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“The thing that will bother you most in life is the picture in your head of how it should be.” ~unknown
I was hoping to get admission in college. I hoped that after hard work I would get a career and one day I would meet a good man and we would get married. We’ll buy our first house together and start a family, pick out a crib and baby “going home” outfit, and organize a drawer full of diapers. We’ll have more kids, go on vacations, and grow old together.
I hoped that one day I would take care of her until she took her last breath and then I would join a travel group with other retired women. My adult children came over for dinner, and we took family vacations with the grandchildren every year. All this kept going on in my mind like this.
I had a linear approach to life. You go to point A, B, C, etc. You do what you’re supposed to do and you work hard. It was very simple, life with these expectations. Follow the recipe and then eat your dessert.
Spoiler alert: Life was so simple until the universe pulled the rug from under my feet.
It was a normal school day when my life fell apart. Such things happen frequently in ordinary days.
My husband and I were both teachers, and we would wake up before the sun rose to begin the assembly line of breakfast and lunch preparations. Afterwards we would wrangle the kids and get them dressed and ready for departure, which was basically like herding cats. Then, he left them at their respective places. After school I picked everyone up.
In between all this we worked, went to meetings, ran errands, bathed the kids, cooked dinner, and took care of all the normal tasks of domestic life.
Except that ordinary day, nothing like that happened.
On April 27, 2016, I woke up to find my husband dying on the living room floor. Out of left field, in an instant, the life I hoped for was gone.
I never considered the possibility of becoming a thirty-four-year-old widow with a one-year-old I was still raising, a three-year-old who could barely speak sentences, and a six-year-old who was only two months away from graduating kindergarten.
I was thrust into an alternate reality of complex, tangled suffering, and it was in this new place that I painfully realized that the life I knew, what was familiar and most comfortable to me, was over.
My husband and I planned for each of our kids all day long. We also had number four on the calendar, which would never happen.
But now I was a single mother. A widow.
It’s a little embarrassing to admit, but during this time I wasn’t just grieving the loss of my husband. Sure, I missed her so much that I couldn’t eat. I was not able to sleep. I spent my days in exile, not knowing where I belonged. The wear and tear of my new life as a single mother had exhausted me. The loneliness within me created a painful hollowness that felt hopeless; The unfairness of this proverbial roll of the dice has led me to give up more times than I’d like to admit.
But there was something else I was grieving, too: the loss of the life I had hoped to live. My dashed hopes. The path of my life that had been changed forever was now headed in an unknown direction that felt like it would surely kill me.
We hope that our lives come true exactly as we see them in our hopes and dreams. When life doesn’t go according to plan, it can be difficult to reconcile the disappointment of our new reality. Resistance is the first defense. We don’t want to believe or accept change.
This was not the life I chose. I thought, I deserved something better. “It” seemed totally inappropriate. Surely there were worse people who were more deserving of being struck by such lightning – so why me? I clung to those thoughts and they buried me even deeper. Resistance can be a catalyst for deeper parts of grief.
It’s a disappointing, embarrassing revelation when you realize that you never really had complete control. It feels as if you have been lied to. All those years you spent with blind followers of the first world thinking you could plan every detail. It was cute while it lasted. Now it just seemed silly.
I realized what the expectations really were.
Nothing.
My expectations were never realistic. They were nothing more than thoughts running through my mind. Assumptions. Desires. Never gives guarantees.
It was always like that, but for me it was on a subtle level. Micro-disappointments, like not getting the job I wanted. A relationship that ended. Losing a bid on a house. I never prepared myself for the real disappointments in life. The earth-shattering despair that shatters your world and introduces you to your new constant companion: pain.
We usually think that the bad things we hear about only happen to other people. We know it exists, but not in our reality. Just an abstract thing elsewhere in the world.
Unless this happens to us.
I remember how angry my husband would get when I would surf Facebook, moaning that so-and-so got a new car, or how a couple seems to love each other, and why can’t we go to Hawaii like so-and-so?
“Everyone puts their best self on Facebook,” Kenneth told me. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
“No,” I insisted, shaking my head. “So-and-so is madly in love. Look how passionate they are about each other. Why don’t we hold hands like that?”
“We have three children under the age of five,” she said, rolling her eyes.
I want Kenneth to live long enough to know that so-and-so is divorced. He would have said to me, “I told you so.” And for once, I would have gladly told him he was right.
It’s like those memories I love to lean into. Life may not be as terrible or as wonderful as it appears in my mind. A middle path has to be found.
