more on grieving

I hate my life today. I hate crying, I hate feeling so sad and empty, and I hate that I don’t know when this will ever end. I hate spending my life at 1:32am crying and crying and crying, and getting a headache because of all the crying. I just want it all to end right now, but I don’t see how I can possibly make that happen without hurting myself, and I definitely don’t want to do that in the least. I just want the pain to go away. I’d do anything to just feel nothing right now. Why can’t someone just come and help me and take it all away? I feel so alone and abandoned and just plain unloved, even though I know I’m not. This is what 1:32 am does to me today, I guess.

grieving

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s grieving. After my grandmother died, the process was so difficult I entered into several years of therapy, in which I had the chance to come to terms with plenty of other issues. But the grieving itself nearly killed me, and it’s during subsequent bouts of grief when I worry most about whether I’ll have the courage to keep going on in life. The past week has brought an entirely new episode of coming to terms with loss into my life, and once again I’m at that point where the pain seems interminable.

Doing some research about the grieving process, I found a website that isn’t so much critical of Kübler-Ross’s stages of grieving as it is honest about grieving being highly subjective. About the five stages of grief, in fact, Kübler-Ross said,

They were never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages. They are responses to loss that many people have, but there is not a typical response to loss, as there is no typical loss. Our grief is as individual as our lives.

And the site, instead, offers three general categories of grief:

1. The first reaction to loss, SHOCK can involve just minutes or last for days. You might feel numb or be in disbelief. You might be unable to make simple decisions or attend to your daily routine;
2. When the shock wears off, the SUFFERING begins and can last for weeks, months, and intermittently for years. If you’re suffering from a loss, you’ll typically experience waves of emotions that can involve sadness, anger, guilt, anxiety, or any combination of those feelings and others. The pain is as palpable a physical experience as it is emotional. You might also experience physical symptoms such as loss of appetite, sleeplessness, or chest pain, and behavioral symptoms such as withdrawal from society, mood swings, or inability to concentrate; and
3. RECOVERY represents not the end of pain over a loss but the ability to reconnect to the interesting and joyful parts of life — to refocus your attention from your pain of loss to living with meaning and purpose.

I think it’s safe to say I’ve entered the Suffering Stage over the past 48 hours. I’ll be fine for a little while but then start thinking of all that’s happened over the past ten days, and I’m reduced to a blubbering mess. I’m having to force myself to eat; nothing tastes good anymore. I can’t fall asleep until 2am, even when I’ve got an 8am class. I don’t want to leave my house. And I blanked on my Math quiz today — something that’s completely unheard of — even though we’d been covering the exact same material only moments earlier. In short, I’m a mess.

The biggest challenge, right now, is finding people to help me through the grieving process. Everyone is so busy in their own lives, and what going on with me is so largely a secret that it’s difficult to just reach out to anyone at random. I know who my friends are — thanks to K. and V. and M. in particular — but it’s still hard to be so weak so frequently. It’s hard to deal with these things at 2am, when surely no one is awake to get my “I’m so sad and I can’t stop crying” text messages. I can only take a cue from the past and realize that it gets incrementally easier at some point, and there will be some day when I don’t think about the sadness at all. It’s extremely difficult, entering this second stage, to see when that will be. Faith in myself is what it takes, I suppose.

What they don’t tell you…

I wrote this in 2002, soon after the last abortion I had before this one. I’ve been going through some of my old writing, trying to remember what the psychological aftermath is like, when I realized it was probably normal to have feelings about how I could have made a different choice if I wanted to, even though I knew what the “right” choice was. I like these paragraphs:

What they don’t tell you is that afterward, there is a lot of bleeding, with clots. They don’t tell you that your breasts will begin to produce milk and become painfully hard and leak, because your body thinks you’ve had a baby, only a bit too early. No one tells you that you’ll hunger for that baby, that you’ll scream at ghosts and beg to make your choice go away. You’ll grab your belly and claw at the bed sheets, wishing things could have been different. You lie to yourself, say you could have handled being a single mother with no support, that another child doesn’t take that much more effort, that you didn’t know it would be like this, that you would have just done something, anything, if only you could take it all back and not have this pain and not be sitting on a toilet at three in the morning, crying and sobbing as half-dollar-sized globs of blood descend from your empty uterus through a war-ravaged vagina to make a sickening plopping sound into the bottom of the toilet.

But they also don’t tell you the screaming will stop, regret will turn to relief, the bleeding will go away, your milk will dry up, you will (soon enough) be able to look at babies without crying, the pain becomes part of who you are and dissipates, one day you will wake up and you will realize that you did the only, the best thing you could do and, damnit!, you’re going to embrace that and be that “I’ve had an abortion and I lived through it and I’d do it again if I were in the same situation” kind of woman.

They don’t tell you that, one day, you will take the strong part of the core of your being — that part that made you want to be more than just a struggling, overworked single mom wondering how to pay the electric bill — and you will love and nurture that strength and thank the gods and goddesses that you had the chance to make that choice. They don’t tell you that one day you will have a child — or two — when you’re ready, and it will be as pure joy as you have felt pure pain, and you will know that life is good.

