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Comment by Hilary Christene on November 27, 2015 at 11:40am

"I am only relating my own experience because I feel like I had been lied to about grief. I think society gives a timeline and then judges a person as dysfunctional. I guess I'm here to dispel that notion as false. This is a journey like no other and no one, no one who hasn't delivered their love to deaths door can understand it. It's just the way it is."

The expectation held in this culture that there's an "on" to be "moving to" is horrifying. I feel some protection here where it's acknowledged that the physical, living companionship of this particular other person was everything, the whole point of all this.

I'm strong. I can handle "lonely." This is not "lonely." Morgan you mention about the brain trying to find a way to deal with the problem and it's so true. I'm scrambling around on the inside of my mind looking for any way out of the fact of D's absence. I'm here when I should no longer be; it's like some hellish error. I expect I'll keep trying to make sense of it, compulsively.

I broke down in front of a patient. Thank God, thank God, she understood. She lost her son to suicide three years ago. She held me in her arms and explained "you have no control over this..." and I thought, geez. She is super at this mom thing. I bet her son really, really loved having a mom like this.

I let my boss know that rationally, I'm not about crying on my patients but that this is bigger than me.

My grief is as large as my love for D. I have a spiritual outlook on all this which surely is helping me but at the same time the yearning for him is unrelenting and I miss him more every day.

Comment by morgan on November 27, 2015 at 1:33am

Laurie,
I can so feel everything that you are describing because not only is it so hard to feel so disconnected, but we all know that this is not a short path or that any of us want to walk this path and yet here we are forced to try and undstand what has just happened to us. People who we have known us throughout our lives will try to be helpful but all of this will change. As a friend who had had several losses told me at the very beginning of my personal journey " we have been catapulted into a different universe".. ...what I have come to find out on my own is there is no going back. You think that somehow your brain will pick up on the depth of the problems and will make it right. That only partially happens as we sort through the debris and try to find pieces you can string together. To even make it to the supermarket and buy food and try to get out the door without crying is a Herculean task. That alone will be a personal victory. Just trying to shop for food was a major event for me. Each of us have the triggers and you'll find they are many.

Unfortunately sleeping will be one of the hardest ones. After two years and ten months I have finally succumbed to taking Tylenol pm to sleep. I have tried to tough this out by not taking drugs of any kind but I think i am at a point where the sleep patterns have not returned in any real shape or form so I am trying to force them. Of course here it is 1:00am and I am still going strong. Then when I take the pill I sleep for 12 hours or more. I can't win.

And you are right about walking around in a daze. Not to mention that if you don't cry it physically hurts. Boy do I get that. I am still having unbelievable crying breakdowns. Different tones, deeper explosive sobbing spaced further apart but I can feel them coming now. Before they would just happen whenever. Now I feel them coming and there is nothing that I can do to stop them and they go on until they are done. No control whatsoever. I had one at the sewing center the other day and I literally stumbled out to the car and cried so hard a man must have heard me (and I was in a somewhat empty lot) and came to ask me if I needed a doctor. All I could do was nod my head no.

These kinds of events are heartbreaking for all of us. We are all undergoing the same kinds of things hourly. The best we can do is come here and spill our guts. At least here we know that no one here will sing platitudes to us about how time will heal or he wouldn't have wanted us to suffer or any of the other thousand reasons why our grief should be short lived or hidden. Here we can tell each other how damn hard this is and how we are trying to live but every little something keeps throwing us to the ground.

Today was defeating for me. Another day of nothingness. Before just recently I kept trying to beat this. I kept reaching out. Now I am not. I am sitting with the silence. I have no idea how long I am going to do this but I have quit trying. I am simply doing now. There is no reaching out for another way. I think I have figured out this is as good as it gets. I think. I will sit with it until I decide, but the beating I have taken and I have given to others has been long and arduous. I need to decide what this is worth.

Please know I am hopeful that others have a better time coping with loss. I am only relating my own experience because I feel like I had been lied to about grief. I think society gives a timeline and then judges a person as dysfunctional. I guess I'm here to
dispel that notion as false. This is a journey like no other and no one, no one who hasn't delivered their love to deaths door can understand it. It's just the way it is.