Child Loss – Page 7 – Sunshine, Angels and Rainbows

Denying Myself

How many of us do this daily? We walk around with a smile on our faces while in reality all that we really want to do is cry. Because we are dying on the inside missing the hell out of our loved ones.

Look, people mean well. They want you to feel better, they want you to move on. Even those closest to you. They want you to be happy. How much of our happiness is derived from someone else’s needs?

I have children, so my grief sits somewhere in a back corner. When my son died my daughter didn’t want us to sit around crying. We did, everyone did for the first few weeks and then slowly it became less and less. I still cry, in the shower, in the car, putting the toddler to bed, in the pantry. My lovely private places.

Why the hell can’t I show this to my kiddos? I have no problem showing them anger, happiness, why not show them sadness? Why not show them that grief can be handled healthily? Why do we hide our sadness?

I’m legit asking. I wish I could explain why vulnerability is bad. I wish I could understand when I was taught this concept. Maybe it’s a coping mechanism I’ve picked up. Who knows?

One of the only places that I can be my true grieving self in at my grief groups. I can be real with my anger and sadness over my son’s death. And it’s ok. It’s my ‘Benny time.’ And I look forward to it all month because it’s like offloading so much that has been stuffed down deep inside.

And here obviously. Here I am still in my protective bubble. And I know that most anyone reading this gets it. And even if they don’t, they can empathize. Because wearing this mask is exhausting sometimes.

#thisischildloss

The Next Right Thing

**Spoiler Alert for Frozen II**

Clearly I am on a Frozen II kick this week! If you don’t have little kids, or haven’t seen it, you have missed Disney getting grief right. I know that I’ve posted other songs/lyrics from the movie, but this one was a gut punch. I have never been so bowled over by a scene/song in an animated movie before. And I was prepared!

It all started when my oldest came home one day to tell me that Olaf the snowman dies in Frozen II. I knew we would be taking the kids to see it, so I needed to be prepared. We love Olaf over here (I swear my 4 year old son is part Olaf), so I was worried how my kids would handle this. I was concerned it would be triggering for my eleven year old, who is the only one to know her brother before he died.

I reached out to a friend, who reminded me that this was a Disney movie (in other words , everything ends well), but that that scene was sad and Anna sings a song about loss. So I knew what was coming. And I sat in that theatre and I cried my damn heart out.

I watched Anna hold Olaf as he was being reduced to snowflakes and my God it took me back to the last moments of holding Benny and saying good bye. And the lyrics to the song that Anna sang during that scene were probably the best description that I have ever heard of how to handle early grief.

This is cold
This is empty
This is numb
The life I knew is over
The lights are out
Hello, darkness
I’m ready to succumb

I follow you around
I always have
But you’ve gone to a place I cannot find
This grief has a gravity
It pulls me down
But a tiny voice whispers in my mind
You are lost, hope is gone
But you must go on
And do the next right thing

Can there be a day beyond this night?
I don’t know anymore what is true
I can’t find my direction, I’m all alone
The only star that guided me was you
How to rise from the floor
When it’s not you I’m rising for?
Just do the next right thing
Take a step, step again
It is all that I can to do
The next right thing
I won’t look too far ahead
It’s too much for me to take
But break it down to this next breath
This next step
This next choice is one that I can make

So I’ll walk through this night
Stumbling blindly toward the light
And do the next right thing
And with the dawn, what comes then
When it’s clear that everything will never be the same again?
Then I’ll make the choice
To hear that voice
And do the next right thing

I’ve seen dark before
But not like this

Nearly seven years later I’m still stumbling around trying to do the next right thing. Some days are easier than others. Some days there just don’t seem to be any right things.

I guess that’s all we can do when we are confronted with such a huge loss, is realize that the life we knew is gone and try to figure out what is next. And that can seem very overwhelming.

Anna reminds us to measure time slowly at first, break it down to make it more manageable. You shouldn’t try to figure it out all at once.

But we always must go on. Even though we don’t want to and the grief is so heavy. We must make the choice to keep moving. And keep doing the next right thing.

#thisischildloss

Show Yourself

Some more great lyrics from Frozen II. Very empowering.

