt yet opened my path...or pushed me out..most likely both. I can honestly say that I feel better though with the understanding that I have a long way to go...and maybe I have been on this journey my entire life even before I met my Jim...lots of old issues have been leaving me in a good way I just need to leave them gone . I think its beautiful that you are trying to become a voice for the animals for your wife. My husbands passion was the military...and it was to honor them . I tried to carry his passion as he did but I found that it was impossible to do it exactly like him because THAT was his passion..so I keep it simple...it was because of him that my eyes were opened to the wonderful things our brave young men and women do...the words \"all gave some ..some gave all \" truly speaks to my heart in a stronger way than my brain did on the respect issue. So one of the gifts my husband gave me was that I try to honor and respect our military in a way that reflects that..but it will never be in the way he did....when I tried to do it in a way that I thought he would it really brought me conflict because I cannot live my life by trying to be him...I can honor some of his passions as myself. I hope some of this makes sense for you...sending you many many hugs across the ocean
Tiger . . . as an animal activist myself, I totally commend your effort in this endeavor. You can make a difference in the world . . with whatever is behind the motivation to do so. If it\'s Yan, great. If it\'s to help process your grief, great. The point is you are \"doing\" it! I am very proud of you!! We need more voices for the animals!! I\'m behind you a thousand percent. (Back to your experiment, I will be most interested in your future observations.) Hugs, D
Thank you all for comments. I am in the Chinese City Hanzhou to meet a friend who lost his wife at age 29. We have been friends for a long time and he has come here for a conference but also for me because he wants to see I am OK. Before I felt sad for him when he talked about his wife Judy, now, after my wife\'s passing, I felt Very sad and deeply painful for him and me. He gave lots of encouragement