Grief is a Spiral

Learned something valuable today, which I should have guessed at because of my education, but still managed to catch me off guard. After being estranged from my son for 14 months, I ended up back in the same city where, three years ago we had an amazing talk about his life moving forward, my past, our lives growing up together. I was a young mom and I am still waiting to grow up, so I think of my time as a parent of young children as growing up with them. It was a blast! We had tons of fun and I remember making up stories about them, where we had great adventures and saw magical things; the fabulously, crazy birthday cakes and parties and running with them chasing soccer balls. I loved having kids and being with them. The innocent times were care free.

Now, back in the same city, I broke down and sobbed for all that I lost. I have told my husband that this rift between us feels to me like he has died. Two months ago on the anninversary of this tsunami that tore through my life, I did a ritual to let it go or let me deal with it so I wasn't such a mess. It worked. I felt lighter than I had all year and I could rationalize the pain and the anger.

Being here broke that illusion. I remebered being with him again and all the great times we had together. He is very silimar to me in personality, music tastes, bad sense of humour and the the dark things we find funny. Losing him in this way makes no sense to me, emotionally or psychologically. And the damn broke. 

After dealing with the fallout of a horrific, soul crushing childhood, I learned that dealing with grief and anger was a spiral. You deal, you grieve, you get angry, you get depressed, you coast and you start all over again.

This has been the same way. And, Ironically, the course I was on was dealing with critical incident stress. So I learned this is normal, this will change and this will ebb and flow as I go on. I knew that from my psych nursing days, from all the self help books and from my own couselling days, yet this still hit me like a bomb blast. 

I guess this is what makes people resilient. And what makes life hard to endure and painful. One day I shall move past this. One day the cuts to my heart will heal. I know that. It is how I choose to journey there that will make the difference.

Peace.