The Yellow Brick Road

In a March post about Stages of Grief, I described the stages as a spiral. I've been thinking lately about my reluctance to participate in the three groups I belong to and it's led me to thinking about this path I'm on as a spiral. At first, I imagined myself falling off a cliff onto a new path, but now it's more like a tornado picked me up and dropped me somewhere else entirely.

Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, I started out in the middle of a spiral. When she first gets on the yellow brick road, it's a tight spiral, and she walks it surrounded by all the people there cheering for her because her house fell on the witch. As she keeps walking, the spiral opens up and takes her away from them.

This is exactly how I feel--like the spiral slowly took me away from all the people that surrounded me. Or at least it took me away from near-constant surveillance, from the phone calls and visits of people making sure I was still alive, had gotten out of bed, and fed myself and my baby.

Slowly I've moved back out into the world, back to work, back to stores. The first time I left my house (to go to breakfast with friends and family) I nearly fell apart. I looked around the restaurant and saw so many people, but my daughter's face wasn't among them. And while I hated my house (because that's where she died) I also felt as though by leaving it, I was leaving her.

I'm at a point now where I feel safe in more environments, but I'm still not quite on the open road. I almost want to run back to the center of the spiral sometimes. And I guess I do--I choose to be with the friends who gathered around me during that time. I was at one friend's house and there were several other women there from the group we all belong to. A couple of them have girls my daughter's age and it pained me so much to be there with them, and not see my daughter playing with them.

So for a while, I avoided them. The women and their children. Now I'm back to seeing the mothers, but am still avoiding the daughters. And so it goes, with that group and the others.

I'm planning a tentative step towards one, maybe seeing one of the groups in about 10 days. We'll see how that goes.