Sometimes Sadness is Sanity

Sometimes sadness is sanity. Tears are the reasonable response. Quickness to shush, shame or fix them, can reveal resistance to wisdom.

Zack Eswine

It wasn’t until I suffered the unbearable that I realized how very true this is: Sometimes sadness IS sanity.

Deep grief is the price we pay for great love.

But it’s easy to mosey through most of a life before you’re forced to come face to face with this truth.

Tears are an appropriate and proportional response to loss. Despair is a reasonable reaction to tragic and sudden death. Horror is perfectly understandable when disease ravages the body and steals the soul of someone you love.

So often those who haven’t experienced it want those of us who have to hold the knowledge close like a secret in hopes they won’t have to acknowledge it is true.

But sooner or later death visits all of us.

And when we choose to stand with those who have, through no fault of their own and without giving permission to the universe, been thrust head first into the unrelenting reality of loss, we not only encourage them, we enrich ourselves.

Life is a tenuous and fragile gift.

The quicker we understand and embrace that the wiser and more compassionate we will be.

I’m Still Learning

It may seem odd to catalog things I’ve learned and am still learning as a result of child loss.

But it’s one way to take stock of where I started and how far I’ve come.

It’s also a reminder that some things are only learned through lived experience no matter how well another heart may describe the or yearn to share them.

❤ Melanie

The way things are supposed to be isn’t always the way things are.

I can experience joy and sorrow in the same breath.

The capacity to love and extend grace is enlarged by suffering if I submit to it and don’t fight it.

Never, never, NEVER underestimate the power of presence or texts or the random, “thinking of you” card.

Read the rest here: Things I’m Learning

Time, Child Loss and Major Life Changes

I remember thinking in the first days and weeks after Dominic’s accident that the world really needed to just STOP!

Sunrise, sunset, sunrise again felt like an abomination when my son was never coming home again. Shouldn’t the universe take notice that something was terribly, terribly wrong?

But it didn’t.

So life (even for me and my family) carried on.

Some days lingered like that last bit of honey in the jar-slipping slowly, ever so slowly into nights when my brain betrayed me by replaying all the ifs, whys and should haves as I tried in vain to get some sleep.

Others flew by and I found myself months further into a new year unable to remember how I got there and what I’d done for all that time.

My adult children married, moved, graduated, changed careers, and had their own child (another on the way!).

My mother joined Dominic in Heaven.

I got older.

We’ve celebrated birthdays, anniversaries and holidays.

Daily life isn’t as difficult (most days) as it was in the beginning but my husband’s retirement has forced me to figure things out once again.

I can’t blame it all on the fact we’ve buried a child. I’m pretty sure most couples struggle to find a new normal when one or both give up long term employment for staying home.

Suddenly my little house kingdom has been overtaken by my husband’s love of music in the background (I’m a work in silence kind of gal), his tendency to leave a trail of breadcrumbs (paper, gum wrappers, tools) wherever he goes and a completely different wake/sleep/work cycle than my own.

I have a plan for the next day the night before. He treats every morning as a blank slate and takes a few hours to decide what he will do. By the time he gets going, I’ve nearly finished my list.

Trying hard to accommodate these changes has laid bare one of the main ways I’ve managed my grief for almost eight years.

I can’t make time stop but I work hard to control it. I schedule and plan and execute the plan in an attempt to reorder life so I don’t feel as vulnerable to its vagaries.

It’s a vain attempt.

My husband’s sense of time is challenging my coping mechanism. Once again I need to figure out how to navigate a changing world, how to carry grief and carry on.

I’m working on it.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

❤

I Just Want to be Me!

I first shared this post four (!) years ago when I was approaching the four year milestone of Dominic’s leaving for Heaven.

By that time most folks who knew me when he died had relegated that part of my story to some ancient past that surely I was over by now. I’d met others who had no clue my heart skipped a beat on a regular basis because one of my children was buried in the churchyard down the road.

And even the closest ones-the ones I thought would understand forever-were sometimes impatient with my ongoing refusal to leave Dominic behind and be “healed” of my grief.

What I long for more than anything as the eighth anniversary of his departure draws near is simply this: Let me be me, whatever that looks like.

Don’t try to fit my journey into your mold.

❤ Melanie

Even in the very first hours after the news, my brain began instructing my heart, “Now, try to be brave.  Try not to disappoint people.  Try to say the right thing, do the right thing and be the example you should be.”

Whatever that meant.

Read the rest here: Can I Just Be Me?

The Importance of Agency in Grief

For those of you who follow the blog on a regular basis you’ll know that I managed to disable my laptop keyboard yesterday by spilling my coffee.

