Today is especially difficult. It's been a month since my husband died, it's the 4th of July and the Higgs Boson particle was just discovered.
Recently I was ranting about how much the phrase "This too shall pass" pissed me off, especially as a response to my grief. If I'm supposed to feel my feelings and be in the present, how exactly is "This too shall pass" an appropriate response? It's not, but it allows other people a way to dismiss and avoid my pain. A friend asked if the pain was in the future, thinking about things down the road. I replied that grief is in the moment - more than any other feeling I've had when I feel my loss it is in the now.
Grief is a series of realizations that the person you loved is really, truly dead and gone. The first 10 days, it was a series of shock waves. Everything felt surreal. I kept thinking "This is just a bad dream and I'll wake up." And then I'd realize it was real and be struck with a tsunami of loss, pain, grief. Every time I run across a connection and realize anew that he is dead, I'm struck with a sharp, debilitating pain. I'll cry, I'll call someone and talk, I'll do whatever I need to do to survive it. And then I pick myself up and move on.
So today, I woke up at 5am. I seem to have PTSD - a month ago, I got a call at 5am that he probably wouldn't last the day. Ever since, I wake up at 5am. Sometimes I'm able to get back to sleep, but mostly I lie in bed in that region between wakefulness and sleep, and my brain thinks about the reality that he's no longer here and my life is irrevocably changed. This morning I just kept thinking "It's real. It's been a month." Holidays suck right now. Celebration is the furthest thing from my mind. Just getting up, working, taking care of myself is challenging enough. Sometimes I even have moments where his death/my loss aren't at the forefront of my mind. So tonight I'll hide out and avoid the celebrations. As for the Higgs Boson particle - he loved science. He would ponder gravity and black holes and share his thoughts with me and we would have lengthy discussions about science and spirituality. When I saw the stuff about the particle, I wanted to email him links to articles, and then one more time it struck me, he's gone... forever. There won't be any talking about the particle with him. He won't drive me crazy talking incessantly about it for a week. And even though it could be irritating, his enthusiasm was contagious. He kept my mind sharp. And I learned far more than I realized with him in my life.
So I'm crying again. I've already cried several times this morning. And now it's time for me to pick myself up, get ready for work and keep moving forward.
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