So I found myself headed back to the GriefShare support group last Monday.  I was actually considering stopping my attending. Not because anything has been solved or fixed or resolved, but because things had settled down, and my problems have moved onto other issues.  Then on a random scroll down Facebook lane, I see a posting from Jen's sister, Dallas, that her oldest daughter, Brooklyn, had been killed in Omaha a few days past. This tore me up. This family has endured more pain than any family should have to endure.  And if I’m being completely honest, I didn’t necessarily know Brooklyn super well, but in my twisted, fucked up, Multiverse reality, there is a version of reality where she would be my niece as well.

So I went back to GriefShare to help process these emotions. There is a new gal there that had recently lost her husband and after the video and everybody’s talking, she asked me what my story was. There had been a couple hints here and there that I was dealing with something that was old. So I briefly told the story about Brooklyn’s death, but then deeper down, how it is really just a continuation of Jennifer‘s accident 36 years ago.  For some reason, she saw it, my story, so differently than everyone else.  She was immediately able to go down the path of, "You didn’t just lose a loved one, you lost your life too."  All the secondary losses, the hopes, the dreams, the plans, the potential, ripped away without ever having a say in the matter.  That is the first person, in the hundreds that I have talked to about Jen’s death, that has been able to make that connection immediately. Yes, we all lose loved ones.  I attended six funerals of friends alone before I was 20 years old.  But only one of them ever completely derailed me.  And others, perhaps even most people, have stumbled upon the fact that there were secondary losses.  I intellectually know that it happens, I have even documented their existence in some of my past writings, but this lady was the first person to ever see it immediately as, I lost my plans for life too, and not just a close friend.  It is strange to say that it is validating, but for once somebody heard about the length of time I have been suffering and could immediately identify the issue.  I felt seen.  For the first time in 36 years, I didn’t see myself as completely batshit crazy, and I didn’t even know that that mattered.

Now I’m left scratching my head, wondering, what do I do with it? Is it enough? What is my next step? Is it even possible to just pick up the pieces and craft a life from here on out? Why did it matter?  And even as I ruminate on it more, I am lead down a path of asking what am I actually grieving all these years?  Is it really Jennifer, someone that I loved, or am I actually that much of a selfish asshole that has actually been throwing a tantrum over my losses, cloaked in the loss of a loved one?  Maybe (hopefully) it is both...I don't really want to come to the conclusion that it is just a case of a selfish toddler.  But it is definitely a near term additional layer of identity crisis.