When the Waves Crash

Grief is not predictable. It’s the oddest and the toughest thing one goes through. At first it is a challenge just to breathe most of us liken it to being in the ocean with waves pounding you during the worst storm ever. Then slowly, ever so slowly everything calms down. What happens next is the most unexpected thing, well it was for me anyways. I noticed about a month later that our lives began to have a pattern. Friday through Tuesday day everything went pretty normal, well as normal as you can be after a spouse passes away. From Tuesday evening through Thursday night life was extremely hard. That is where the waves of grief would once again pound the shit out of us. The kids felt it even, we just started hating Thursday completely. Why Thursday? Simple, it was the day we were use to him coming home. When he was alive it was the best day of the week, he came home and we couldn’t wait to see him. The knowing that there would never again be a race to the door to see him to get another embrace from him washed over us and so Thursday became the worst day of the week. As time has passed, Thursdays became Thursdays again, but now we come to a date the 25th of every month. It is now the calendar that we watch as the year anniversary creeps closer and closer to us. It seems like now instead of a few days per week we are now down to one week out of the month. It starts around the 21st and really crashes down on us by the 25th. I wish I could explain what this is like for us, all I know is that it happens. The waves just have gotten less.

Notice I say less, not smaller, the grief still hits very hard and it is still hell. I had someone ask me the other day how I was. Okay it was my counselor but it wasn’t the usual “How are you doing?”, it was the real how are you doing. For the first time in a very long time it felt real when he asked. And I said I was doing okay, and I am, but I haven’t been great. I thought I was, but something happened that completely showed me I wasn’t. I learned very quickly that I wasn’t in the place I thought I was, and I was kidding myself to think I was. What I had been doing was finding anything and everything to distract myself from dealing with Ed’s death. I had told myself that I had grieved enough, that I was honestly going through the process. Reality was, I wasn’t. I went until I was so exhausted that I could no longer fight back the tears and then I would spend hours crying in my shower or in my room. Then I would tell myself that, that was me processing everything and grieving. It’s not, I knew it wasn’t, and it wasn’t until I said it out loud to my best friend that it was true. What I had been doing was wrong, and it is time to fix it.

It is time for me to get through the hard days of grief. My counselor said most people don’t even start really grieving until the second year. At first I thought well that’s not me, but reality is that is me. I’m just three short months away from the one year anniversary and I am just now realizing that I have done nothing but press the fast forward button on life and tried to skip steps. My friends I am telling you, there is no fast forward button. No matter how far into the future I look, I cannot move forward without going through the grieving process. I have taken steps but from what I can tell only two, and some days I think I step backwards. It is not a race to get done, it is a journey to heal, and I needed help doing that. I thank God for my counselor. If you don’t have one, get one. I am no where near the mountain top here, but I am finally ready to start my journey. Life will be good again, I just have to stop skipping steps. One day the waves will be smaller and they will no longer drown me. They will never stop, that is the reality. But they will get smaller.

-Dee