I survived the Sad Day...

again.

Yesterday was hard. The entire day was spent on the verge of tears, sad to my very core, for everything. I could attempt to reason my way out of it, try to find out the ‘why’, but grief doesn’t often provide you with validation papers. It just hits you sometimes, like a wave in the sea.

Early in my grief journey, when my husband died unexpectedly, I learned about these grief waves. Back then, the waves were hurricane force: able to crush me. Riding those waves often meant feeling like I was being held under the water, barely able to hold my breath long enough to reach the surface again.

But I did hold my breath long enough.

And then I learned that surfers, when they found the perfect wave (not to be confused with the very imperfect waves of grief), they would dive into the wave to come out on top of it and surf to their hearts content.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

I like this image for grief as well, because grief does not allow you to ignore it, doesn’t let you avoid it, grief is coming no matter what dodge and weave you attempt to throw in its path. Grief WILL hit you. And in the years since I learned about the surfers actions, I have chosen to dive into grief when it presents me with a wave, big or small.

Feeling the grief completely is the only way to ride it out. And yesterday was a day of feeling it intensely.

My grief from losing my husband a month before his 50^th birthday was only the beginning of my journey. The following year, his mother died, just over a year after her oldest son. Then less than 9 months later, my father, who had struggled with pain for years, and whose health had been in decline for quite some length, also died. I was with mom assisting her with daddy’s care for his last month. And I held his hand as he took his final breath.

Those three significant deaths compounded my grief journey. And then we all began our collective grieving of the Covid pandemic, when our lives were forever altered in 2020. And in my view, we have been avoiding dealing with that grief ever since that very scary time before we were able to have vaccines to boost our mask usage. (I could go off on a tangent here but choose not to do so.)

In the years following my father’s death, I became mom’s primary person despite living five hours away. When she needed to see specialists requiring driving on highways, I drove myself up to assist several times a year. In 2022, I spent several months living with her to get her prepared for her second heart valve replacement surgery, got her through surgery and to her one-month checkup, after which, she was diagnosed with dementia.

More compounding of the grief.

These past few months, her disease has been taking more and more away from her. She doesn’t remember where the light switches are in the house. Her incontinence issues have dramatically increased. As she washes up dishes following supper, she asks if she had her pills-as the container I put them in is in her hand to be washed.

Compounded grief on steroids.

Yesterday, the full force of all that grief tried its best to make me stay underneath the wave until my breath was gone. I did all the things that have helped to ease the wave in the past, to no avail. The grief was relentless.

So I dove in.

I sat with the grief, let it know that I understood it needed my attention. And I stopped trying to ease it.

And, in doing so, I was able to come out on the other side of this necessary visit with grief. Because the resilience I have learned, and earned, over the past eight years is stronger than my grief. If I pay my dues when the waves come, and take the time to sit with grief, and fully feel.

I survived the sad day, and will do so again.