Free Saturday Night Widows by Becky Aikman Page B

articulate, and well informed, and I knew he specialized in patients with cancer and HIV. He would be up on the latest thinking about people and death. And much as I dreaded meeting him in his East Side office and sitting in the same upholstered wing chair where Bernie had sat, hemmed in by the same bookshelves filled with the same soothing Asian art, more than anything I wanted to learn what Goldenberg knew about this perplexing state of bereavement that I now inhabited.
    “You look about as I’d expect.” He greeted me with welcome candor, no doubt taking in my freefall weight loss, the sacks under my eyes.
    “That’s refreshing,” I said, lowering myself gingerly into the armchair that had been Bernie’s and pulling a notebook out of my bag. “Everybody keeps telling me what a babe I am now.”
    “People want you to feel better right away,” he said. He sat opposite me in an ergonomic chair and switched into his soft, professional psychiatrist voice. “Unfortunately, there’s no shortcut.” A therapeutic silence filled the room as he waited for me to continue.
    “I don’t expect a shortcut,” I countered. I switched into my professionalvoice, too. “I know I have to plug along this road on my own. But I don’t seem to be following any map. Like the five stages of grief—I can’t seem to get the hang of it.”
    “There
are
no five stages of grief,” Goldenberg said sharply. “They’re a complete misconception. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross studied people who were dying, not people who were grieving. People who are grieving don’t necessarily follow any particular pattern.”
    “You’re kidding me!” I said. “At my support group we had handouts! I thought we’d be tested on them later!”
    “Somehow, the stages of grief have lodged in the popular consciousness.” Goldenberg shrugged. “Even many professionals buy into them.”
    I nodded slowly. It made sense that these emotions might emerge in a person facing his own death. Denial—of course, Bernie had been incredulous at what was happening to him. Bargaining—yes, we tried everything to forestall the end. Anger—sure, it was tough to accept the unfairness of it. Depression—understandable. And acceptance—ideally, perhaps, a person would want to die at peace with his fate, although I can’t say that Bernie achieved that stage. Why should he?
    The truth is, scientists had begun a serious study of grieving only in the last few years, Goldenberg said. “They say that the emotions of loss and sadness come in waves, and that the waves become less intense over time.”
    “That explains why I’m weepy one minute and finding something funny the next.”
    “Exactly.”
    I told him about the nightmares and flashbacks. “Are those normal, too?”
    “More than you’d think,” he said. “Many people worry about succumbing to depression after someone they love has died. But trauma is more common than depression among people who are bereaved. You probably suffer from some degree of post-traumatic stress disorder.”
    Just what I need
, I thought. “But I haven’t exactly been waging war in Afghanistan.”
    “No, but in some ways you and Bernie were in the trenches, bullets whizzing around you,” Goldenberg said.
    The comparison was extreme, but it made sense, too. I thought briefly about the sorts of excruciating medical interventions Bernie had endured. The toll on those left behind can be traumatic, I knew too well. Visions of robot surgeons and failed rescues from drownings didn’t seem much worse than what I had witnessed in broad daylight before he died. I was reliving the horror now in my mind, again and again.
    “Also, while you were at war, so to speak, you were surrounded by people who were living a normal life,” Goldenberg said. “You were living a double life, and that makes it difficult to adapt. You still are … everybody around you is continuing normally while you go through this traumatic experience of loss.”
    “What