Grief is weird

I am learning more about grief than I ever wished or wanted to know about it. When I think and learn about grief from a scientific or intellectual standpoint, it helps me manage the grief. I read definitions of grief such as “Grief is a strong, sometimes overwhelming emotion for people, regardless of whether their sadness stems from the loss of a loved one or from a terminal diagnosis they or someone they love have received” on the Mayo Clinic website and say to myself “Yah, that sounds right." I read or hear in my grief support groups that grief is a “natural reaction to loss” and a process, and I accept these truths. I have learned, from my grief counselor Cheryl, that grief never goes away and people just learn to live with their grief. Check.

But, then, I read about (and fully grasp) how grief comes in waves, like this accurate description from The Loss Foundation, and I fall to pieces:

“When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing.”

It’s this part of grief that I find to be so strange. It’s these grief waves, the ones that I never see coming and that, indeed, crash over me, that actually do wipe me out. It is so strange the way there is no regularity or predictability to what will trigger the waves of grief. Sometimes it can be a particular song, and then the next time I hear that song, my grief isn’t triggered. Then, after hearing the song several weeks later, the song triggers the grief again. I suppose it’s a bit like the waves in the ocean: some are powerful enough to knock me down and fill my nose and mouth with stinging salt water, some hit me but I can easily right myself, and some I can jump over or splash the water on top of them as if I were built like a dolphin or pelican and designed to handle waves.

When the waves crash and wipe me out, it’s not uncommon that it happens at an inopportune time, day or night. These powerful grief waves can happen when I’m about to begin a telepractice session with a family or client, and I’ve just read an email from a friend asking how I am (note to self: stop reading personal emails before a client session). Or, maybe I am triggered by a thought about Chip right as I sit down with Sam and Stella for dinner and I don’t want to ruin the mood at dinner, so I sniff a few times and get rid of the thought that triggered me. Sometimes I am triggered by Chip’s name on a useless catalog that comes in the mail or when folding a bedsheet which Chip always claimed was the “softest and best sheet of all the sheets” we owned every time he climbed into bed with that particular sheet set on the bed.

Sometimes it comes completely without a conscious thought. Yesterday, I was putting a pan away from the drying rack and decided to put it below where I usually do. I pulled out the bottom sliding shelf in the cabinet and placed it on top of the cast iron pans. I didn’t have conscious thoughts about loss such as “Oh, Chip loved to use cast iron pans” (he did) or “I remember when he taught me how to clean them properly” (a sweet memory of mine with him standing next to me at the sink and demonstrating how to clean the pan without soap). I didn’t have a sad, happy or angry feeling about seeing the cast iron pans.

When Sam, who happened to be standing there at the time, asked what I was doing with the pan, since he knew I wasn’t putting it where it belonged, I stood up, looked at him, began to open my mouth to speak in order to explain my reasoning, and began to sob. It was just one of those perfect waves of grief that comes without warning and without a clear thought or feeling attached to it.

I allowed myself to cry. I thought it through. Sam hugged me hard while he listened to why putting a pan on top of the cast iron pans made me feel so sad. I explained to him that grief is weird. He had nothing to say, of course, since it’s impossible to understand the feeling of deeply grieving for someone that you loved so deeply. I hope Sam doesn’t have to know the pain of deep grief and loss for decades and decades. When he does, I hope he will have people around him, like a grief counselor, a grief support group (or two!), family and friends who can support him through the grieving process.

I hope Sam has a dear friend like my friend Stephanie from college who is helping me through the process. She has texted me a photo every day since Chip died to ease my pain, get me to think, help me appreciate life around me and so much more. A few days ago, she sent a photo of a deep red flower (pictured in this post) that made me think about how the deep red reflected my deep love for Chip. She replied “Indeed...deep, rare love. This comes from a succulent in my friend‘s yard. First time seeing this kind.” I responded with the text “Rarity is so valuable but can be difficult as we tend to keep seeking what is so striking. If we never discover rarity, we don’t know what we’re missing when we don’t have it.”

When she responded “And we cherish the experience of having had it that much more...it’s yours eternally...and that will always be,” the grief wave crashed into me and knocked me flat. Of course, what she texted was so very true, but the words released the grief that I had been storing up during the work and school day and, so, I let it rush over me. As I twisted and rolled over and over in the strong grief wave, trying to right myself (read as “stop sobbing”), I was grateful to her for the opportunity to release some of my grief.

My grief counselor Cheryl says I need to grieve more. She has said several times that when I’m keeping myself busy and not letting the feelings flow, or purposely holding the feelings back or in, that it will come back to “bite me in the a** later.” To help me understand how frequently I am allowing myself to grieve in a typical day or week (and to decide if it’s enough or not for me personally), Cheryl instructed me during our session on October 15th to keep a written list of times when I allowed myself to grieve and to identify and sit with the feelings. She asked me to write down the number of minutes that I grieved in the moment. That will be my baseline.

Cheryl said I don’t have to only identify and jot down the minutes that I cry or mourn for Chip. It can also be minutes when I make myself a martini and remember the happy times when we made and enjoyed martinis together (his with gin, mine with vodka). Or, she said I could write down the number of minutes I felt angry when I’m washing the dishes in the sink for the third or fourth time in one day and I realize that I’m grumpy because I have to do it all myself since Chip is gone (we split who did the food preparation or cooking and who did the washing dishes pretty evenly in an average week).

I meet with her again on Friday, the 30th. I have no idea whether my baseline is horrible or decent. I look forward to her input about my personal grief journey and whether or not I’m giving it the attention that I need to give it. In the meantime, I’ve got today and tomorrow to complete my 2-week assignment. We shall see.