Healing, Hope, and Other BS.
Some people are inherently selfish, and if you haven’t filtered them from your life yet, loss like this and grief like this sure will do it for you. Some people are inherently good and a loss like this will bring those people closer to you. Who those people are, on each end of the spectrum, likely will surprise you.
Grief is weird. The way people expect you to be “ok now”, through a process. Like a switch has flipped now that time has passed and I am healed!
Also “healed”, “healing” what do those words even really mean in grief? This isn’t a broken leg that gets better and returns to normal. It will never be normal, because Jason will never be here.
I was shocked the other day when I received a text message from someone close to me. It implied that I must be traveling again since I wasn’t attending his wife’s baby shower that coming weekend. My mind quickly spiraled. I had texted her many weeks (months?) ago, vulnerably, to let her know my heart couldn’t handle the event. It was simply too much for me at this time and I wouldn’t be attending. I closed out the message with I hope you understand. I never received a response.
You know, I don’t expect people to understand, even when I write it. I know they don’t understand, but I hope that they at least can find the logic in my decision. That they can try to understand. If I’ve learned one thing about grief, after losing Jason, it is I need to take care of myself first. I spent 18 months taking care of Jason. I took care of myself during that time too, but I put myself second for quite some time. Not always even second to Jason, but second to others. I stretched myself thin to please others, best I could. I wasn’t saying no to things as much as I should’ve. I attended events that left me feeling more drained than when I started. More often than not that exhaustion came from a place of feeling isolated. Feeling removed from people my age. My husband had cancer, no one could relate to me, no one understood the heaviness I was dealing with. I tried to fill the void with socialization, but often left feeling more empty than when I got there, for the simple fact that people didn’t understand.
Since losing Jason, I have gotten better at saying “no”. This grief is too damn heavy now to force things that suck my energy. There are things that I simply can’t. Attending this baby shower is one of those things. It’s multi level. It’s watching someone else get to live out my dream, the moments I should be celebrating in my own life, had Jason been healthy and alive. It’s what I wanted. What Jason wanted. What we wanted. What we never got. What we won’t ever get. It’s all that and so much more than that. It’s the room full of joy and strangers. Celebrating a new life. Many who wouldn’t know the pain I hold inside me. Many who wouldn’t know me at all. It would be the need to put on a smile, a front, suck all my energy to simply seem ok on the surface while hurting on the inside. There comes a point when you simply can’t pretend to hold it together anymore. Or pretend to be happy. No one should be forced to do that. And no one should be forced to do that at the cost of the pressure to show up for someone else. Everyone should be given the space to opt out of what hurts them, even if the hurt isn’t intentional.
I told him the honest truth of how I was doing. You know what he said? “Thanks for sharing all that…We would love your support as much as we’d love to give you ours.”
Ouch. You know, I try not to be a selfish person, but if this is the one season in life that I can’t show up for anyone except myself, I think I get a pass. Being asked to show up for someone else like that, in the darkest season of your life, is incredibly hurtful. To me, it says, we think whatever we have going on is more important than the pain you’re feeling.
It also tells me what I already know to be true, they simply just don’t understand.
Grief keeps teaching me lessons, which is annoying sometimes. This one being, some people continue to hold expectations of you, even in the worst season of your life. You have to come to accept you will never meet everyone’s expectations, and that’s ok. Those who have expectations in this season are not the people you need in your corner. People have a lot of expectations around grief, what you should and shouldn’t do, feel, be, through it all. Here’s what I have to say to that, you get to be whoever you want to be, take what you need. No one can tell you, you are doing it wrong. Your grief is uniquely you, those who can’t see that and support that, well, they probably always were that way, grief has finally just shown you who they really are.
