The feelings of grief and traumatic loss these days

“Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep, and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.” 

—Jonathan Safran Foer

I haven’t blogged in over a week. In the darkness of my bedroom, with the tiny circle of light from my phone flashlight shining, I have been writing private thoughts and memories in my Widow’s Journal (I still don’t know who sent it to me). When I have trouble falling asleep, staying asleep throughout the night or waking up for the day far too early in the morning, I write in the journal. According to Cheryl, my grief counselor who is a volunteer with an organization called Haven of Virginia, sleeplessness is common for those who are grieving and who have experienced a traumatic event like a spouse’s death.

I hadn’t really thought of what I have been through with Chip as traumatic, since our lives were filled with so much positivity and love, but in my phone call with her yesterday, she shared plenty of information about traumatic loss. She told me about scientific research about traumatic loss as well as about her own experiences with the trauma that she felt from losing family members and friends to cancer over the years. Cheryl informed me that not only was caring for Chip when he was sick traumatic for me (I had no idea…it never felt traumatic to me), but so was watching him slowly decline after he received his stage 4 diagnosis just a little over a year ago, on July 31, 2019. She added that the trauma of saving his life on our back deck by performing heart compressions until the EMS team arrived, finding him alive in his ER room (giving us a chance to say last words to each other), and watching him die in the ER was likely the most traumatic thing I’ve ever endured. The floodgates opened (a theme for me these days), and I knew she was right.

During the call, Cheryl gently guided me through talking about the trauma of enduring Chip’s life with and death from cancer. She encouraged me to think of ways to process the trauma of his disease, death and loss. She told me it would take time to process the trauma. She encouraged me to stay focused on my life’s purpose, my work, my family and friends as one way to “move past” the traumatic events of the past 3+ years, but she also encouraged me to take the time to grieve and process the emotions coming out of the traumatic loss in quiet times.

She made suggestions for dealing with the sleeplessness. She suggested sleeping in another bedroom to get some sleep (I can’t imagine sleeping anywhere but in our bedroom filled with memories of him there). She suggested trying a weighted blanket and using an app called “Calm” to quiet my mind. Cheryl shared that one way to get past the memories that were causing me to lose sleep was to put new memories and sensory experiences (my words not hers) in the place of the old memories. She prompted me to alter the memories I had of him with his disease and while dying to prevent the anxiety from taking over.

When I expressed my anxieties to Cheryl that maybe I hadn’t told Chip I loved him frequently enough in the days and month before he died, that maybe I should have pushed harder for hospice, and that maybe I didn’t do enough for him in his journey with cancer, she said something that hit me hard: Chip knew he was dying and that he had the time to ask me to do certain things because he knew he was dying. I asked her for clarification by saying “What do you mean he knew he was dying?” She explained that people who die from cancer are, generally, of sound mind (Chip certainly was) and that when the end is near, they know it. In the time of “knowing it,” they take the time to tell those around them what they want in the end and how they feel about them (Chip certainly did both of those). She shared her experience of talking to her father in the last month of his life (he died of gall bladder cancer about 15 years ago), and told me “He knew he had one foot in Heaven and one foot on earth” (The Revivalists song "Other Side of Paradise" and the title of my blog took on new meaning for me after she said this). Because her father knew he was dying, he took the time to say exactly and adamantly what he did and did not want at the end of his life and to state what his wishes were for after he was gone.

Cheryl assured me that I did all I could do, under the circumstances, for Chip and that I did everything he wanted and wished to be done for him at the end. She assured me that I continue to do for him now by honoring his verbal and written wishes (We spent so many sleepless nights together talking about his wishes) and by keeping his memory alive. She said, several times throughout this part of our call, "You respected his wishes and will continue to honor his wishes." By the end of the conversation, I believed her.

The idea of dealing with the trauma of his disease, death and loss scares me. No, it petrifies me. I want to remember and focus on the great times…the laughter, the trips, the recipes, the music, and the love. I have, consciously and deliberately, pushed the traumatic events deep, deep down into the recesses of my mind. It’s not the part of my life with Chip that I want to think about. When those thoughts rear up, I calmly speak of them in a few sentences to whomever I am talking to, and move, as quickly as possible, passed them in my mind, never really dealing with the emotions behind the thoughts and images in my head.

As per usual with me, a good place for me to begin will be to define “traumatic loss." Research by Wortman & Latack (2015) gave this definition of traumatic loss that was comprehensive and made sense:

“A death is considered traumatic if it occurs without warning; if it is untimely; if it involves violence; if there is damage to the loved one’s body; if it was caused by a perpetrator with the intent to harm; if the survivor regards the death as preventable; if the survivor believes that the loved one suffered; or if the survivor regards the death, or manner of death, as unfair and unjust.”

An article titled “Grief after Traumatic Loss,” written about the research, added “when a survivor witnesses the death” to Wortman and Latack's definition a traumatic loss.

Until I process the traumatic losses of the past several years and May 30-31 of this year, I think I’ll continue to toggle between the last two stages of grief (sadness/depression and acceptance) after losing Chip. I want to get to the stage of acceptance and remain there permanently (at least consistently), so that my life will be spent honoring his memory and his wishes without anxiety, guilt or sadness. I want to live in the mindset that we’re all going to die and that it is in death that we are reminded how precious life is.

I will get there.