Dangerously Hot Water

Post 7

***I need to kind of correct this a bit… after sleeping on it and waking up reading it I realize it comes across much more grief stricken than it actually was. We really couldn’t have had a better weekend unless Toddy had been there. It was actually a quite wonderful weekend with the most wonderful people. So as you read… try to find humor in my baby grief. Find love and warmth in our weekend as a family. These are the deepest, innermost thoughts- no sympathy is necessary… simply sharing thoughts. I laughed a lot this weekend… loved a lot… ate a lot… talked about Todd alot. It was a very blessed weekend indeed…….

Good day my friends. It has been a long holiday weekend for all of us and hopefully a wonderful one as well. We continued Todd’s tradition of celebrating the Fourth at the lake with family, bluegrass and friends. It was very nice and much more comforting than anticipated. I think he would have been very proud at the job everyone did! Naturally, there was an obvious hole in the atmosphere but everyone seemed to do their best to honor him and make the very best of a difficult time. As I was driving my 3 hour tour back to the thumb of Michigan I was met with the “feels”. I managed to push them aside as much as I could all weekend as they seem to do me no good. There was a moment as the kids went out on the boat that I faced the challenge of confronting the BIG feels by choosing to go with them and experience the lake for the first time without my reason or listen to my body. I was exhausted from the weekend and staying true to what I learned by my online grief counseling video through ONSITE, I let my body lead me through the process and decided to let it rest. One thing at a time, I thought. I was not ready. And that’s alright. Meeting with the “feels” on the ride home I felt the knot of entangled emotions tighten. I was reminded of earlier in the weekend when my friend, Suzanne, had me untangle a necklace for her. How tangled and twisted it had become in the box. I finally took off my earring and used the post to aid in the untangling. It took some time but it began to loosen and finally with some gentle persuasion the knot was undone. I started thinking of my blog and how every one of my writings starts out in a knot of entangled emotions. By writing the words, the knot begins to loosen and by the end of it I feel it has relented and my emotional state is released into something usable again. So with that I would like to express my sincere gratitude that you are here assisting me with the ensnared emotions you allow me to unravel simply by your reading along and the sincerity that it has helped some of you.

Last week I finally ventured out into the world of the living and went to a hardware store. I was working on a project… man-work… and asked a fella there for some help. I wasn’t sure what an item was on my list of directions. I felt like he was thinking, “Oh Lord, help this woman she doesn’t have a clue what she is doing”. I explained to him that I had lost my husband three months ago and just needed a few things that I’d rather just buy than try and figure out where he would have stored them-also noting that my most intelligent husband was not necessarily the handiest man on Earth and frankly I was not even sure he actually owned these items. I knew I had them at the house in Tennessee but since I had not had to really do much man-work here I was not sure what tools were in TDW’s toolbag. Upon leaving, the fella carried some items to my car and I think recalling what I had said in the store, he informed me that my tire was low- which kinda warmed my heart, like he felt it his manly duty to let me know since I probably was too distracted to notice. It made me smile. As I was driving home I began envisioning my grief as an infant. It’s always a strange decision that you make sharing your personal trauma with a stranger as if it were relevant to anything else in the world. Sometimes I feel that it is necessary… at least it is to me. It became this sort of comical episode playing out in my mind. Like, “Excuse me sir, would you hold my grief child for a moment while I attempt to ask simple, mundane questions that ‘normal’ people take for granted”. You see, my grief is in its infancy. It was just born three months ago. It has not yet learned how to behave in public. It is quite needy and unpredictable. It takes a lot to get it all together to simply go to the grocery store. I must pack all of the emotions up and try to carry them with me while carrying my grief infant too. I started to realize that I also had a 10 year old. A sort of pre-pubescent grief child. He has learned to behave in front of people. He does not act up like before. I don’t have to really call any attention to him anymore. On the occasion I still do but rarely. It must be under the right circumstances and generally with the right person. This grief child has learned to be quiet and only speak when spoken to. I have learned that sometimes people do not even have to meet this grief child. Most of the time I believe it is for their benefit if they don’t because they never know what to say to him or how to react. So I often just spare them the trouble of trying to figure it out so I just don’t even introduce them. But this infant is different. This infant seems to be screaming more days than not. It is inconsolable. I feel like a new parent again trying to figure out what it wants to be pacified. It is just that difficult. You read books about it and consult friends that you believe have something to offer from a different perspective but overall it is your problem to figure out. The same as with children this grief child will grow and change. It will go through it’s phases of tantrums and rebellion. It will often try to get it’s way and for a while I am sure it will. But I have to learn to control it. I have to learn to teach it how it must behave. I, too, must learn how to behave with this infant.

