Grief is a B*tch

May has been all over the place. Much like grief I guess. May started off easy, Ha, “easy”. Aka, I didn’t feel like I was drowning. But I guess all things considered that’s my new definition of easy. Seriously though I felt ok starting off May, which was a nice relief from a very heavy and hard end of April. I feel like I did ok for the first 10 days of May, and then Mother’s Day came around and it hit me harder than I anticipated. Which I talked about in another post. Since that the 9 month mark of Jason’s death passed. I’ve been kind of in a weird space with my writing. Some of it doesn’t feel as “complete”, like it’s in a space to share with the world. Today is Monday. Memorial Day. Yesterday marked 40 entire weeks without Jason. The Sunday before that marked 9 months, 39 weeks. That continues to be a hard concept for me to grasp, it feels so long ago, yet, also doesn’t. There are days when my mind and body still cannot believe Jason is dead and many days where I still wait for him to come home. I write over and over how unfair this all is in hopes that maybe, just maybe, that somehow will change the trajectory of my life and this story. It won’t. People ask if I have plans for the summer, I don’t, not really. But honestly, what am I waiting for? Jason isn’t coming back. Yet there is something that feels so cruel about living. It is a really hard and confusing experience. It isn’t even that my mind does not want to, it is more a feeling in my body. Probably because continuing to push my body to new experiences and new spaces is hard. I mean really hard. Grief is just as much a physical experience as it is a mental one. The physical exhaustion is real and more often than not, I don’t know how something new or different is going to make me feel, until I dive head first. But when you dive head first and the body isn’t ready, it’s a brutal feeling on the other side. Much like a hangover. A very brutal, fucked up hangover, except the night before wasn’t filled with joy and endless cocktails.

This past weekend my beautiful cousin got married in New York. I am not going to even pretend it was easy, but it wasn’t what I was expecting or preparing my body for. Which is another tricky part of grief. I think I mentally prepare myself for a lot of different versions of reality to shake out, and rarely one of them does. Then bam! It hits in a different way entirely. It did not really hit me until a week before that I was actually going. I want to be clear, I made the choice to go. No one was forcing me to go, in fact, everyone gave me many outs and said many times they understood if I didn’t go. But it was important for me to go. I do believe so much so in showing up for the people who show up for you. My cousin, she has shown up for me. Not just since Jason died, but long before that. She was checking in when he was sick, she never lost sight of how hard this was for me and how hard it continues to be. I can tell you this, the list of those people is short. I think it is also super important to mention that in grief, two things can be true. You can be hurting immensely for the pain and loss in your own life, and still hold space to care for, be happy for, love those who are experiencing joy. Is it not always easy, in fact that very concept is fucking hard, but it is possible. It takes a lot of work and energy to allow two competing emotions to co-exist. It is confusing, very confusing.

Grief is just confusing. There is not a day that I don’t miss Jason. Some days, life feels more normal than others. I allow myself to be ok, or at least, I am trying to. And other days I allow myself to not be ok. I have to. I think that sometimes I fight how I am feeling, especially when I am around other people. The thing I was dreading the most about my cousins wedding last week was the fear of having to pretend to be ok. The need to put on this appearance for everyone around me that I was happy, because I was at a happy event. I often feel that way, because people ask things like “how are you” and more often than not I run through my mind so many scenarios, “do they not know that Jason is dead”, “do they not care that Jason is dead”, “do they expect me to be ok? Jason is still dead”. I think I am finally coming to realize that it is ok to be honest when answering that question. I am ok, sometimes, and I am here, and Jason is still dead. That is the truth. I am here, and I am doing my damn best every single day. But no matter how good the day could be, Jason is still dead. I was so hyper focused on the fear of pretending to be ok, or seeing a few people who I did not want to see, that I think I forgot about what actually might hurt the most. And what hurt the most wasn’t the “how are you’s”, it was that Jason was supposed to be there, by my side, and how robbed we got with what was supposed to be forever.

I let the tears fall from my eyes through the words “as long as we both shall live” and the “to death do us part”, sadly, I’d guess, knowing more meaning in those words than most of the other people in the room. But also knowing, no one in that room will ever escape that. I sadly know the most painful part of those vows. And the ones that probably truly matter. The ones that talk about love when life gets hard. And I don’t mean I had a bad day at work hard, I mean the real type of hard. The type of suffering that some loves cannot endure. The real meaning behind the words. To some, they are still just words, but to me, those words have shaped my life. They are my reality. My other sweet cousin squeezed my hand when she saw me cry. My other cousin hugged me and said that suits are for wiping tears. My aunts held me and told me they were proud of me for being there. In some sense, I felt guilty, I didn’t want the attention on me, to take away from the brides day. I watched my mom and my dad’s eyes both fill with tears, my sisters too. I was reminded that I was not the only one in that room missing Jason. Because Jason should not have just been there for me, he should’ve been there because he was supposed to be apart of this family. The entire family. The extended family too. He was supposed to be there to celebrate my cousins marriage, to meet my other cousin’s girlfriends and boyfriend, and be out on the dance floor with all of us, enjoy life and this celebration. He should have been there. He was supposed to be my forever plus one. I wish nothing more than him just being there. There is so much pain in the words, the feelings, the thoughts, but at the end of the day, when the room is full of joy, the hardest part of it all is that he is not there by my side to share in it with me. Without Jason, I don’t feel whole. That’s what marriage is all about. Sharing in this life and this joy with someone else, for as long as they both shall live. Except, whoever put that together surely wasn’t expecting that to mean a life cut short and so soon. We were supposed to get forever. That forever included us showing up in others people joy and celebrating other peoples love. A constant ache of “Jason should be here” hovers over me, along with “I need him here with me”.

I saw so much about how people loved me. A reminder that they don’t all expect me to be ok, even though many days it feels like there is this external pressure to be ok now. But I am not ok. And I guess I realized some people know that, and they don’t need me to be. Maybe some expect me to be ok, or will literally never say anything, but screw them. The people who love me most don’t need me to be ok. But I showed up, and I smiled and I laughed and I meant it. In between the many tears, there were beautiful moments of joy and laugher.

There are days when I am just so angry at the world that it is so easy to be angry at other people. Other people who are not doing anything “wrong” necessarily, but who were maybe absent then or absent now. People who move on, who barely check in, or don’t check in at all. People who send a text and then don’t respond when I put the energy into a reply. People who say the wrong things, or don’t say anything. I realize a lot of this contradicts itself. But when you are angry, because your husband is dead, anger is not always logical nor is the way you want people to respond. I get angry at people who are living happiness, the type I desperately long for and had at one point. The happiness that was all so violently stripped away when Jason was sick and then again when Jason died. I get angry at people who seemingly have very little problems. Though I was once that person, naive to this type of pain. I get angry at people who get to move on, who get to keep living. People who seem to have no impact from Jasons death. Sometimes I get so caught up in this feeling, the anger, the fear that others are forgetting and moving on, that I forget to remember that other people are hurting too. That other people miss Jason, it maybe isn’t the exact same as me, but they are hurting too. This weekend in a way, was a reminder of that to me. That maybe those who don’t say the right thing all the time, or don’t vocalize the hurt, are still hurting. Hurting for me, for themselves, for Jason. Widowhood is so isolating, and I think it just sometimes is so easy to forget that other people feel Jason’s loss too. Grief sure changes the way you see the world. I’ve spent so much time and energy since Jason died being hurt by external factors, mostly Jason’s family. That even though it hurts like hell, there are people who know me and love me, and support me. I really needed that support and love. As a reminder that Jason was special and that I am special and that what we had was special.

Grief is a bitch. May was hard.