No fluffy puppies
No offense to this fluffy puppy, we love you very much Tabasco.
“Maybe your next post should be about puppies.”
-suggested with love, concern and a bit of jest by someone who knows me well.
Look, I get it. The last couple blogs have come from a dark place, but here’s the thing, grief can be really fucking dark. Pardon my language. Actually, you know what? Don’t pardon it, these are strong feelings and I need strong expletives to express them.
This week has been better than last, hooray! But I also know that no feeling is permanent. As is evidenced by these last few months where I’ve ping-ponged back and forth between letting myself sit in the dark and wondering why I can’t just push through this. Between granting myself grace and feeling broken. But this is grief - it is waffling and uncertainty and confusion. It is like playing pin the tail on the donkey but you’re spun around and blindfolded while underwater. You don’t know which way is up, let alone which direction the donkey’s ass is.
I could write about puppies or something else cute, fluffy and heart-warming, but that would be a false representation of where I am and unfair to all of those walking a similar grief journey. As uncomfortable as it makes me to know that there are people worrying about me, it is worse to think that someone out there is reading my words who is also grieving and is under the impression that I have it all figured out.
The truth of the matter is that I am not ok. How could I be? My daughter died less than a year ago! But that doesn’t mean that anyone needs to worry about me, or worse, pity me. I am surviving as I always have, an inchstone at a time. And so far I’ve learned that the best support comes in the form of patience, empathy, and perhaps most of all, laughter.
I had been told that grief from child loss never really leaves you. That in time you just learn to live with it. I heard these words but they didn’t compute - how in the world do you just live with this kind of unbearable grief…forever?
Then this week I had a visceral memory of grieving Adelaide while she was alive. When it became clear to Miguel and me that Adelaide was not going to develop typically, that her trajectory had been thrown way off course and she was now forging her own twisted path, we grieved. We grieved the little girl, her life and our lives together that we had envisioned. That grief never really went away and would resurface with each regression or hospital admission. But I found a way to accept the grief. To live with it. It took years, though, and I still had Adelaide to care for and love on.
Since Adelaide passed, I’ve been playing tug of war with this grief, succumbing to it, then trying to reject it but never allowing myself to just accept it. If it took years to accept my grief of our idealized life WITH Adelaide then I have to imagine accepting a life WITHOUT her will take even longer.
October 12th will mark one year since I held her. That’s only one month away. I had hoped I would be in a better place by now, that perhaps my grieving while she was alive would count as time served. But grief isn’t rational or direct so I can see now that this road is going to be much longer and more circuitous than I would have liked. At least I know my destination: I am on the road to Acceptance. Acceptance of my grief, of the loss of my daughter, of the life I had envisioned while she was growing in my belly. It is NOT a road of fluffy puppies, so you see, I can’t pretend that they are here. But there are occasional flowers, and spots of sunshine, and as I grow - as my acceptance grows - I have to hope that the rocky, nearly impossible terrain, will slowly get more manageable. THIS is living with grief. It is accepting its permanent presence in my life. Accepting the grief doesn’t take the pain away but maybe it dulls the edges enough to get out of bed again tomorrow.
