Category: grief

Hello fellow grievers, it’s been a while since I last did a blog. Where have I been all this time? Well gang, I was studying for a huge licensure exam. I took that exam a few weeks back and passed! Soooo now that the studying is done, I have a little more time on my hands. Truth be told, it kinda felt nice to be so busy that I didn’t have time to think about grief. One has to wonder about the meaning of that. Its learning the fine balance of not dwelling in the grief and moving forward with the grief by my side.

Back in March I went to the beach with a good friend of mine. As typical, when I am at the beach, I walk along the water and allow the sights and sounds to cleanse and calm my overactive mind. Once that occurs, I can focus on my feelings and many times, great ideas come forward. I had my phone with me when these ideas started and buzzing around, so I used the voice to text feature on my phone, thinking it would capture my thoughts much quicker than trying to type them in. Once I spoke my magnificent ideas into the note aspect of my phone, I put the phone in my pocket and walked on.

I finally pulled up my notes from that day on the beach and found that my phone didn’t quite capture my brilliant words as I had imagined it would. I had a jumbled mess of words and sentences that trigger a thought, but I just can’t seem to remember the idea of why I felt it was so important and profound at the time.

The idea that came so strongly to me that morning was grief and logic. Grief doesn’t take a logical road in my mind.  Elizabeth Kubler Ross was an author that put grief into stages. She wrote books about the stages of grief and those books impacted the treatment of grief for behavioral health providers. In fact, in the DSM 5, prolonged grief is now a disorder. It’s defined as persistent longing or yearning and/or preoccupation with the deceased accompanied by at least 3 of 8 symptoms that include disbelief, intense emotion pain, feeling identity confusion, avoidance of reminders of the loss, feelings of numbness, intense loneliness, meaninglessness or difficulty engaging in on-going life.  Wow! Well sign me up for counseling right away. What’s normal? What’s complicated? How do we study it? Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s stages of grief are often referenced when people assume you are not going through the stages in a timely manner. Who defines the timeline of grief? Companies in the USA only allow you 3 days for an immediate family member and 1 day for a distant family member, and oh hey, your best friend dies, good luck on getting any time off. If it takes more than a month to get the acceptance part of grief, do you need mental health help?

This is what happens when people try to be logical with grief. Again, I reference back to those statements that people make to “silver line” your rain cloud.  My personal favorite logical statement is: “Crystal, you know your mother would never have wanted to live the way she was living” NO SHIT, really? She didn’t want to live that way? Wow that is profound, thank you for telling me exactly what my mother would have wanted. All my heart at that time was focused on the loss of her physical body. The logical side of my mind knows that my mother never wanted to live that way, but my heart was breaking at the loss of my mother. My loss of identity as her daughter, my loss of my role as a caregiver.  Three years later, I still struggle with the loss of identity. Does that mean my grief is persistent? My sister-in-law who has done counseling for many years really started me down the process of understanding my grief. You see, I was trying to be logical with my grief, I was trying to do everything to avoid the emotional aspect of my grief. She encouraged me to feel the grief. To sit in it and to stop rationalizing it. She reminded me that I was loved and talked me through some of my lowest points. She reminded me that I was different than my brothers when it came to grieving. I was the caregiver, and I had to hold it together so that my parents could get the care they needed. While everyone else in my family were grieving even before my parents died, I couldn’t do that. I’m at a different part of my grief then my family. I’m on my own journey. I find most days, I’m doing ok, then something triggers a sucker punch to the gut and I lose it all over again. I would get mad at myself, the logical brain would try to be stoic and positive. The emotional side wants to scream and yell and cry and curl up and sleep for days until the feeling passes.

I recently read a really good book by Patti Callahan called Surviving Savannah (non-fiction). There was a statement that spoke so loudly to me. The statement was: “How do you survive the surviving”. How do we survive being the ones left behind? This simple statement has been stuck in my head and I can’t seem to walk away from it. I have been asking myself this question a lot lately, “how am I surviving the surviving?”  I do know the surviving has changed me. I’m not the same person I was on May 3^rd as I was on May 4^th, or on Aug 14^th or November 29^th. That person is gone. She’s been replaced with a much more sensitive and cautious person. A fearful person if I must be truthful. A quieter, more introspective person, a person afraid to allow others to get close for fear of loss. A person who is no longer vested in making new friendships, for fear they will only lead to more loss. My best friend not only died, but I lost people simply because they couldn’t stick around in the grief. They didn’t like who I became, or they just didn’t want to talk about my sadness. They don’t like how I am surviving.  I know for those who have stuck around, they tell me they hate seeing me hurt. I say they hate not being able to fix it for me. I can tell you that I am no where near those linear stages of grief that Elizabeth Kubler Ross discusses. I’m probably in the persistent prolonged grief stage, but yet I don’t feel dysfunctional because I’m still surviving the surviving. How are you surviving?