"Mostly it is loss which teaches us about the worth of things."
—Arthur Schopenhauer
Well, it's June 14th again. Three full years have moved passed now since Eric passed away. Plenty has changed and happened, and yet there are still moments where I wonder if I have moved forward at all. I have never really shared that he had a heart attack while going through alcohol withdrawals, unless its been in a face to face conversation. I mention it now only to note that he had been very sick at the end, and there was a lot of loss and heartache already engulfing my life. As well as others who loved him. His brothers, his family, his friends. So the time of loss is really blurred into closer to 4 or 5 it seems. Say what you will about alcoholism and what you believe it to be. I know it to be a beast of a disease. I shared my husband and best friend with this beast and lost every battle against it, and was left holding very little when it was said and done. You can fight, pray, beg, detach, yell, hug, walk out, or go on lock down to make it stop. But all of those efforts feel like throwing balloons at a brick wall. It is not an easy thing to surrender your life over to circumstances that you have very little say so in, but I see now that is not really what was happening.
The reality is our fight with this was for a short period of time in comparison to what some people experience, and over the years I find myself being more grateful for that than I ever expected. I know now that I had wild, beautiful, talented, and loving Eric most. You just always think you are going to have more time. I think this is true no matter what the case is. Whether it is sudden, or there are months and years of illness. Will there really ever be a time where we feel we said all we wanted to? I think we believe we can lessen the blow of a loss by avoiding, preparing, or working through it. That if we work hard enough, or are good enough than we will never have to truly experience it. This is far from the truth. I have also learned that as painful, and confusing, and devastating as loss can be, it can also be a filled with lessons that transform. That bring you back to truth. And whether we want to embrace it—it is an inevitable reality. So I finally decided that trying to fight or hope to never walk through it was a wasted effort. The past few weeks I have been anticipating this year mark coming, and have been thinking back on the last three years. I have written plenty about grief since 2010 and have shared my days with it whether I wanted to or not. But this year it has felt less like a roommate, and more like that honest friend that stops in from time to time. So it feels like it might be time to believe I am past my grieving. There is a hesitation I have when I say that because I think it might imply that I am no longer affected by that loss or miss him or love him. This misunderstanding of what grief really is can be the reason we get stunted by loss, and allow it to become a hindrance in living rather than what it can ultimately be. Grieving is the time after a dramatic loss where we are sick and rebuilding ourselves back, not something that I believe we are meant to stay in forever. So this year, I felt strongly that I wanted to share my experience with what grief actually was to me. One, because I don't think we talk about it enough. And two, because I feel I can actually speak to it with clarity. I hope it might make someone else feel less alone in their experience. Because I am hear to say that the space of grief is one of the loneliest places to ever exist.
I have made a list of a few of the major steps that I experienced. Not like the 5 stages of grief that we all know. But a few more personal things that are relative to those stages that you might not necessarily find with a quick Google search. Things maybe I would like to have known walking into this darkness.
1. There is a fog that rolls in and engulfs you on the other
side of losing someone. I can remember feeling it from the moment I got the
call. This fog is a God-given protective cloud. It is slightly numbing and
turns out, lasts for quite a while. It lifts ever so slightly with each passing
month or year, giving you time to readjust to normalcy. I would look back and
wonder how on Earth I did some of the things I actually did. But could barely
remember taking part in it. I still thank
God for that fog.
2. There was a fear that cleaning out closets, rearranging
furniture, and repainting rooms would cause me to forget Eric, or erase him
from my life. This is a real fear that our brains and hearts tell us is truth.
What I need to say is I had to actively force myself to move forward. We do not
naturally want to do this. I had a complete breakdown the night before my
friend was going to come over and help me repaint, but on the other side of any
guilt and fear was the beginning of healing. You can't see it, or even yet
begin to feel the healing. It is simply having faith that it will be there. I
also need to say that no amount of changed rooms, or bags of clothes given
away, or graduating through phases of grief can ever come close to erasing a
person from your life.
3. I don't remember eating for months. I am sure I did, but I am not sure what. It would be six months before I actually felt hungry again. This is a real, physical reaction to loss. I knew this, but what I didn't know was how hungry I would be. It was terrifying to realize my body had been starving, and I had been unaware for so long.
4. Another physical reaction is what felt like a huge rock in my throat that made it difficult to breathe. It was also literally painful. It took me a month or so to take notice that it was there and had yet to go away. I couldn't sigh deep enough to release it. It resembles that feeling you might get right before you need to cry. Only it never went away. It didn't go away for over a year.
3. I don't remember eating for months. I am sure I did, but I am not sure what. It would be six months before I actually felt hungry again. This is a real, physical reaction to loss. I knew this, but what I didn't know was how hungry I would be. It was terrifying to realize my body had been starving, and I had been unaware for so long.
