Grief is a *Bleep

February 8, 2017 /  Julianna Czech  /  3 Comments  /  General Blog, Julianna Czech, Surviving Sundays

Grief is a bitch. There, I said it. Many days, I fly right through. There are moments I pause and think about the last 10 weeks and wonder where time has gone. I might shed a tear or two, sometimes they are tears over happy memories but mostly they are tears of pain because my baby boys and I were robbed of a future together with their Daddy. When I grieve, I grieve over what I miss and what I am going to miss. The plans we talked about for our boys, vacations, retirement.

There are days like today. The day starts off like any other. Then out of nowhere it spirals out of control. Maybe my toddler has requested three different breakfasts in the span of thirty seconds. Maybe it was because my baby woke up too early and didn’t want to fall back asleep, so now we are both tired. And just like that, I start my seemingly scheduled panic about forgetting all my memories of my husband. I’m trying desperately lately to remember all the details of our marriage, the things he did with our sons, the details of his death.

Was I holding his hand when he died? Or was I touching his leg? Was I even touching him? Was he scared? Did I do everything I could to make him comfortable? Did I help him feel less afraid?  God how I hope he wasn’t afraid. He knew he was dying. He told our friend it was a good thing and a bad thing. And it was both of those things for me.

Lately, my heart aches for what he was feeling and fearing while going through the hellish year of surgeries, chemo and complications from surgery. We shared many of the same fears, but the day he went to have fluid drained from his lungs for the first time, I found something I wish I hadn’t.  A cancer webpage was open on his phone, he was reading “what does it feel like to die.” I wasn’t sure if I could keep going. I never mentioned it to him.  I knew it was something he had to read about, he needed to think about because that was where his mind wanted to go.

Grief is such a *bleeping* roller coaster. It sucks. On the night Adam died, I asked his best friend how I would ever survive this.  He told me, what he shared with everyone during the eulogy: “. . . while we may sit here and not know how to get through tomorrow, we will wake up, and it will, for lack of a better term, suck.  The next day will probably suck too. But one day we will get up in the morning and take a baby step, and it will hurt a little less. Even though the next day might be a step backward, eventually we will start taking more steps forward than back.”

But, as I move along in my own grief, I am learning this is one task I need to do on my own.  I need alone time to grieve, and baby + toddler = none. Especially when one or both are always challenging me to grow and be patient, using all my energy reserves. It takes energy to grieve. Who knew?

Every grieving widow is different, but one thing is the same among us all.  Friends and family checking in with a simple text or voicemail, maybe even a card in the mail long after the “get well” and “sorry for your loss” cards have stopped, mean more then you’ll ever know.  Maybe you offer to take the boys or say yes when I ask you. Please know that sending my boys to your house is filled with guilt, relief, excitement(!), more guilt, and time for me to grieve.

You might have to leave three voicemails before I call you back. Be prepared for the dinner date to be cancelled last minute, maybe even twice, because I am not emotionally or socially available like I thought I would be. It might take me three months to get back to you on the offer to watch my sons, so I hope you really meant it the first time you offered! The reality is I am a tired, single mom grieving the loss of my best friend and sons’ father.

Grief ebbs and flows. Some days it is a tsunami and other days like a little trail of water running down my driveway. Today it is a tsunami and that’s okay. I’ll be better equipped for tomorrow’s grief because I got through today.