#thisischildloss

This Will All Make Sense When I am Older

We have little ones, so naturally we have seen Frozen II. I think I am more excited than my children are for when this movie is released on DVD. Disney has wrapped so much feeling and emotion into an hour and 43 minute movie. Now that I have memorized all of the songs from Frozen II (we play them on repeat constantly), I am desperate to watch it again. The lyrics are so unbelievably poignant and speak to me on many different levels.

If you haven’t seen the Frozen movies, the premise of this particular song is when the snow man, Olaf, is trying desperately to make sense of something that makes no sense. He was created by magic in the first movie, so he is younger and is seeking knowledge. He also tends to be very dim witted (yet lovable) and seems to think that age equals understanding.

Last Friday I turned 40. And even though I had been listening to this song over and over on repeat for the last month, I didn’t realize the message in the lyrics. And how absolutely absurd and hilarious they actually are. I can tell you that no matter what age you are, everything will absolutely make no sense.

The more that I have tried to rationalize the awful things that have happened in my life, the more I have realized that that is not possible. With age, the only thing that seems to make sense is that nothing does. I have changed my thinking from an ‘Everything happens for a Reason’ type of person to a ‘Shit happens’ type of person. Because sometimes things that happen that have no meaning or reason.

When we try to justify something tragic, we do harm to those involved by disregarding the severity of the situation and their feelings towards it. The only one that we make feel better is ourselves because we are creating distance between ourselves and their tragedy. I have been guilty of doing this and I’m sure it’s just a survival instinct, along the lines of ‘that couldn’t happen to me.’ I am now of the mindset of ‘know better, do better.’

I have learned that death, love, loss, tragedy and human emotion don’t make much sense. And I’m making my peace with that. It’s a process to retrain your thinking, but a sudden tragedy will do that to you. Thank you Disney for recognizing how silly of a concept trying to make sense of the insensible is.

#thisischildloss

Here

Just heard this song for the first time. Wow. Love to anyone missing someone today. ♥️

#thisischildloss

Loving & Losing

Take Time

This is so very true. As a mom I put a whole ton of pressure on myself to do ‘all the things.’ All the time. It’s exhausting.

My brain is constantly swirling with my to do’s for work, for home, for my kids and sometimes even myself. I often joke that my brain looks like an internet browser with 30+ tabs open. Because, well, life. And that is a lot. All of the time.

Sometimes when you’re running like that all of the time you forget that you can stop. The Earth will not stop spinning and fall off its axis. Your to do list will still be there tomorrow.

When Benny died, the world paused for me. Those to do’s suddenly disappeared. Everything just stopped, it was almost as if time stood still. All of a sudden I wasn’t running, hell I was barely crawling.

Me, who always had a plan always knew the next step, had nothing in my sights. I was injured so I figured I’d be home for a few weeks from work. Well, a few weeks turned into a few months and then a year, and then a decision to leave my career. I walked away from a job I loved with people I adored. And it took me a year to come to that conclusion.

I didn’t drive for about four months after the accident. I couldn’t handle the responsibility of being in control of a motor vehicle, even though we were hit outside of my car. It all seemed like too much. It took me about 18 months before I would drive longer than a half hour. I still won’t go longer than an hour or two by myself in the car. And I used to sit in my car from 3-5 hours a day at my old job.

What’s my point? Be kind to yourself. Grief takes time, so take time for grief. You do not have to figure it all out today. One of the best pieces of advice we were given was to not make any big decisions / life changes during that first year. It may not work for all but it worked for us. It gave me a chance to get my footing back and decide what was next for us so that we could start walking towards what the future held.

How A Grief Group Led Me To Hope

My article on joining a grief group has been picked up by The Mighty. Check it out!

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/grief-support-group-led-hope-114539082.html

Fear

In the last year I’ve found that I have received most of my news information from Facebook. Since the accident I do not watch the news or really follow current events. People post a lot of that (especially now), so I have no choice but to see it.

Parker and I are friends with many people on both sides of the political spectrum, so we see some really interesting stuff. Political beliefs are one thing, but very often I will notice that someone from the right will post about XYZ and then someone from the left (completely unrelated) will post something refuting XYZ. So this is when I feel like I need to be educated and go in search of the facts.

I liked it better when I was ‘in the bubble.’ Where the worst thing that could happen, already did. Ignorance is bliss and I liked my small little world where very little information got in.

