Beyond Goodbye: Living in the Experience of Loss

Life can change in the blink of an eye.

People say this all the time, but it’s hard to believe — hard to know what it really means — until you experience it for yourself. Until it becomes your reality.

When you lose someone you love, someone who is so much a part of you that their absence seems impossible, the lines between you and the rest of the world become blurred for a while. Life goes on around you. You see it. You acknowledge it. But starting to interact with it again... That’s the hard part. Where do you even begin?

In 2019, after having lost two of the most important people in my life, that was one of many questions I found myself asking: Where do I begin? How do I start to heal myself enough to exist in this world that seems incredibly distant from what it was not so long ago? What is the first step toward moving not on or away, but through and forward?

I will you tell you up front that I am not a physician or a psychologist, nor do I have any formal training in mental healthcare. In answering these questions, I can only go by my journey. I can only share what I have felt and learned and embraced over the past few years. But if all you need is a starting point — a place from which to begin looking inward and engaging with your thoughts and emotions so that you can uncover your own answers — I hope you will find it within these pages. At the very least, I can guarantee that you will find a true story. My story.

I guess an introduction is as good a place to start as any, so let me tell you a bit about myself and two of the most important souls I have ever known.

My name is Jeanne — pronounced Jeann-ie, though some people just call me Jean. I grew up in Rhode Island, and I have a beautiful family full of extraordinary, caring, irreplaceable people. I’ve always considered myself fortunate.

In March of 2019, everything changed when the first of my two best friends died. My mom was my shopping companion, my lunch date, my advisor, my bosom buddy. She was 90 when it happened, but she was not your typical 90-year-old. She cooked. She baked. She crafted. She shopped. Her energy was unbelievable.

The illness came out of nowhere. She was sick for two days before her kidneys failed, and once at the hospital, she chose not to undergo dialysis, saying that she was just too tired. Within a week, she was gone. I didn’t leave her side that entire time. I owed her too much. When you lose your mother or the mother figure in your life, it changes you in ways you can’t express... But that is another book to write.

Eight months later, on December 15, my husband, William Francis Bundy — Will, as I called him — had a massive heart attack and died in front of me, on our kitchen floor. Somehow, the fact that it happened in such a normal place made it all the more incomprehensible.

Will was a naval officer, and when he retired from the military, he became a professor at a prestigious college. I, on the other hand, made my way in a more personal field, as a hair stylist. He was pretty conservative; I’ve always been a free spirit. In other words, we were a great match!

My husband was my other best friend, my companion, my mentor, my life. I believe we were soulmates, each of us bringing the other a missing piece. We had two sons together. We traveled and lived all over the world together. By the time he passed, we had been married for over four decades. If my mother’s death had been a shock, his was an absolute bombshell.

So, grief hit me with the force of a one-two punch that will be internally expressed forever. Within less than one year, I had lost the people who had been holding my world together in ways I didn’t recognize until they were gone. How could I even imagine forming an existence without them when I was finding it hard to see straight, to speak, to breathe?

This is where my journey begins.

Grief. It’s such a tiny word, yet it has such a powerful meaning.

When people discuss how grief must be processed, I wonder if they know what that means, or if they’ve ever actually felt it. I want to ask them if they’ve ever experienced a loss so deep that their heart broke into tiny pieces — pieces scattered so far apart that they wouldn’t even know where to search for them, let alone where to find emotional glue strong enough to start putting them back together.

Grief is the direct result of loss. It is a state of being without something you once had; a stark realization that something is missing. Though I will only be speaking to the variety of grief that results from the death of a loved one, it can be caused by the loss of any dear thing — an animal, a home, a career, a physical ability, etc. It can be intense, it can be mild, or it can be somewhere in between. Mine was pretty intense.

I have come to understand grief as a living thing that we need not only to survive through, but to bloom beyond; something that we need to acknowledge and to fully feel so that we can thrust forward, onto the other side. Is this an overnight process? No, it is not. Moving through grief takes a while, and the amount of time is different for everyone. Some people move quickly. Some move slowly. Some never move at all.

Grief first hit me as numbness — or, as some might refer to it, shock. It’s that this shit is not real