Life After Loss… Recalculating

On Monday June 30th at 1:30 pm, I along with my children Dara and Zach will relive that very moment when their mother and my wife Suzanne Shefska took her last breath. After a two and half year struggle with stage 4 lung cancer, after all the shock, all the hope, all the pain and all the disappointment, Suzanne exhaled one last time and finally found the peace that she so deserved.

While Suzanne found peace, we found heartbreak, sorrow and a gapping hole in our lives. How in God’s name do you fill that hole or better yet honor someone’s memory?

The answer, as it turned out, was for us to become better people by trying to understand who we are and why we are the way we are. That requires looking deep within ourselves to really grasp how we each could be better, more well rounded individuals.

For me, that meant being brutally honest with myself about not always being emotionally available, withholding my love, my trust to those who meant the most to me, Suzanne and the kids. To eventually admit that my personal fears crippled me emotionally, creating trust issues and doubts in the minds of those I loved. If I wouldn’t trust the people I love the most to be honest with them emotionally, then why would they ever trust me? And, how finally being honest with myself has allowed me to communicate with Dara and Zach and close personal friends, what I am feeling emotionally because finally I realize that by doing so, it is a sign of strength and not weakness as I had always thought in the past.

My kids to a degree have done the same, we are all to some degree or another working on ourselves. We want to be the best versions of ourselves as a way to honor Suzanne’s memory.

Was Suzanne perfect? No, not at all. Like all of us she had her issues, lack of self confidence, low self esteem, a fear of not fitting in but her virtues far outweighed her deficiencies. She cared deeply not only about her family and close friends but also about those she served, her students. Suzanne was a Special Education teacher in one of the worst neighborhoods in Baltimore. Waking every school day at 6 am so that she could help her students, all while carrying with her a portable oxygen concentrator to ensure that she had enough air in her compromised lungs to be able to provide her students with what they needed. She made it a point to call parents when a student went above and beyond and let them know that they could and should be proud of their child. Her determination to make a positive difference in people’s lives even while trying to cope with lung cancer, showed us a strength and resolve that I still admire to this day. So much so that I try to emulate her everyday when doing the work that I do at CarEdge by selflessly giving back to people, sharing my knowledge and encouraging others to be better educated, so as to not ever be taken advantage of in the future.

Eight years is a long time when you think about it but when it is about the loss of a loved one, it is barely a blink of an eye, a moment that lives with you forever, a memory that never fades and a sorrow that never really fully leaves you. So, the questions for me became how do I cope, how do I move forward, how do I honor the person that I lost? In my case I looked inward, not in an attempt to reinvent myself but rather to redefine myself. To find a better version of myself, Ray 2.0 if you will.

Ray 2.0 is closer to the person I should and could have been, closer to the person that Suzanne always wanted me to be, closer to the person that she needed me to be. I am so much more capable of empathy and understanding today than I have ever been. Men in general and me in particular, have always heard things in such a way that I feel as if I have to solve the problem, come up with a solution and road map to get us there, when in fact I was really being asked to hear, not heal. I was being asked to acknowledge, not to solve. I was really being asked to just be there and I didn’t understand that or know how to just be present.

I have learned to no longer ask why but rather what. What is making you feel the way that you feel as opposed to why are you feeling the way that you feel? What causes you to think a little more deeply than why, it forces a more introspective look at the causes and perhaps when you better understand the what, it becomes easier to address the why. What communicates a more genuine caring to the person you are asking, it is softer and warmer and more comforting and helping then why. And yes, I wish I would have learned that 60 years ago instead of two years ago. Thankfully I’m still evolving.

So, will I ever be the person that Suzanne had hoped I would be and the kids need me to be? My hope is that at 74 and as I approach the fourth quarter of my life I will come closer than ever before to being that person. My success towards that goal no matter how big or how small will be because I want to honor Suzanne’s memory and at the very least show those who I love that all of us regardless of age can change to some degree and find a better path to travel.

Suzanne, you are still the glue that holds this family together and for that I am eternally grateful. May your memory always be a blessing. I love you dear and I miss you.