The past couple weeks have been a bit hectic as the school semester closed and I prepared for graduation.
The bad thing about that is the time I now have to think again.
Ugh.
In the last week, I have found myself weeping a little more easily.
Especially as graduation approaches.
I am a little less distracted from the noise of school and life.
I have now have time to read for pleasure.
Tonight I drew myself a bath and grabbed Matt Logelin's book.
I only had two chapters left.
Matt's book has really hit parts of me as it has a lot of the widows I know.
Like Candice and Supa.
I want to share two sentences that grabbed me tonight:
Grief "would fold itself into my blood, into my cells, into my DNA.
My heart would pump it and my veins would carry it, every moment, all the time."
So many people think that grief goes away.
And every widow I know.
As well as every person I know that knows grief on a personal would scream from rooftops that it does not work that way.
Absolutely does not.
Unfortunately.
It becomes part of you.
And my grief for Roger and my dad, especially, is with me all the time.
I will think of Roger a lot more this week.
Remembering his own graduation.
Thinking about what it means for me.
Thinking about the how.
Thinking about the why I am graduating now.
Thinking about how is not in attendance.
I miss him more than I can ever find the words for.
More than I can cry for.
And it is so hard to think he has been gone for so long.
1 comment:
I'm not surprised at all to hear that the grief has been creeping in more this week. I wish it wasn't…but after 5.5+ years of this crap road, I'm not surprised at all (and truth be told, I would have been surprised if it HADN'T cropped back up for you).
I remember it being an odd time as I came up on the last few months before the 3-year anniversary of Charley's death. I was ashamed and embarrassed that I was still grieving (and even more embarrassed that I had no clue I was still even grieving), and it was such an odd mental and emotional space because I'd assumed, courtesy of our culture, that I should long be past it. Yet now, I can look back and see that OF COURSE it was still awful, and hard, and how I was still in that earlier half of grief.
Ironically, you're almost to the same point as I was when I first started writing my blog. I started it 3 months before the 3-year anniversary…and I "met" you about a month or two after Roger died. Strange juxtaposition, huh?
I remember sitting in my local widowed support group shortly after I first started, and wondering at the women who were 2 1/2, 3, years out and still needing to come to a grief group (or, worse still, just needing to start coming at 3 years out). While it was a comfort to know that I didn't have to be "over it" by 2 1/2 years out, I always assumed it was something integral to them, their histories, their personalities--that there was something lacking in THEM--that they'd still need to be coming to a grief group at 2, 3, 4, years out. I swore that I'd do it better, more consciously, more deeply, so that I wouldn't need to still be coming at 2, 3, 4 years out.
Yet that's exactly what happened, because I eventually came to understand that it didn't have anything to do with them--it's just how this shit works, a sign of just how hard it is and how long it takes to come out on the other side. And even though I do feel I'm on the other side of the worst of it, I still go, because those people understand it all implicitly…and because they're more empathetic toward me than I am toward myself. Thank god for all my widdas, both the ones in person and the ones online…. =)
(ANd sorry! I don't know why I ended up hijacking your comment so much. =))
Much love and many hugs to you this week….
~Candice
Post a Comment