A friend of mine recently posted on FB that she ‘chooses humanity over fear,’ in referring to the refugee crisis. Of all the posts that I read concerning this, hers was the most researched and she was able to back up her viewpoint.

But I’m not here to write about politics. I’m the last person that should be making an argument for either side. What struck me was how she said she ‘chooses humanity over fear.’ Parker and I have been talking about it for days now and I’ve come to the realization that we don’t have a choice, fear is what we know.

Now I’m not speaking in reference to the refugee crisis, but rather this whole ISIS threat. As far as I’m concerned, they have won with us. They have met their end goal. I’m fucking terrified. I know what it’s like to lose a child. I don’t ever want to be there again.

A week ago we were considering taking Darcy to see A Christmas Carol, that idea ended last night as I’m reading that we should ‘stay away from large crowds.’ Yes, we’re being paranoid and we get that. Yes, we let ISIS win by sheltering ourselves, but it’s not a choice for us. I didn’t choose fear, it chose me.

I do not like the hold that it has over our lives, but it’s going to change how we do things, where we go. I honestly started looking into home schooling, this is how paranoid I’ve become. Parker, who is so often my voice of reason when I’m being crazy looked at me last night and said, ok, I’m onboard. He said to me, ‘we know what it’s like to lose a child, it changes how you view things, what you feel threatened by.’

So now I sit here in panic and wait for something bad to happen. I know it’s not healthy and most of the time I can snuggle the kiddos and make it disappear for a bit, but it’s always there in the back of my mind. What if…

2 Years ‘AA’

So I need to write one more entry for CYG to close it out, but in order to do so, I need to look back at where I was last year relative to this year. Suffice it to say, it’s going to be awhile.

I’m curious how different things look through the lense of 2 years out opposed to 1 year out. Yes, there are obvious things have changed, such as Fletch, but it’s supposed to be about where I’m at in my ‘grief journey.’ I don’t know that I like that term because ‘journey’ implies that there is an end. There is no end to this.

I cannot believe that I’m writing about this 2 years out. It all seems so foreign to me now. It’s like that awful thing that happened to someone else-but it actually happened to me. How is that even possible? 2 years out and I still cannot wrap my head around losing Benny and I was there! I guess not too much has changed in that department.

He would be 3 1/2 now. I can’t believe that. He would be in preschool. Maybe he would play soccer or do gymnastics. Maybe he and Darcy would fight like siblings do. A lot of ‘maybe’s’ and ‘would’s’ here. More like ‘should.’

I miss him every day. I watch Fletch, who is so like his brother, and wonder what kind of mischief they might get into together. They have the same flirty smile and deep dimples. I watch Fletch play with Darcy and I’m so filled with happiness and sorrow all at once. There’s someone missing from their game, there always will be.

I’m not surprised at how much I miss him, but rather how much I miss my mom. I feel like every time something big happens, I miss her more. I missed her at graduation, both high school and college; I missed her at my wedding, but most of all I missed her when I first had kids.

My grandmother was right down the street from us growing up. She came over after school and did our laundry, ironed and always had fresh baked cookies and butter cake. My mom’s family is close and I have so many amazing memories growing up with that family during holidays. I miss that. I want that for my kids.

I think what made me miss her most this year was the absence of our remaining parents. Not one of them acknowledged November 8th. No phone call, no email, no text. It probably wouldn’t bother me so much if at least one of them remembered. The worst thing for a grieving parent is the belief that their child is being forgotten. Well, thanks for that.

I know that if my mom was here, she would have been there. She would have been there so much over the last 2 years. She would have been an amazing support, she would have been a parent. It kills me. It’s grief compounded.

2 years out sucks too. All of it still feels so unfair. I mourn for Benny, I mourn for my mom, I mourn that Fletch will never meet his older brother. I’m assuming it will just get harder too, because he’s our after. He doesn’t know what he’s missing. Kind of like Darcy with my Mom. She doesn’t know what she’s missing. It breaks my heart for both of them.

I wish that I could say that it gets easier. It’s like parenting I suppose, it doesn’t get easier, the grief just changes. What used to set you off a year ago is ok and another trigger has taken it’s place. You start to lose another part of that person. It sucks.