The pain I've known with the loss of my wife has been unlike any other agonizing I've ever experienced. In a cruel way it beats me down until I surrender or submit and then mercilessly continues to kick and punch me.

The pain finds new ways everyday to hurt me, extracting a terrible price for the encounter. This foe delights in my cries, feeds on my fear, and drinks my tears. As time goes by I am stronger and slower to surrender or submit. But the pain stands fast too. It is a daily game.

Spending so much time with this adversary has brought me to a place of respect, if not a certain honor, in our relationship. My disdain and hatred slowly turns to fascination and curiosity. In mourning the dead even my nemesis offers healing if I remain open. Even as it smiles at my hurt I find strength to go another round. And this strength is new, something I didn't have in my earlier rounds.

While I swung at and fought this awful enemy I began to have questions I wanted it to answer. Never before in my life's journey have I had the need to speak to my pain as I do now. We have spent so much time together in battle and the work of my grief. My need for its message is as real as the need for my next breath. I wondered aloud "can we talk?"

"Talk is mere words," pain replied. "I don't use words, I use feelings. Let's speak feelings." At that moment pain hit me with a terrible blow, taking advantage of my pause to form words. "Let's speak feelings." But how, I wondered. How do I speak without words. Pain hit me again. I'm crying and bleeding. "Let's speak feelings."

"Ow!", I exclaimed. Pain replied by planting a dark image in my head. I cried loudly. Pain replied by jabbing my eyes so tears flowed. "Let's speak feelings."

"Who are you that you need to persist with this infliction?" I asked. My chest collapsed at pain's pressure taking my breath. I felt its answer "I am life."

I fell in desperation for the lack of oxygen as pain strangled me relentlessly. I felt in my inner being a strong denial of what pain said. "No you are death, not life." I felt its answer "I am life." Without thought my response was "Then let me live!"

Pain grabbed my heart and weighed down my limbs. "We're talking in feelings."

"Yes, I feel. I hurt. I am undone."

Pain replied "You are alive. You feel."

In my Al-anon 12-step program I have learned about "detachment with love." In my first writings on detachment I said I preferred to turn the words around so they read "with love, detach." To be certain it isn't that hard to detach in anger or without love. But with love, now that's a different story. Loving detachment can be hard; very hard.

I have learned that healthy detachment is neither kind nor unkind. It is done without judgment of the alcoholic. It is just the process where we remove ourselves from the bad effects created by alcoholism. Detachment not only stops us from enabling the addict, it upsets any notion that we are victims or martyrs of another person's actions. It frustrates self-pity and our concentration on what another person is doing to us. Instead our focus is placed on our own lives.

My sponsor asks the question from time to time: "Who is crazier, the alcoholic or the one who lives with the alcoholic?" The alcoholic's routine and patterns become somewhat predictable and can be anticipated. But the non-alcoholic who lives with them can become really unpredictable and crazy as we quickly try one cure after another, flying from one extreme to another in our pursuit of another person's sobriety. All the while we jump from idea to idea without any real organization or methodology to keep things stable. Much of the time this is done while we feel victimized or put upon by the entire mess. We feel like we're responding to what life is throwing at us instead of taking an active role in how we face life.

I started attending Al-Anon meetings one year and three weeks before my wife died battling alcoholism. It took every minute of that time to develop even a rudimentary process of detachment with love. It was really hard work. I had to become aware that my qualifier's actions weren't about me. This wasn't something she was doing to me or because of me. I also had to accept that I was truly powerless over her alcoholism. I didn't cause it, I couldn't control it, and I couldn't cure it.

I describe detachment to my Al-Anon friends by talking about a ping pong game. Alcoholism serves the ball across the net onto my side of the table and I hit the ball, returning the serve. Then alcoholism hits it back to me a little harder, so I return it harder. And so on. Without any thought whenever alcoholism smacked the ball over the net onto my side of the table I jumped into action and sent the ball back. Detachment happens when I set the paddle down on the table and walk away. This in no way stops alcoholism from serving the balls. But after a while I can let those balls fall onto the floor or go zinging by without so much as a flinch. At that moment both my qualifier and I am healthier by far.

But for me alcoholism took a sinister turn when it took my wife. When she died I fell into a dark night of the soul. What I had mastered so well in detachment with active alcoholism didn't seem to matter anymore. Certainly without alcoholism in my home I didn't need to expend energy in detachment any longer. Right? Here is where I stumbled for a while in the fog.

I must provide a disclaimer at this point because I am not trained in psychology nor am I equipped to give advice to someone in deep grieving. I can only record my own thoughts and experience for your consideration. This is about my own experience. Take what you like and leave the rest.

Alcoholism's effect on me did not die with my wife. Loosing the most important person in my life hit me hard. I fell down. Every fiber in my body hurt with a pain I'd never known before. I couldn't eat, sleep, or function any longer. An event so unimaginably tragic overwhelmed me with a crippling hold.

Dealing with the pain and trouble my wife's death created took me to a dark, lonely place. I felt like my wife's death had "happened to me" without my consent or control. Self-pity and martyrdom set in with kind of a predictable cycle. I had forgotten to consider the part of my grieving that is in my control vs. the part I have no control over. In some ways I had let alcoholism draw me back into the ping pong game. I was reacting to each new volley of pain.

Of course to pretend I can control my grieving process is nonsense. But, and this is where the fine line lies, I do not have to be the victim or martyr in my grieving process. On the one hand I must face the raw, awful, unpredictable pain my loss has brought me. On the other I must recognize when my own thinking is needlessly increasing my trouble. For me this happens when I become comfortable with the pain - or when the pain starts to feel normal, or even welcome (as strange as it sounds the pain of grief can at times feel like a deserved punishment that pairs with my own misguided feelings of guilt).

One method I've learned that helps me with this comes from a reading in a relatively new Al-Anon book on grieving. In it a writer suggests the idea of grieving in 15 minute increments. The idea is for me to grieve fully and hurt completely, but every now and then I come up for air and make a conscious decision about whether I need another 15 minutes to grieve or not. This may go on for hours. But eventually, when I sense it is time, I can redirect my focus on more positive memories. I can find something to be grateful for. Or perhaps it is enough to simply quit crying for a while and tend to my body's welfare. And in that moment I can tell alcoholism I have set the paddle down. I'm not playing anymore. I am neither a victim nor a martyr. I will survive.