The huge difference between the human infant and the grief infant aside from all of the obvi’s is there are definitive milestones in timely expectations of the human infant. They will eat solid foods at a certain age, cut teeth at a certain time, walk, talk and progress in a fairly predictable fashion. It’s pretty tried and true. We know when things are appropriate for this child. There are professions that are dedicated to ensuring that children follow said timeline otherwise there will be concern and interventions- “Something is wrong and we must understand why this child is not at this milestone by x amount of time“. All in all it should grow and mature and hopefully progress successfully into adulthood without abnormal problems. It is our hope, dream and full expectation with the birth of every child. The grief child is born out of a deeply broken heart. You cannot say it is not born of love because it is that very love that has created this “infant” you now cannot go anywhere without. You will tend to it as much as any other new baby that is in your care. You will do your best to care for it because ultimately the goal is to “successfully progress”. No? THAT… is the expectation. But, there is no tried and true method for any one particular person. I suppose there are guidelines and milestones to anticipate along the way. But a timeline? Oh, no no no… there is no such thing. It would be so encouraging and wonderful if we knew that at a certain time as long as we do this, this and this we should have conquered our grief, raised our grief child to it’s adulthood and then send it off to discover the world for himself. We expect that our children will graduate high school somewhere in the neighborhood of eighteen years. Provided that everything goes as planned from that magical moment that they arrive and are placed in your loving arms. But… life, you know. Sometimes life doesn’t always get to be picnics and homeschool and cookies and glass bubbles. Sometimes life does not make sense. We all try to do our best by our children, don’t we? Why should this infant be any different? I’ll tell you why. Because this infant we did not want. This poor infant is one we would rather orphan and never look back on. But there is no return on this one. There is no abandoning it at the church steps. No loving parents to take it in for adoption. Nope… this one is forever yours and yours alone. If you are lucky like me, you will have many babysitters. So many will offer and even try their best to keep this infant for you but will realize quickly that they have even less an idea of what to do with it.

So here is what I have learned with my 10 year old grief child. I have learned that the sooner you embrace this unwanted child that has been birthed UNTO YOU… the sooner life will start to find a path to something. I have no idea where this path is going to lead but once you have accepted that this infant is YOURS, I believe you have reached one of the first milestones in “grief-hood”(the sister to motherhood or fatherhood). All of the denial in the world will never change the fact of the matter. All of the tears that would fill the Mighty Mississippi will not change the fact of the matter. Nothing you can do, try as you may, will change the cold hard fact… of the matter. We fight it. We deny it. We are angry with it. We cry out of desperation. We are resentful. We. Are. Broken. Into. Itty. Bitty. Pieces. We stand in the middle of the room looking around at all of the pieces that were your life only moments ago. Blown to bits. Where ever will you begin to pick them up. Which one do you pick up first? Second? Third? Where do they even go? Oh my God. The carnage that lays before you, around you, engulfing you is beyond comprehension. My friends. The first thing you will pick up, is your infant grief. Hold it. Look at it. Touch it. Become intimate with it as a parent meeting their new child. You must embrace it. It is yours now. Like it or not, it is not going away. So embrace it. Swaddle it up and lie down with it. Get to know it. Figure out what it is demanding of you. In the initial stages of having received this unwanted “gift” we tend to try and run from it. We want AWAY from it. We want to cast it OUT! It is hurting us terribly by it’s very EXISTENCE. But if you are grieving… you know that it absolutely DOES exist. So the sooner you accept that this infant will forever be yours, you will feel a tiny sense of peace… called acceptance. We won’t go further today about your new grief infant. There is plenty to explore together but if you are struggling with where to begin I suggest accept that you have a new addition to your family in the loss of your person. It’s going to be with you for the rest of your life. You have to accept that part and no more at first. It is only a tiny step but none the less~ it is a step.

Being at the lake brings overwhelming memories of the love of my entire life. He is EVERYWHERE there. From the morning coffee to the magnificent evening sunsets he is there. The smell of charcoal burning swells my heart thinking about one of his favorite things to do was to feed all of his family, friends, elderly neighbors and anyone else who happened by on any given afternoon. His clothes still lay where he left them only the morning before his fateful departure from us. But the strangest thing caught my attention this weekend. The hot water. My husband LOVED this dang hotter than hell on a Sunday, unreasonably, insanely, piss you off if you forgot to turn the cold on with it, hot water. We never really understood his determination for this hot water. I am not kidding you when I tell you that you would literally get mad at how hot it was! OOOOH, I WOULD CUSS AT IT! When Juju Bee’s arrived, several of us were adamant about the water being DANGEROUSLY hot. Isn’t it funny the things that will poke you in the feels when you least expect it? I cannot recall right now if it was turned down with his permission, against his will, without his knowledge or after his departure right now. I am sure someone knows but the point here is that the DANGEROUSLY Hot water is what kicked my feels in the shin this weekend. It likes to hit you when you are not looking and least prepared.

Bless you my brothers and sisters on this side of life. Bless those who choose to reach over the divide to give us your hand. And bless your new infant, toddler, adolescent or adult grief child. Thank you for joining me.

Jules W