Well, I’m up and running again thanks to the marvels of technology and bluetooth.

And while that might be a tiny blip on the radar for some folks, it’s HUGE for me!

Here’s why: when my son was killed in a random, unpredictable, unanticipated accident nearly eight years ago, I was stripped of any illusion of control. My world-which up to that moment had been fairly predictable-was suddenly chaotic and very, very frightening.

I learned early on this journey that if I was going to survive, I’d have to exercise what psychologists call “agency” even if it was in something as simple as choosing for myself what I’d have for breakfast or finding a workaround for a broken keyboard.

Years ago in my undergraduate studies we read about a famous experiment in which fish were placed in tanks with invisible dividers. At first the fish would try to cross over to the other side of the tank.

But hitting the divider over and over, they soon learned to stop trying.

When the researchers removed the barrier they found the fish still stopped where it used to be and didn’t even try to reach the other side any more.

Traumatic loss can make a heart give up on everything-not just the one or two things that are truly outside our control.

It’s why so many of us bereaved parents find ourselves staring off into space, sitting in a chair, unable to move and do even the simplest tasks.

We aren’t crazy.

We are just conditioned to believe that no matter what we do, it won’t make any difference.

But I’m here to tell you-don’t give up and give in!

It’s absolutely true that we have so. much. less. control than we think we have. Seat belts, good health habits, careful living can’t protect against random.

But there are many ways we can still craft a world where love and light reign.

So today I’m celebrating the fact that while I can’t make the sun come up or protect my loved ones from every unpredictable horror I can choose to DO what I can to shape my sphere of influence and exercise control over some parts of my little world.

If you can’t do it all, do something.

And celebrate.

❤

Monday, Monday…

Well folks, I managed-after more than a decade of typing with laptop in my lap and coffee beside me-to spill it on my keyboard!

I am painstakingly pecking out this short post with my on-screen keyboard so no one worries.

I’ll be working on getting things back up and running (hopefully by tomorrow) .

Until then, be kind to one another.

❤

Melanie

I Really DO Get It…

I write a lot about what bereaved parents (me!) wish others knew or understood about child loss and this Valley we are walking.  And I am thankful for every person outside the child loss community who chooses to read and heed what I write.

But I want to take a minute to tell those of you who are not part of this awful “club” that I get it-I really do get it–when you need to put distance between yourself and me or other people walking a broken road.

We all love to think that life is a never-ending ascent toward bigger, better and more enjoyable moments.

Our children are born and we think only of their future, not their future deaths.

Read the rest here:  I Get It-I Really DO Get It.

Sleep and Grief

It’s something I hear often from bereaved parents-sleep is elusive.

Falling asleep was nearly impossible in the first days and weeks after Dominic’s accident. I would lie down utterly exhausted but simply not be able to close my eyes because behind the lids scrolled the awful truth that my son was never coming home again.

Eventually my body overcame my mind and I would drift off for an hour or two but couldn’t stay asleep.

It was years before I finally developed something that resembled a “normal” sleep pattern. Even now I wake at four practically every morning-the time when the deputy’s knock sounded on my door.

Sleep is important. I can’t do the work grief requires if I go too long without it.

I have used (and still use!) various tips and tricks to help me fall asleep and stay asleep. Here are a few of them.

❤

Boy, do I envy my cats’ ability to fall asleep any place, any time.

I’ve lived with chronic physical pain for over a decade and there are nights when it is hard to go to sleep-when it is impossible to ignore the pain.  But I have never thought of myself as having trouble sleeping.

Until now.

Read the rest here: grief and sleep

Child Loss: Photographs Can Be Complicated

Our family had only recently upgraded to smartphones when Dominic left us so we didn’t have the treasure trove of photos and real time videos so many folks have today.

I often wish for more of those but there’s not one thing I can do about it.

Even now I don’t think we record as many family moments as we should-there’s just a subtle whisper, “He’s not here” that plays on repeat in the background when we get together.

Like so many other things after loss, photographs are complicated now.

❤

I remember everything about the first formal family photograph after Dominic died.

It was two months to the day since we buried him, and his older brother was getting married.  A day we had planned for and looked forward to for a long time.  It marked a new beginning, a new life, but the spectre of death veiled my eyes and whispered in my ears.

Standing there, smiling and holding back the tears, my heart cried,”One of us is missing!” and I wanted to shout, “Don’t take the photo.  Don’t memorialize the absence of my son.”

I swallowed the words and have an album full of evidence that he wasn’t there.

Read the rest here: Bereaved Parents and The Question of Photographs