4. Another physical reaction is what felt like a huge rock in my throat that made it difficult to breathe. It was also literally painful. It took me a month or so to take notice that it was there and had yet to go away. I couldn't sigh deep enough to release it. It resembles that feeling you might get right before you need to cry. Only it never went away. It didn't go away for over a year.
7. There were moments where I had such clarity about it all. At the risk of sounding a little crazy, I describe them as feeling like pinholes of peace from the other side. These moments would almost always be followed by an extreme low. This would even out over time, and after a while I figured out how to hang on to some of the clarity about it all during the low moments. This, for me, essentially came down to having faith in God, and belief that there is in fact a bigger purpose to all of this. These "pinhole" moments would end up being one of the biggest things carrying me over the lows.
I essentially went through the majority of my grieving
alone. There really wasn't anyone my age that I knew personally who had lost a
husband. The truth was, I was mad about that for a long time.
Mad I was so alone in it, mad I couldn't just be 30 like everyone else around
me. I missed a lot of the lighter things that one might be doing during this
time—whether it was dating, getting married, having families, or traveling. But
there was clearly another path that God had for me, so after three long years I
am 100% on board with what my life is, and has been. In the meantime, I had my
loving parents and sister, and family, and a whole crowd of friends to lean on.
And as beyond blessed as I am with amazing people who propped me up along the
way, very few could ever completely relate and tell me what to expect. I am
thankful for this fact; I would never want this for my loved ones. But this is
partly why I am sharing all of this, because I am able to. Here is what I want
to tell others, and maybe what I wish I could have told myself in the
beginning:
—You won't move past this quickly. You may feel the expectation
is to be strong and get back to life. You even think it will be within 6
months, a year. It won't be. By about six months or so, the majority of people
around no longer seem to have that on their mind when they think of you. This
is completely natural, but it is okay that it is still all you think of. Our
culture does not like to sit long in sadness or grief, so I think we force
ourselves further along then we need to be. It took me about six months to
finally rebel against any expectations—most I set on myself—and to allow my
days to be consumed by the loss. I finally didn't care that a normal 30 year
old would be doing this or that. I just couldn't. I needed to stay deep inside
the sadness, because I was.
—Don't go on a food cleanse when you are in the depths of a
snowy winter and in the middle of dark sadness. I say this sort of jokingly,
but I did it. Stuck inside a house alone, in the middle of a season I am not
fond of already, and limiting myself in things like food and caffeine was a
rookie mistake. The point is, don't make extreme decisions like that when you
are not 100%. It was this moment when I finally gave into the fact that I was
not actually doing okay. I was not 100%, I was probably not even 50%, and so I
let go of wanting to be further along. And decided to stop and take care of
myself. Even it that meant eating unhealthy comfort foods, or drinking lots and
lots of coffee because I was tired all of the time, or if it meant leaving my
to do list undone.
—Guilt is an ugly thing. It is almost always rooted in
untruth and is unproductive. Find a way to pull yourself out of the guilt and
not take it on as truth. It is technically one of the stages of grief, but in
my experience it showed up in many places. Guilt from things left unsaid, guilt
that I was changing the house too quickly, guilt that I was experiencing things
that he never would. It was there when I had to get a new car. It was there
when I found myself having a good time at a party. Some days it took me down,
other days I quickly handed it over God and chose to believe what I knew was
true.
—Some moments the reality of what has happened will hit you
like a freight train. Out of nowhere. And it can literally take your breath
away. In the beginning it will feel like too much, but the blows lessen over
time. 3 years later they still hit me from time to time, so I can’t speak to if
it ever stops. Just know that it is possible to breathe through those moments
and let them pass over you. I have found that when this happens I immediately
send him love. It helps.
—Don't be so hard yourself. Take time off early on. I was,
and am, terrible with this. I wish I could have told myself that I was going to
completely lose it just right after the first year. Complete melt down! And
still, even then, it didn't occur to me that I needed to step back a bit and
just take some time. I really thought that by the end of the first year I
should have been further along. However, I skipped the anger and depression,
and every time it came up, I pushed it back off. Thinking a week or so would
cover it. Well, it rolled in dark and heavy, just right about the time my
grandmother passed away. And a new year started. It had taken me a year and a half
to finally lose enough to be ready to let it all go. The best thing I can say
about that time is that it was a catalyst for throwing my hands completely in
the air and giving up any ounce of control I thought I had. To finally just
hand it back over to my maker. The transformation that resulted was one of the
biggest reasons I am where I am today.
"here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope
or mind can hide"
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)"
—e.e. cummings