Frederick Marx > Quotes

“I no longer have a deeply trusted, patient and abiding life partner to share all comments and observations about life’s passing parade. I don’t have her to share my confidences. There is nothing more precious than that. That deep sense of home in another person. Gone.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“greater world, and valued those qualities at home in our daily interaction and conversation, the very same attributes left me cold in the arousal department. She was physically striking and had an amazing, sexy body, but her choices in clothes, hairstyle, and bedroom demeanor were chemically ineffective for me.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Everybody always says, “Now she’s at peace. Now she’s no longer suffering, in pain.” I didn’t feel any of that. What I felt was an immediate connection back to the life we shared for so many years. A life of tranquility, peace, and ease. With her there not breathing beside me I felt safe and comforted, our relationship restored.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“After Tracy died, almost every day , often many times a day, I was asked, “How are you?” I decided I had to stop answering. The question is well meant but meaningless. It’s impossible to answer partly because I never know the time frame in which it’s meant. “In this second? In this minute? For the last hour? Today? Since I last saw you?” Every answer could be different and the answers grow in complexity with ever-widening time frames.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“We live under the illusion that our individual suffering is unique. Yet the Buddha made very clear in his First Noble Truth that suffering is universal and absolute. Furthermore, we are interdependent. What you do affects me and vice versa. Who’s to say who healed whom when the grieving mother made her rounds? Yes, her grief was lessened when pooled with the grief of strangers she met. But how might she have helped them with their losses?”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“But more so I felt like even if it was all “real,” I was intruding on her experience. Does she want or need me to have these conversations with her now? This is an expression of my needs. Do I have to come first even now , in her death? Can’t I just leave her in peace? I didn’t attempt it again.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“If I can get to bed then I can make it. 11: 00, 10: 00, 9: 30… once it turns 8: 00 I feel “OK, I can go to bed now.” It matters less these days how early I get there just so I get there. Thank god I can usually fall asleep right away.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“So Tracy had my three primary relationship requisites covered. Handily. So sex? Was it a problem? Yes. Did it sink our beautiful marriage? Not even close.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“It’s true that lightness and joy have returned to my life. I attribute it mostly to my Zen practice and to my time in the monastery. Playfulness is back . I note it with gratitude.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“What’s less commonly observed is that, once tested, every relationship succeeds or fails not on how much “love” the partners have for each other but on how committed they are to working through their differences. Integrity and accountability count for much more in successful relationships than anything pertaining to passion or romance.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“I have no understanding why but I believe washing her was one of the most profound things I’ve done in my life. There must be a reason why so many religions insist on the practice. Obviously, sanitation and health. But aside from that? Maybe because it’s the final act of devotion. I know no other possible answer. In Jewish tradition, it’s considered the only act of giving/ kindness that expects no gift in return. Somehow it seems the perfect bookend with wedding. In a Zen wedding like ours, we bow to each other at the altar . Marriage should be a partnership based on deep mutual respect and equality. In death, we figuratively bow to our beloved again by cleaning the body. The greatest number of photographs I have of Tracy are from our wedding. They surround me now. They too are part of our time together. They too remind me of my final opportunity to love her body.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Now I discover that I can ride my bike past the Lake Merritt park benches we used to sit on without feeling twinges of pain. I can return from Grocery Outlet with items she would’ve enjoyed and feel warmth in that recognition. I can watch an episode of Colbert taking happy satisfaction in knowing she would’ve laughed too.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“I keep saying death doesn’t arrive with a Save the Date notice but now I’m wondering if that’s not true. If we really listen and observe closely maybe death does arrive “on schedule.” Tracy is certainly doing her own magnificent, accepting, generous part to welcome it. To have this kind of time to plan… it’s just so much the opposite of what everyone exclaims when they first receive such news—“ There is no time left!” Not true. There is plenty if we take it with acceptance, and don’t act in denial.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“The story of the mustard seed from the Buddha’s life sprang to mind. A mother lost her young son. She came to the Buddha and pleaded with him to bring him back to life. Other versions of the story say she pleaded to be relieved of her suffering. In any case, the Buddha said, “Yes, I can do that. But first you must bring me a mustard seed from a home where no one has faced a similar loss.” So the woman set out. She went from home to home, knocking on doors and inquiring. It seemed everywhere she went someone in each family had suffered a terrible loss… fathers, daughters, uncles, mothers, friends…Everyone knew the heartbreaking loss of someone beloved. She couldn’t find a soul who hadn’t experienced some devastating pain like hers. In this way she healed the pain from her own loss, and in keeping with the first scenario, realized that despite her great love, there was nothing unique enough about her son to merit his resurrection above all other beings.