I posted last week about feeling good and then Thursday night, I did not feel good. Not good at all. I had an upset stomach and a brutal headache when I went to bed. I slept for a few hours and then woke up, having an anxiety attack. I was sick all day Friday, able to work from home but napping between meetings and feeling generally crappy, nauseous, and headachy all day.
Midway through the day, I realized: it was the 19th of the month, exactly two years and seven months since my husband died. There’s no name for the 31-month anniversary of a death and two years-and-seven-months doesn’t have a fancy term for it, but my body knew it was a date of import. Some months the 19th comes and goes uneventfully, but January was not one of those months.
In those months when the 19th hits me hard, I often wake to a memory of holding my husband’s body in my arms in the hospital’s neuro-ICU. All the tubes and monitors had been removed, so for the first time in days, I could actually get my arms around him. Holding him while he took his last breaths, feeling his ribs move against my arms and then not moving, then realizing the very last breath was complete was the most intimate experience I’ve ever had in my life.
Compressed into those last breaths were the happiest and saddest moments of my life. I got to do exactly what I promised to do when we got married—to be with him until the very end. And then I had to keep living.
When I realized that my illness was a grief response, I thought of a meme that shows up periodically in the widow Facebook groups I belong to: on one side is a neat line progressing from loss and shock through guilt, panic, isolation, finding new strengths, and ending at affirmation; on the other side is a wild, tangled scribble ricocheting around those same terms, bouncing from one to another over and over and so often that the end of the line can’t even be discerned. Over the first image is the heading “stages of grief”; over the second is the heading “my experience.” Well, friends, that wild, tangled scribble is my experience for sure.
The general trajectory is toward some sort of overall peace, but the day-by-day experience can depart significantly from that arc. The time between tough days gets longer, but the tough days don’t stop coming.
Megan Devine has done wonderful work at Refuge in Grief promoting the idea that the phases of grief need to be retired. I’ve been following her work since my husband died, so I’ve been well aware since this journey started that I would not have a linear or orderly experience. I’ve still been surprised at exactly how much emotional whiplash I’ve experienced. I’ve had intense lows and highs back to back. I’ve had some of my worst grief days a year or two after my husband died.
My body has often reacted to a milestone date before my mind processed what the date was.
When a tough grief day hits me unexpectedly, I let it. I don’t bother telling myself it’s too long after my husband’s death for me to be feeling this way or I don’t have time for this emotional crap right now.
Here’s what I do:
- I remind myself that everything is temporary and that this wave of grief will pass.
- I take everything off my schedule that can possibly be bumped.
- I give myself permission to be a mess—to nap between meetings, to close my office door and cry, to wander around the house touching things that remind me of him, to talk to him.
- I bring one of my old-fashioned cloth handkerchiefs with me everywhere I go.
- I spend as much time as I can with my two dogs, who never judge me and know just how to put their heads on my lap in a comforting way.
- I give myself grace. I am kind and empathetic to myself, just as I would be to anyone else in the same situation.
I did all these things on Friday. None of these things seemed to have made the grief hurry up and pass, but it made Friday more bearable. (I figure I can be grieving and mean to myself or grieving and kind to myself—either way I’m grieving and it sucks, but I see no reason to make it worse.)
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