Grief is a strange and funny thing. I've heard it said that grief comes in waves, and it never truly goes away. In my short time being a "griever" of a very close, personal loss (like everyone, I've lost other loved ones I was very close to, but never someone who I had such an intense connection to), I certainly feel that statement is true. Some days, even a few of those early days shortly after Osias died, don't always seem that bad. They are the days when I can think positive and focus on the fact that he's living it up in a far better place than this world could ever be to him. The other days are the ones everyone expects us to have after losing a child, the ones filled with dread and crippling sorrow, the ones that make it so dang hard to get out of bed. The ones that I'm just not allowed to be having now that I'm outside of the one-year window from my baby's death.
But I still do.
Another funny thing about grief is that it always seems to show up the strongest when it's unannounced and unexpected. Of course, we expect to have the really hard days on certain milestones, but those haven't always lived up to their dreaded expectation. It's those normal, run-of-the-mill days of no significance when grief likes to speed into the driveway with the horn honking and maybe even doing a doughnut or two in the grass for good measure. It knocks down the front door like the Kool-aid man and straps its heavy self onto me like one of those backpacks they wear during military training hikes. It can literally stop me in my tracks and throw off every plan I had for the day. Sometimes it sticks around for a week or so, sometimes only a matter of hours, but it's usually for two or three days at a time.
Grief is pretty unpredictable, in spite of being neatly organized into the list of stages all the books say we will (and certainly have!) go through. Not only with its inconsistent arrivals, but with its varying intensity. This week was a strange one. I started feeling that familiar smothered feeling, where grief becomes a physical affliction in addition to the emotional type. It caught me off guard, because I'd been doing so well lately and was getting pretty excited about some of the progress we've made toward our adoption and some other goals I have right now. It took me several hours to figure out what the problem was, because it wasn't the usual super-mega-intense sort of grief that typically makes me feel that way. This grief was a very strong ache, throwing me completely off my groove and making me feel that restless anxiety that something was wrong.
Of course something was wrong. Something will always be wrong, because I've outlived my child.
When I had a little bit of quiet time to stop and try to ponder what was going on, I realized that my emotions and my body were all geared up to struggle over some things I hadn't even been thinking about. We'd had family pictures taken last week for our personal use and to add to our adoption profile...and Osias wasn't in them. I'd had a fleeting thought about whether or not I should take a photo of him along for us to hold in the pictures, but I'd decided against it. All of a sudden, it felt so wrong that we had taken family pictures without our whole family in it. Beyond that, our older son's birthday is this week, and it's yet another occasion that we will be celebrating without our baby. It's weird to have my "youngest" child be turning four, even though my true youngest is much younger than that.
Christmas is right around the corner, which means there will be Christmas card photos of kids in their red and green jammies by the tree...but not all the kids will be there. There will be an empty stocking hanging by the fireplace, because there's no one here to excitedly dig through it on Christmas morning. It sucks.
I'm doing much better now, even though I'm sure the tone of this post suggests otherwise. I know there are tons and tons of things out there about grief and losing a child and all that, but I felt like maybe people need to know that there's more to it than one would expect. It's not all tears and dreary thoughts, but even the happiest smiles have a hint of sadness to them. It's a bittersweet existence, but it's one that I wouldn't trade for the world, because my grief is evidence of a life that once lived -- a precious life that I will always be thankful to have had in my life. So if you've lost a child and are feeling out of sorts or not normal, know that you are not alone. And if you haven't lost a child yourself but know someone who has, try not to hold them to your expectations of their grief.
