The Long Night…….

One of the hardest things about grief is that it shows up when you most don’t want it to. Mine shows up everyday when I lay down to go to sleep. It’s like it is just waiting there for me. Most days I try to ignore it, but I can’t any longer. So I have done something very hard. I got rid of all the distractions of life so that I could face this head on. It’s odd how easy it was to let life distract me from the thing I needed to focus on the most. Okay not the most but more than what I was. I just figured I would walk around with this hole in my heart forever. I mean that’s what people tell you. “You’ll never get over it.” “Time doesn’t really help.” and my favorite, “You just have to get use to the new normal.” All of these things are the proper things to say to someone. Because they are all true, yet I am not your average person. I am different, I am me. And I’m not looking to get over it, I know time isn’t going to help, and the new normal is the same as the day before he died, it’s just him not being physically here. I am not in denial, I know that my husband died and that he is not going to come back. I have been through all of the steps of grief. Yes even my counselor agrees with that. Yet I feel like I am in limbo of the last two. Depression and Acceptance.

I tried to fight the depression by dating. Big, huge mistake, because I was not ready to deal with someone else’s emotions or even lack of them. I dated three guys all completely different from each other. The first was just a train wreck and I came off as a very needy person. Someone I just don’t want to be. Cool thing is that guy is one of the greatest guys around. We are still friends and he just got what I was going through. One date was all but a lifetime of friendship was gained. He helped me grow.

The second one caught me by surprise and I fell madly in love. Real love, but he was the wrong one. He is your classic emotionally unavailable heart throb that every woman needs once in her life. Why? Because the sex is great, and when you are lonely and just need someone to hold you on the worst nights of your life, he was the the guy that did that. He will always be the guy that fills every woman’s dreams. Yes the kind that no woman wants to admit that she has. He was that, and I tried not to fall in love with him, but I did. We broke up in a terrible way the first time him breaking my heart. Only to a month later while I was dating the third realize that he loved me too. That was a very difficult time because the one man that I longed to hear say that he loved me, finally said that and more. Yet he was filled with conflict and his emotional mess could not become mine. And that breakup was the most crushed I have ever been over a guy. More to come on this one……..

The third was the perfect on paper but I just couldn’t fall the way I want to. I have learned by talking to many women some who marry young believe that they did not marry their soulmate. They married the guy that was going to be the good father, the strong provider, and the one that would always be rock solid. Ed was that for me. We were happy, but never in my life had I ever experienced a love like number two. I was blissfully unaware that such passion was real, believing that it only existed in movies. Yes I loved Ed deeply, more than anything, I was happy and we had a wonderful marriage one that I would have never left, or even felt unfulfilled in. The third man was a safe reliable wonderful man, it would have ended up a safe stable marriage. But after knowing what passionate love is like, it was like, I just realize that if I can’t have it all, then I just don’t want it. Not that I didn’t love or couldn’t love, it just feels like a half life. I refuse to live a half life.

I know what you are all thinking, is she crazy!! It hasn’t even been a year yet! Yes at times even I thought this. But I think people need to know what goes on in a woman’s head while she is grieving. If you think it is confusing to just ask her what she wants to eat, ask her what she is going to do with her life once the man that she loved and promised to love forever died. That head and heart are just a complete mess. She is scared that she is old and no one would ever want her again. She is afraid to be alone because she just doesn’t know how to be. Then a million decisions that have to be made are overwhelming. I’m not talking about funeral I’m talking life decisions. Then to add to the top of that the fact that one should not make life altering decisions in the first year after a loss and the confusion, all of the sudden makes sense. Compile that with a million people that want to come up and tell her exactly what she needs to do and how she should do it. When all that she is consumed with is who in the hell would love her again. Then ask her how she is doing with her grief. I am telling you grief is the easiest thing to put off. This may not be every woman, but it is me.

For the last year I have walked around the actual grief of losing Ed. I stay busy, I work two jobs and sometimes more just to say busy. I run everyday and fill my weekends with a ton of to do lists so that I don’t have to confront that grief face to face. And the more distractions that I could find the better. Yet here I am one month and two days from the year anniversary and the grief that I need to be processing is still waiting there for me.

I went back to the second guy, after all he said he loved me that he needed me, that no one would ever love me the way he did. Yet after a while we were right back to him not wanting a relationship and me feeling like I was just a walking heartache. Funny the very thing that I didn’t want to be. I didn’t want to be that sad widow walking around just broken. But as long as I couldn’t be loved the way I loved, I would walk around exactly like that. Truth is, it is impossible to love a broken person because they don’t even love themselves. And even though the passion between him and I is so intense, it just can’t be lasting. So this morning I ended it all because there is something I need to do. I need to love me. I now know what kind of love I want and what I deserve. I need to be unbroken, I need to face the grief. Which is confusing for me as I feel like I have gone through all the stages of grief, and I have. But what I haven’t done, is face the depression that comes with the loss. The feeling sad, the actual weeping of the soul so that it can start to heal. I wanted to skip that, but I can’t. I must face it and until I do, it will always be waiting there for me.

Here is how I know that this is the right path. As much as I love number two and would throw myself in his arms just to be held by him again, after letting go, that grip of a constant heartache started lifting off. He doesn’t want to be loved, and once I stopped trying love him enough, the sting of rejection was let go too. You can’t love someone who doesn’t want to be loved. He has been walking around his own grief from whatever loss he had suffered, and I can’t love him through that.

So now I am exactly where I need to be. Facing the longest night of my life. Yet I’m facing depression, grief and loss, with a power that I didn’t expect to have. Because I know what mad passionate love feels like, and somewhere on the other side of depression, grief and loss, that love is waiting. So here I go let the work begin.