Grief is strange. My grief is deeper and broader than the ocean, and it’s as if my mind and body know that it is far too much for me to bear. I feel as if somewhere inside, my mind has attempted to put a dam on the Ocean of my grief, but it’s an impossible task.
You can no more dam grief than you can stop the tide. With any loss, it is inevitable. And yet, I cannot comprehend the enormousness of what I have lost all at once. I feel as if the last ten years were based on lies and misinformation. I question our life together. Was he ever really happy with our life? Was the infertility and cancer just too much piled on to previous difficulties, or was it getting laid off that was the final straw?
I weep for the future we won’t have and the memories my children won’t have of their father. My children are 5, 5, 3, and 1. The twins may remember a couple of vacations, and I’m hoping the 3 year old remembers a little. I know the baby won’t.
If I wasn’t enough to live for, why weren’t our children? That’s the part that I’m not sure I’ll ever understand. I never questioned going through a single part of chemo or radiation because it was simply what I had to do to be here with my family. It was the price I had to pay to get to live longer. I wanted to live to see my babies grown. Why didn’t he?
There are too many thoughts intermixed with the sadness. I miss the jokes, the hugs, the partnership. I can’t think of everything or I’ll be sucked to the very bottom of that ocean. Instead I have to grieve in parts in pieces. So my mind created the dam.
There are days where I am walking and talking and seem just fine, but inside the tide still rolls. Out of nowhere there is a tide of sadness, or rage or despair that rolls up in a wave over that dam and takes me by surprise. Sometimes it’s a song, or word that triggers a memory. The memories are still more painful than comforting.
I cry in the car, in the McDonald’s drive thru, on my lunch hour, in the shower…. The numbness has worn off, and the dam seems to be lowering as if knowing I need to fully grieve Tim’s loss, and judging me more capable now than I was at first. I miss the life we had, I miss the life we should still have, and I hate having to explain that Daddy is dead everyday to a three year old who just wants bedtime kisses from his Daddy.
Cancer Ever After 