This morning, I woke up with a very heavy heart. Losing Tim made me realize that we truly only have the present. It made me want to hug people tighter, look people in their eyes when they talk to me, listen to people with my heart and just love them harder. Since Tim’s passing, I’ve encountered three more deaths of people that I love dearly. People that were staples in my life. People that I love so very much.
When we lost Travis 10 years ago, I didn’t know how to grieve. I didn’t know what to do with my emotions, so I chose to just not. I pushed everything down, took care of business and didn’t allow myself the space to feel. Since then, I’ve learned that we MUST grieve. If we don’t, it can and will do a number on our bodies. So, when Tim passed, I engulfed myself into the grief experience. I’ve paid attention to my feelings; I honor them and him. I’m actively in multiple forms of therapy. I cry when I want and scream when I need. Here we are 13 months, to the day and I’m STILL learning how to grieve the loss of my husband. It truly is a full mind, body, and soul healing process.
So where is the space to grieve the others? How do I find the capacity to continue to grieve my husband but now three additional people? June 2023, December 2023, March 2024, July 2024... where do I breathe? When do I catch my breath? How am I supposed to grieve and honor each of these amazing souls when I’m still grieving my husband?
Nobody likes to hear the word death. It comes with heavy emotions and feelings of discomfort. Nowadays, one small word sends me into full anxiety mode. Death causes my heart to race, my palms to sweat, my eyes to cry, my hands to shake... all from one single word. I have some great tools in my therapy tool box on how to address my anxiety and discomfort but I’m not sure my tool box is big enough for ALL this loss.
Dying is inevitable, I know this. As I get older, it becomes more and more of a reality. A reality that I could probably handle, given one at a time. But not today. Today I woke up with tears in my eyes, tightness in my chest, flipping through photos wishing they were all still here.
Ironically, I have organized a peer lead support group. I hold space for other grievers and we offer support and talk about the variations of grief and how we are handling it. I’ve educated myself in many ways on what grief can do to the mind and body if not processed. I don’t want to be that girl that doesn’t process. I don’t want to go back to stuffing and avoiding. It all comes out eventually and it’s not pretty. But I’m really stuck on HOW to do this now. How to grieve the loss of so many in such a short time, when the grief of my husband is so large, and the additional losses are big too.
I’m also aware that I’m not the only person feeling this way (even though some days I do feel like I’m on an island all by myself). Many others have dealt with multiple forms of loss at a time. The question is, how do you properly grieve all the loss? How do you live in the present when your heart is so heavy? There is no timeline on grief, we know this. Only we can make that decision for ourselves. Only we can do the work to feel better. However, lately it just feels like constant inner work and certainly no play. It feels like being on the gravitron at the carnival and screaming to be let off. The ride doesn’t stop just because you’re scared and don’t want to do it anymore. The ride continues, until you are no longer scared anymore.
If I were to look into the future, I foresee me doing a lot of screaming. A lot of screaming until I can somehow, someway, figure this all out.
In the meantime, make that phone call, send that text, take the pictures, hug a little tighter, find one thing to be grateful for each day, and try try try to be present. For one day, I’ll we will have are memories.
I’m a constant work in progress and majority of the time I don’t know what the hell I’m doing but this morning, I lit a candle and asked the universe to please be kind and not make me put another picture on this wall for awhile.
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