I have to remind myself of this when I’m feeling the extremes of an emotion. These are just thoughts in my head. Sand castles are built on emotions, and sand castles are swept away when the tide rises and brings a new day. It’s not a matter of it being a good or bad thing. it just is.
My expectations have been something I have had to live with my entire life. I have always had high expectations from myself. Failure shouldn’t be such a thing. As a widow, I found myself stumbling into a new reality where I felt like I was constantly failing. I’m legitimately not able to do what I once could.
I was not that kind of mother to my children. This new me had less time and patience. She was more tired, overworked and in pain. I had to learn to live with the limitations of my new life. My disappointment accumulated inside me like poison. Whatever I could do was not enough. I wasn’t enough. These are all very toxic emotions to have when you’re already drowning in grief.
But there’s only so much time you can spend falling into a deeper pit of despair. One day you realize that you are no longer falling and have actually reached the bottom. There you are, alone with your despair, so tired of yourself that you can’t even handle your negative thoughts anymore. You can’t take one more second of it.
This is the moment for you to get up and wash yourself and start again.
When the frustration stops ringing in your ears and you have a moment of peace, you can begin to think objectively about your life. Your new life.
I realized what was wrong with me. I decided that my problem came from my expectations. They were the root cause of my disappointment.
I hoped for a long life with my husband, even though he was always a mortal being who never promised to be mine forever. I expected a lot of things, except for the only thing that was true about life: We are only guaranteed today. It ended yesterday. Don’t know tomorrow.
I knew I wanted to live the best life possible. I wanted a fulfilling life that was hopeful, joyful, and meaningful. If I want it all, I have to change my expectations. It was impossible to completely get rid of expectations. I’m only human. Furthermore, expectations serve a purpose. He has helped me in life. He has hurt me too.
I decided the middle ground was to find “flexible expectations.” I could not be rigid in my thinking. I wanted to have standards and goals, but I needed a little allowance for the inevitability of life not going according to plan.
I had to become more flexible and strategic about my failures. I needed to keep a long-term perspective and not feel like individual moments in my life were everything, everything. I needed to be less attached to a prescribed way of living.
You realize that in a world full of uncontrollable circumstances, the most powerful line of defense that is completely under your control is how you think.
Your attitude.
Your viewpoint. Is that glass half full or half empty? You decide.
How you think is your flexibility. Your ability to stand back up and dust yourself off. The way you know that life is worth living, not only during the happy moments, but also during the challenges, the pain, and the heartbreaks, and that’s why you persevere.
Maybe my expectations never deceived me. Perhaps this was truly considered one of my greatest teachers in life.
About a year after my husband died, I sat down and made a list of the “good” and “bad” of the past year. It got so blurry that I felt like I needed to go back to the details. When I remembered all the horrors I was hoping for a pity party.
Bad: My husband died. alone.
The good: new friendships, a loving community that stood up for us when we needed it, trips to Japan, Italy, and Denmark, seeing an old friend for the first time in eleven years, being more productive than ever with my writing, my kids being happy and adjusting to little people, having a good roof over our heads, loving my job that doesn’t feel like a job, staying healthy, and so much more. I kept thinking of new things to add to the list.
This was telling a lot. We focus on the negative. My mind wanted to go back to the bad moments of last year. But after re-reading the list, it became clear that the year wasn’t bad at all. There were many bright spots in the hardest year of my life.
Mooji said, “Emotions are just visitors. Let them come and go.”
I always try to remember this.
It’s okay to feel terrible. You are not broken for feeling this way. You can’t let yourself get attached to emotions. There will be days when life seems very difficult. You will feel pain, loneliness and fear which will torment you. None of this represents who you are, nor is it any indication of what your future looks like. They are only temporary visitors.
When emotions come upon me, I accept the pain. Take shelter. Maybe my schedule will clear up. Lower my expectations about productivity. Allow yourself to relax while I let the thoughts go. Then I move ahead. It’s not that you ever forget the pain, but moving on is a way of compartmentalizing it so that it doesn’t destroy you.
Eighteen months later, I am a different person than I was before my husband died. It’s not the life I initially chose, but in many ways I’m living a more intentional life with a lot more choices. There is a certain amount of excitement in what I call my “renaissance.” there are no rules. You just live as authentically as you can, with everything you have, doing your best, and that’s it. No mystery.
Everything you need to persevere is already inside you, and that truth is liberating.
About Teresa Shimogawa
Teresa Shimogawa is a human being who is trying to do good in the world. She is a teacher, storyteller and is currently studying to become an assistant to a Shin Buddhist minister. she writes www.houseofteresa.com.
