(My) face of grief

This picture is from about 7 months after Joe died. Every now and then I come across it and I find it hard to stop looking at it.

It brings me back to days when I sat alone and stared for hours, just like this. Not able to move, not able to make any sense of the thoughts in my head. Extreme pain and sadness and confusion. I see it on my face, even though I am looking away.

I think I find myself staring at this girl because I want to talk to her. I know she would understand everything I had to say. I know she could tell me things that would make sense to me. She lost what I lost. My struggles are her struggles. And together we continue on. Fighting every day to make sense. Of things that will never make sense.

I am checking out of this blog for a while. I know people check in on me and it is much appreciated. I am going through a hard time. Alyssa is going through a hard time. I just feel like all I can do right now is sit and stare....try to figure stuff out. How to get Alyssa through her pain and how to take all three of us to the next level that must (please God) be waiting for us.

Peace out people. Be kind to each other.

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Valentine's Day is a stupid holiday, everybody knows that. But for some reason this year I want to take off my shoe and throw it through the tv whenever I see two adults on a commercial acting like...all lovey and stuff. I refrain from swearing at them for the sake of my children's innocent ears. Don't mistake my hostility for jealousy, it's more I feel like its a big farce.

Valentine's Day....... you can suck it.

I want a day that's the opposite of Valentine's Day. We'll call it....Eviltine's Day. On this day you get to send a card to the person you hate most. Tell them why you hate them. Actually, send lots of little folded-up cutesy cards......to everyone who pisses you off. Make those little candy hearts say things like "You're an idiot" and "f-you" and "dirtbag". Decorate your house in black and throw darts at a big scroll of marriage vows. Take all your plates to the basement and throw them against the wall, one by one. Ahhh yes.....................Eviltine's Day. I like it!

Why does this sound so much better, more fun to me than a day to spread the love? After all my love love love posts, what do I feel? I feel like........

Love.......... you can suck it too.
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(Big smile after writing this post. Happy Valentine's Day!)

Black

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When I started this blog I chose black as the background for a few reasons. Obvious ones, like because that's how I felt, my existence was dark.....everything was unknown.....the future seemed overwhelming.....etc. Black of course was the perfect choice. I had this thought though, that as my grief progressed the shade would get lighter and lighter, until eventually....no more black. Back to white...back to color....back to life. It would be kind of a gauge, revealing how I was feeling and making my way through the process.

In over 2 years I have never felt like the time was right to lighten the color. I've thought about it at times.... maybe I could change it to a dark gray or just something ever-so-slight.... Nope. It never felt right.

I have wondered sometimes why I have not felt like I could move that gauge one step closer to "normal".

Absolutely my life has gradually been repairing over the last 2 1/2 years, a process that is still very much evolving. I am a different person than I was 3 years ago, not because I wanted to change, but because at times you have to evolve and adapt or else be defeated by life's hardships. My core is the same though, and my deep desire to live a beautiful and meaningful life (and all that means to me) has never completely left me. I struggled with it early on ("Can I still do this?"......"Is this still possible?") but the fact that I still wanted to do it, still thought about it, was evidence that it still existed inside me. Shattered into a million pieces, but thankfully, still present. It was proof that I really didn't die along with Joe that day (a feeling that I felt for a long time- dead inside but still painfully alive), that I was a person whole and separate from him.

The drive in me to someday live happily again is what has guided me more than anything else through this struggle. It has guided me both through the mundane aspects of life (the day-to-day) and also the deep-thinking type of deliberate choices I make for my life and family as a whole. Lots of times it was just going through the motions....doing stuff just to do stuff. Smiling because it felt the same as anything else my face could do...going places not because I wanted to but just because something was on the schedule. Literally going through the motions. As time passed I started to feel again, be more present and things started to feel less painful or less meaningless. But did things feel "better" enough to change the color here from black to gray?........No.
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Why?

The agony of being a widow with young children is something I would never wish on anyone. It is an excrutiatingly painful existence at times. This is still real and present in my life. I don't clean the bathroom mirror without remembering when my husband hung it....or walk up my front stairs without picturing him building them. The reminders of him being with me are everywhere. I don't watch a movie without tearing up at the sight of a daughter dancing with her father at her wedding; or a son standing shoulder to shoulder with his father. My daughter still cries tears in her sleep at night saying things like "No! Daddy! I miss daddy!" and the endless agony and helplessness I feel when I hear her unconscious pleas still make my body go limp. All of it hurts. Just as much now as the day he died.

