Just two weeks after Adelaide passed away I flew to Las Vegas to the HLTH conference where I was honored for my WEGO Best in Show: Blog win. Honestly, were all of you just scrolling through my posts wondering what the hell I was thinking? Who does that? Jumps on a plane two weeks after her daughter dies? I do, apparently.

I couldn’t see it at the time but I was running from my grief. Anxiously holding on to my former life, my busy life, with the same desperation as our dog Sriracha when she gets her teeth on a delicious remote control. Shortly after Vegas we were off to Epilepsy Awareness Day at Disneyland followed by other Epilepsy Awareness month events and capped it off with riding in Chicago’s Thanksgiving Day parade.

This is a pretty solid pattern of mine: If I just stay busy enough then I won’t have to feel things - but it always, ALWAYS catches up to me. Though, I do have to admit I’m pretty impressed by this solid 6-week effort to stay on the run. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t grieving during this time, I was still an emotional mess, but I was also driven by this obsessive need to keep moving forward. As if I was driving down an interstate going nowhere fast and bugs kept hitting my windshield, until at some point my windshield was so full of bug guts that I couldn’t see the road anymore and I had to pull over. I wish I could say I chose to pull over, but lets be real, when its gets that bad it’s really just about self-preservation.

Over the last couple of years I have worked really hard on not letting my windshield get so dirty - on trying to process my grief as it comes and with real elbow grease not just a very tired pair windshield wipers. But somehow, this week, I once again found myself trying to differentiate the painted lines on the road through the muck on the glass.

Now, I give myself some grace here given that the anniversary of Adelaide’s passing and her birthday was just two weeks ago. When you’ve lost someone, anniversaries and other meaningful dates are basically the worst. As long as the Earth circles the sun they are unavoidable, but perhaps as some sort of consolation they are only 24 hours long. I found that by planning activities on these days, time passed more quickly and that they can even be surprisingly celebratory. The anticipation of these dates still suck, and can often be worse than the day itself, but at least once the day was over it was over and it didn’t continue to haunt me.

Until this year.

On her deathaversary we watched videos, looked through pictures and went sunflower picking - there were still plenty of tears but it felt active and beautiful. On her birthday we celebrated her with friends and family. We laughed and shared stories and it was actually fun! I thought I had figured out the secret to surviving these days: fill them with activities and people and before you now it they are over. 

The days had come and gone but in all the activity I hadn’t noticed the bug graveyard collecting on my windshield. That is, until this week when our guests were gone and the stillness settled over our house once again. 

I couldn’t see that I was employing the same techniques I had used to avoid the most unsettling parts of my grief years before. Go, go, go! Do, do, do! It wasn’t as if I wasn’t acknowledging her loss, then or now. In fact, I often feel like all I do is talk about her. But sometimes, what we actually need, is to let the worst of our emotions wash over us. As uncomfortable as it is, as ugly they may be, these emotions have to be expressed before we can rinse our windshields and get back on the road. Like some sort of miracle cleaning soul wash.

Now I know that while the activities and the love and support of friends and family help me survive these unavoidable days  - surviving them isn’t enough. They still have to be felt and processed.  So, thats what I did this week. I ugly cried when I needed to, stopped pushing them down with medication, food and drink, I relinquished any pressure to do or go and I let myself just be. Basically, I cleaned my freaking windshield and I can see again - which is great and also probably safer for everyone on this road of life with me.