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.