My father wrote once to me "I don't think I will ever get over Joe's death". My immediate reaction was- that absolutely must be false. Surely at some point we all would make some type of peace with this.....how could we go on and live and not get over it? I could not understand or accept that statement from him.
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However, as time passed, my father's words began to make sense to me. And I do not believe anymore that it was just his stubborn personality writing those words. They represent the same reason why I can't change the color here to anything other than black.

It is true that life goes on, that people persevere, that things change and that happiness reawakens at some point to most people after coping with death. But it is also true and possible that the pain of grief lives on simultaneously.

The pain that I feel when I think of what happened to Joe still cuts as deep as the day it happened. The feelings I feel when I think of him are as torturous and uncontrolling as they ever were. Nothing has changed in that respect. What has changed is that my life now is not constantly overshadowed by those feelings. I can do things for consecutive hours and not feel the pain. That is an achievement that was once measured in minutes, and has has yet to be measured in days.
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The grief is still there, painfully accessible in that it is always only a thought's distance away. Grief is part of me, but I don't live there anymore.

The color of this blog may always be black. That's ok. What happened to Joe will never cease to be a tragedy. I may never be able to wrap my husbands life up in a package of life lessons, the pain is too close to me. Yet I am thankful that others can learn from his life and live more fully because of him.

I don't think I will ever get over the death of this beautiful man and my beautiful life with him. Grief may always be a piece of my life for the rest of my days.

But I don't live there anymore.
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Love- Part V

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Based on my previous 4 posts in which I wrote about the love that Joe and I shared, it should be apparent what types of things are important to me in terms of a love relationship. I realize that not all relationships are the same and different things are important to different people. I in no way claim to be writing definitively what real love is or should be to all people, only what a real love is to me.

When I think about the topic of "love" at this point in my life I am pessimistic. I feel like I will not find someone TWICE IN A LIFETIME who will treat me the way I need to be treated in order to be happy. Someone who will respect me the way Joe did. Someone who will be so open with their feelings of love for me the way he was. Someone who was so outgoing and fun the way he was. Someone who will value time with his wife and children the way he did. Someone who will be tolerant of my intolerance with certain topics (disrespect, lying, talking trash about women, etc). Someone who wants a relationship that is not just mediocre. And the baggage! My God the baggage that someone would have to put up with in a relationship with me---the worry I have that people are going to drop dead at any second.....the desperate feelings I have when people are late, that they've been in an accident......the stress I feel every single time I say goodbye to my kids.....the constant fear that something will happen to me and my kids will have to endure another tragedy, which rips my heart to pieces....the ups and downs of my emotions still as I struggle with grief at times....the feeling of-what's the point to doing it all again when it could be lost in an instant-the knowledge of the pain and the risk that loving again means--am I even capable of loving fully now the way I loved before?.....all the STUFF that makes me who I am at this time in my life.

Ha ha, I just read that last paragraph and I laughed out loud at how awful it sounds. Who is this person and how can I get away from her as soon as possible?!!
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I don't want that paragraph to seem like I don't think I am worthy of love. Despite all of the things I pointed out, I know that for everything about me that someone would have to "put up with" there is an equal or greater benefit in return in what I provide to any person I love.

The beautiful thing is that for all of my pessimism in love I feel, I do also feel hope. When Joe died people kept talking about "hope" and I did not know what they were telling me to hope for, I still don't really. There was NO HOPE in his death, because death is final. There is no hope on earth in death. But with love there is hope. At least I have that. Hope that at some point, whether it is tomorrow, or next year or in 5 years, that I am willing to love as fiercely and openly and meaningfully as I once did. With the knowledge of the pain of what it would feel like to lose it in an instant.

I hope and pray to find it in myself to be BRAVE with respect to love. As brave as I have been in other areas of my life.

Now, I realize that I may be jumping the gun to talk about all of this love stuff. That I need to take things one step at a time and see how it goes. I realize that. So, knowing all the things you know about me and how crazy I am, if you are praying for me to be BRAVE, you should also pray for any man I date. He'll need those prayers, maybe more than me :-)
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