Dragging

Yes, it's May again. And I'm still here, though obviously not writing all that often. I've all but stopped writing in my personal hardcopy diary. Stopped a while ago, not sure why. But am feeling the need to write it in again. I know it's there for me if I ever want it.

This past weekend was Mother's Day. My husband worked his usual Saturday and Sunday overnight shifts, which meant I spent Sunday as I always do, grocery shopping, cooking, doing laundry, and keeping the kids from going upstairs and waking up their dad. The grocery store was full of dads picking up cakes, flowers, and balloons for their wives. I was a little annoyed, though I knew there wasn't anything we could do about my husband's schedule and Mother's Day is a holiday created by Hallmark, right? Just to sell cards?

Tomorrow is my birthday. I took the day off from work, though in past years, I haven't. Who wants to work on their birthday, right? The plan is for a bike ride (on my new bike) with my husband, then he'll make me breakfast (Eggs Benedict, particularly time-consuming to make), and take me to lunch. Nothing big. I'm just glad to not be working.

Ever since Sunday I've felt like I'm dragging myself around, body, mind, and heart. Next Wednesday will be 5 years since my girl passed away. Once horrible May is finally over, I get to look forward to my first follow-up mammogram since my surgery and radiation. I feel SO heavy I can't even describe it.

May started out just fine. We had my daughter's birthday party on May 3. My in-laws were here for it, and the kids did really well with them. May 4 I did my first (and possibly only) duathlon. It was a lot of fun. I signed up for it because I wanted something to look forward to in May. Now I'm wishing it was at the end of May, because I'm mostly dreading the next couple of months.

June marks not only the anniversary of my mammogram but also my biopsy, and then of course I had surgery last July. Like my daughter's death, I was maybe cushioned by shock, or inertia, through all of that last year. Now I'm having that sort of horrified anxiety, did all that really happen? And getting sick to my stomach thinking about it.

It's over, I'm safe. That's what the therapist used to tell me when I would go in for grief counseling. And I'm pretty good at telling myself that, talking myself through whatever. I just wish this heavy feeling would go away! I've joined some local running groups. Tonight is a workout at a high school track with one group. I've gone the last couple of weeks and enjoyed it. Wasn't planning to go tonight, but my neighbor/friend is expecting me to. I'm not sure whether running will help pull me out of this semi-stupor or if I'll have trouble picking my feet up fast enough to actually run. I signed up for an "adventure run" tomorrow night, which sounded fun at the time. Now I feel like I'm not going to be able to enjoy it or anything else this month. The members of one of the running groups will be at tomorrow's event, and they know it's my birthday. I'm hoping to focus on just that.

A friend of mine suggested (back when my daughter died) that maybe I should change my birthday. She said it again earlier this week when I told her I was feeling so heavy. Honestly, that never appealed to me. It seems like more work than it's worth, and there will always be someone who doesn't go along with it. Most likely, my parents, who still never mention the death anniversary of their granddaughter.


As people told me, it doesn't get easier, you just get better at living with it. But sometimes it is a little harder.

Resigned

I started this post months ago. It's the only one I saved but didn't immediately publish. I guess I wanted time to think about this one a bit more. The stages of grief. Something I've looked at over and over again. Having studied them in various psychology courses in college, they ran through my head from the beginning. But I knew I wasn't going to go through them in order, or that I'd ever reach acceptance. A friend and follower of this blog sent me an article a while ago on the subject. The stages were originally intended as a way for someone to look at their own death or illness, and was later generalized to apply to others. The basic stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

I wrote the paragraph below and sentence that follows several months ago.

Acceptance is what you do with a job offer, a compliment, or an apology. You accept an invitation or a gift, not death. I don't think anyone ever says "I accept" when being told someone close to them has died. Never. Instead, you battle with it, wrestle grief, cry, scream, sleep. And at some point, you give up. At least, I have. I was so angry, so sad, I wore myself out. And I've stayed worn out. I start to get angry, but lack the energy to sustain it. It might be that I finally realize there's nothing I can do, that I can't bring her back, that she's gone, that the accident really did happen and the daughter I thought would outlive me has now been gone for THREE years. It might be that I was so angry and so sad for so long that I don't have the energy to be that angry or sad anymore. Or maybe I'm part of life again, not part of death, and can't make myself part of it.

Whatever the reason, I have resigned.

Today, I sometimes feel myself tipping into grief, as though it's a cliff I can fall over. And I generally don't let myself. I went for a bike ride the other day, and in the first few minutes, heading out of the neighborhood, I passed a fire engine with its lights on, siren blaring. For months after losing my daughter, the sight of an emergency vehicle made me freeze up. I never saw the ambulance she rode in, but she loved fire engines, and knowing that her last ride was in an ambulance where she probably couldn't hear the siren still makes me sick to my stomach. Seeing that fire engine immediately made me tense up, and I immediately started pulling myself back from the ledge. I could consciously understand why it caused that reaction, and realizing that again made me absolutely freak out. Everything now is at a conscious level, where I feel as though I can control more of my reactions.

As I told a friend, it is in some ways harder once you get farther away from the incident that you will forever grieve. Initially, it's easy to predict what will upset you. Pretty much anything will. As the years go by, things you haven't been exposed to yet, or the most random things you'd never consider could upset you. I watched a movie sometime last year, Flight with Denzel Washington, that absolutely made me break down. I can't even remember now exactly why. Something about the scene with him in the hospital, the way the people spoke to him, reminded me of being in the hospital saying goodbye to my daughter. I couldn't watch the movie. And I know that type of situation could come up again at anytime.

I haven't accepted that she's gone, I've resigned myself to that reality. One thing I wish I could do is create a list of dos and don'ts for those helping others deal with grief. I have tried to describe some of those here over the years. A friend recently posted this article which articulates a lot of the things I feel, especially the very first one: http://sojo.net/blogs/2014/01/13/new-normal-ten-things-ive-learned-about-trauma

The one thing I'd add to the list in the article is don't expect those who've suffered trauma and loss to ever accept it. I feel as though my strength embodies my forever acting out against it. I've thought of myself as "relentlessly happy" throughout. I felt in the beginning if I could act "as if" long enough, I would actually be happy. And maybe it worked. I didn't accept, I became resigned to the fact of the accident and my daughter's death and started living around it. At least, that's how I see it now.