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Ever since I was a kid I loved the idea of portable homes; I had long romanticized RV travel. Somehow I convinced Tracy to do it.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“This morning she asked, “Why are all the little girls in the movie?” If there are a lot of little girls there, sounds like a good movie for her to be in.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“But with complete assurance, I can say that after she was gone, a different strange and beautiful thing happened in a slow, inexorable way. It seemed wherever I looked around at the lives of others they too had lost their beloveds.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Perhaps the hardest thing of all to see go in her is mental clarity. She has such a sharp and beautiful mind. Now when I’m talking with her half the time she nods out and is gone. Increasingly while talking she’ll say things that are complete non-sequiturs, coming out of her dream landscape. It’s hard to know when I should engage and follow up with “what?” and ask for explanations or what to just let go.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“I vow to embrace your family as my own.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“One friend wrote me three weeks after Tracy died. He was very concerned about me because I’m usually so diligent about responding to emails. He knew Tracy had died yet he practically insisted on hearing back from me. So I responded to ease his concern. That’s what close proximity to death and dying does for you— it forces you to become a caretaker of others completely removed from the process.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Call me Jewish, but I have an abiding belief that if you begin from a place grounded in the suffering that’s present for you, you’ll soon find yourself sharing belly laughs, making toasts, and rediscovering that as long as you can have evenings like this then maybe things aren’t so bad after all. I only know one direction— through the pain. There’s no sidestepping it.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“eventually she learned to ask me for hugs. Like everyone, she had expectations of what “normal” people do in a marriage. That included hugging and holding her with great frequency. I was neither raised that way nor inclined by instinct to do that.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Tracy is turning into a skeleton right before my eyes. Last night as we lay in bed talking I looked at her profile and it was like she was already dead, her skull hanging in a professor’s lecture hall. I can’t believe how much weight she’s already lost. It’s like the decomposition process can’t wait until after death, it’s getting a head start. The sight takes my breath away.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“I’d like to start a worldwide movement to implement practices of culturally appropriate Life Honoring Celebrations. Not to replace funerals but to augment them. Personally, I think it’s impractical at best and pointless at worst to sing somebody’s praises when they’re dead. Perhaps saying lovely things about them at funerals helps us mourn. Saying the same things to them while alive may give us a jumpstart on that mourning. But why not use their dying as an opportunity to grow ourselves, to bring us into closer proximity with the reality of death, to face our fears and step willfully into our deepest hearts to speak the truth of what someone means to us? Why not tell them when they’re alive? Why not let them see some of the difference they made in the world around them? Even the most troubled and maligned person usually has positively impacted somebody. No matter how difficult anyone’s life has been they usually create some ripples of positive change. And I believe that every person longs to know that. We long to see it. To know that our existence does not all come to naught in the end. That efforts large and small have impacts seen and unseen. It serves each of us to have tangible proof of this before we pass. Life Honoring Celebrations should be every human’s birthright. Thank goodness Tracy got to receive hers. Just in time.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“It must be immeasurably difficult for the nurses and staff in the oncology ward. They tend so ably, often for such long periods, to their beloved patients, only to see them suddenly disappear with a death sentence and, probably more often that not, no final goodbye.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Her presence is transforming for me now. It still feels more remote than I would like, but when she arises in my thoughts it’s the love and appreciation for her that arises most with them, not the feeling of loss. I’m choosing to remember her now in a different way.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“The biggest challenge for me was Tracy’s: “I vow to embrace your family as my own.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Like many an introvert I suppose, she was happy knowing I was near but she didn’t necessarily need interaction. After the first month of my two -month trip to Australia in 2011, her emails became truncated. “Come home,” was the entirety of more than one. But once I was home she didn’t necessarily want to go out and do things, or have long intense discussions about the state of the world. She just wanted me close, near, but not necessarily physically adjacent to her. She breathed deeper and felt more secure, just knowing I was in my office in the other room, that she could come in for a hug or a brief conversation,”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Anyone who says anything other than “life isn’t fair” in response to those searing “Why her? Why now?” questions are themselves being unfair. Life is unfair. Painfully so. That’s all I could bring myself to say to those who themselves were grieving Tracy’s death. The moment anyone reaches for deeper explanations, whether arrived at through religion, culture, or philosophy, they do a disservice to those grieving.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer

“Read Me” by Naomi Shihab Nye. Watch us humans as we enter our rooms, remove our shoes and watches, and stretch out on the bed with a single good book. It’s the honey of the mind time. Lights shine through our little jars.”
― Frederick Marx, At Death Do Us Part: A Grieving Widower Heals After Losing his Wife to Breast Cancer