Grief

 

Time passes.  It gets better.  But every now and then I can still feel grief sneak up behind me and grab me by the neck and shake me a little bit.  I’m always surprised.

There are five very distinct steps in processing grief (some say 7….who needs that?).  I’ve done the five steps, heck, I’ve even done the seven steps of grief.  Denial, done it; anger, oh yeah, felt it; bargaining, me and God, we talked a lot; depression, yeah, got the t-shirt, it’s real; and finally, acceptance, which is sort of a moving target.

What nobody ever bothered to tell me is you occasionally have do-overs with the whole grief thing.  Hey moron, start at step one and do it again.  I feel myself going through all the steps when the grief monster manages to grab me and attempts to swallow me whole.

For me as the chief cook and caregiver, for my kids, Erin and Matt, we started the whole grieving process on April 4, 2005, after Marty’s first stroke.  We lost so much of Marty after the first stroke and even more eight months later after the 2^nd stroke. 

The brain damage from the strokes robbed us of who Marty had been, the strokes killed off too much of her.  Of course, we mourned, of course we walked the steps of grief.

Long term caring gives you a lot of time to work through the loss and grief, it also gives you a lot of time to grieve, to feel the grief, to see the brokenness of your cared for every day.  You get an up close real look at denial and anger and depression almost daily.  The cycle of mourning became a daily struggle, and she was still with us.

When Marty had her first stroke, a cerebral aneurysm, I lived in a state of denial for a long time.  Really, the denial kind of kept me from going crazy.  I would have cratered had I known what really lay in store for us. 

I did the anger thing on a regular basis, sometimes anger at others, often anger at myself for not doing enough.  I bargained and I know I went through bouts of depressions where everything felt so dark and sad and bitter it was hard to rejoice in the sunshine that occasionally graced us. 

When I finally got to the acceptance part, where I realized where we were and how our life must continue in our new normal, life got better.  Those other feelings were there, grief over the loss of what was, but eventually I came to understand this was our life and we needed to live it the best way we could.

The sadness, the feelings of loss become a part of your essence.  They become a part of you, but never your whole, just a part of whole that makes you unique.  As time goes on, as you work your way through the important parts of grieving, it doesn’t go away, it settles in to be a critical part of who you are and your journey. 

Hopefully, that permanent part of grief that becomes part of your DNA is not a feeling that defines you or rules your brain.  In my journey, it hasn’t gone away, it is simply diminished, it is part of my background like my deep west Texas accent.

I still think of Marty every day, some days that makes me sad, some days that makes me smile, most days I smile, but the loss, the loss that started all the way back in 2005 is still there, and on the whole, I can live with that.