Your Other Half

In life, we often describe our partner as our ‘other half.’ “I want you to meet my other half.” “We’re getting together after work – bring your other half.”  Some of us may even have been referred to as ‘my better half;’ I know I certainly was on a regular basis! This feeling of finding your other half, the person with whom you experience wholeness and a sense of completion permeates not only our own stories but is reflected to us in literature, pop culture like movies and TV (“You complete me!”) and archetypal stories like myths and fairy tales (in Greek mythology, humans were originally ‘double’ beings which Zeus split in half, condemning us to search forever for our lost ‘other half.’) So perhaps it’s no wonder that in losing a life partner, so many of us feel as if we’ve lost half of ourselves. 

What brings us together when we find that person with whom we want to spend our life is truly a capital ‘M’ Mystery. Psychology, biology, theology, anthropology and more – all have tried to plumb the depths of human attraction and yet still produce only partial answers. Is it chemical, societal, psychological? Are we drawn by a mysterious force or primed from childhood to seek a certain kind of partner? Is it pheromones or an unconscious recognition of a healthy genetic match? Is it destiny, ordained by God and written in the stars, or might we fall and stay deeply in love with a hundred different souls if we simply encountered them at the right time and place?  The words of the song ‘Some Enchanted Evening’ perhaps say it best “Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons. Wise men never try.”  

Part of the sense of wholeness we seek can arise from finding a partner whose qualities and characteristics seem to complement ours and fit so well. It may be a cliché to say that ‘opposites attract’ (of course they can also drive you crazy!) but we all know many couples for whom this is true. The shy introvert chooses an outgoing partner who makes social situations a breeze. The free spirit youngest child picks a responsible, nurturing oldest child – one keeps the joy and fun alive and the other one makes sure the mortgage gets paid.   

Losing your partner can feel like losing half of yourself not only because of the grief in your heart, but because of the sudden disappearance of the balance that being with someone who complements you can bring. In your grief, you struggle to understand exactly what you’ve lost and discover that it’s not only the person you loved, but it’s the role they played in your life and in your psyche, the healing and wholeness that being with them brought, the sides of yourself that grew in response to the complementary sides of them. And you struggle to find and reclaim that connection. 

I discovered after Peter died that I took pleasure in doing the things he used to do, the way he did them. At first, I believed it was simply because doing them made me feel closer to him. He was an incredibly meticulous and patient man who did chores to perfection, whether it was sweeping the cottage deck free of pine needles or cutting 200 one-inch cubes of turnip for Thanksgiving dinner. So early on, my first task at the cottage was to sweep every single pine needle from the deck, spending an hour in quiet communion with my darling. Later on, I commandeered the holiday veggies and produced my own 200 cubes of turnip and perfectly peeled potatoes. 

He was incredibly circumspect, always thinking before he spoke and asking himself ‘What is the intended goal here?’ and well, I’m not naturally wired that way. But realizing that I had lost my ‘chamber of sober second thought’ in our family forced me to become more circumspect. Parenting our girls on my own, I always stop to ask myself what he would think or do, conferring with him in my heart and trying to bring his special brand of tenderness and patience to our girls.

I only realized after some time that these tasks made me feel close to Peter because I was trying to take into myself the qualities he embodied. In a way I was trying to incarnate him by doing what he did and being like he was. I was trying to restore the balance that had been upended by him dying, to reincarnate the balance I felt when our two ‘halves’ were together.  

Understanding what was lost and trying to seek it within yourself can be an important task on the road to finding your own balance and wholeness after losing a spouse. It doesn’t mean that you change into them or lose your own sense of self. Oddly, I felt more like myself when trying to embody Peter’s qualities in myself, as if restoring what was lost freed me to be reclaim the person I had been in loving partnership with my ‘other’ half. 

Both psychology and religion envision life as a journey toward wholeness. Whether nature or nurture, we begin our lives with certain innate characteristics, qualities, preferences, and aptitudes. Through a lifetime of encounters with others, and most especially with an intimate partner, we develop sides of ourselves that we would never have grown without them. Curiously, even death cannot halt this process. 

Later on, as grief begins to loosen its grip, we take stock of the person we were, we are and are becoming. Qualities inherent, those nurtured in loving partnership or taken into our hearts after our loss, and new strengths and sides of ourselves grown by grief – all are cause for reflection as we move toward our own wholeness, forever changed by loving and having been loved.