Finished.

The meeting with D. went badly yesterday. I’ve come to realize that he is simply incapable of empathy. The worst-case scenario was always that I’d have to go through all of this alone, and so it’s not like anything worse than what’s already transpired could possibly happen. Holding on to bitterness and anger and pain isn’t doing me any good. So I’ll just move on. That’s the only other option.

Close call

I’m still bleeding, but the clotting has subsided and the pain is much more manageable. This is good, since I didn’t intend to drop B. back at his dad’s house so I could spend six hours in the ER for procedures that would collectively and objectively take less than an hour.

***

Today, I’m meeting D. for coffee. Thursday night, in a fit of romantic delusion (probably influenced by watching that evening’s episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, in which Danny Tripp proposes to Jordon McDeere as she’s about to be wheeled off to have an emergency C-section), I drove to his house. Walking the fine line between romance and stalking, I made sure his car was in the ‘hood before calling. And call I did: twice, plus one text message for good measure. As it turned out, I felt dumb anyhow: he’d gone out with a friend (in the friend’s car), and so I drove home feeling dejected and halfway humiliated.

I suppose I thought if he SAW MY FACE that he couldn’t continue to run away. Instead, I freaked him out, though I suppose one side benefit was that it woke him up to how urgently I feel his lack of taking responsibility:

I am sorry I was not there when you stopped by. I have to admit I was a little shocked and maybe a bit uncomfortable last night that you made it a point to come over, but obviously you felt it was important for us to have some face-to-face time.

Gee, you think?

We’ll see how things go today. I don’t have extremely high hopes. I’m just planning on getting there early, sitting nonchalantly sipping espresso and reading a magazine when he arrives, and looking absolutely fabulous.

And then the aftermath…

I took B. to the North Park Village Nature Center today for the City Wilds Festival — lots of eco-friendly educational resources and a wonderful nature walk experience. No cicadas in sight (thank goodness), but at the grocery store afterward I noticed I was rather crampy and began to feel, well, damp. Arriving home, I realized I’d started bleeding, something I’ve had none of since the abortion on Tuesday.

Since about 2pm, I’ve been passing clots and I’ve been in no small amount of pain. Talked with the doctor on call, who says that if it doesn’t stop by 9pm, I should phone him and we’ll decide whether I should go to the ER (probably yes). I’ve been dosing on ibuprofen and hoping it doesn’t come to that, though it doesn’t look good (it’s 6:18pm and nothing’s gotten better).

This is the first night in some time I’ve been able to relax at my place with B., and we’re having such a good time just being in each other’s presence that it would be unfortunate to have that cut short because my body has decided to rebel now, a full four days after its violation.

Then again, nothing about this experience has gone the way I’d have hoped.

Something = not nothing

As if it were a sporting event to which we’d both purchased tickets, and I’d denied him the chance to see the big game, D. remains upset that I “forbade” him from being present at the abortion:

On Tuesday, it was completely unfair of you to not let me in that office. I had every right to be there as you did, and because you didn’t get your way you forbade me from going. Do you honestly think I would have blown up at you right there?

What he can’t seem to grasp is that no one had a “right” to be there. By virtue of circumstance, my presence was demanded; clearly no abortion would be had in my absence. I gave him every warning, every smoke signal, every humanly possible indication that, should he continue to choose to be aloof and unsupportive, he would be unwelcome in that room. And it isn’t that I was even remotely fearful he’d blow up at me; rather, I was afraid he’d continue to do just what he’d been “doing” for the previous two weeks. That is: nothing. And whether it was an unrealistic expectation or not, what I needed on Tuesday was infinitely more than nothing.

Reminder to self

If last night was crying (and crying it was), today is cleansing. I’m going through stacks of papers, sorting through work to be done, taking inventory of my home and my life. I’m beginning to remember that I was a whole person before I met D., and I will be a whole person long after he’s gone from my life (which looms sooner with each passing day). I am a strong woman — a strong woman who, inevitably, will cry herself to sleep again many more times before she dies, a fact that depresses less than it heartens.

The first day after…

…crying is all that can be done.

6w5d

To describe what happened today is impossible. Sum it up to love, lots of love. Love from M., who picked me up, who brought me to CVS, where I could buy pads, who drove me to the doctor, who advised me on how much Ativan to take, who sat with me in the waiting room, who held my hand through the abortion, who waited in line for my medication while I made my follow-up appointment, who drove me back to her house, who let me sleep on her $1,300-bed, who drove me to the house where my kiddos were, who stayed with me and the kiddos, who let me sleep on the couch while she watched the kiddos, who just damned loved me through the whole damned day.

It’s so cliched, but you never know who your friends are until shit hits the fan.

I’m not happy there’s shit to be hitting, but I’m infinitely grateful that the friends are coming to the surface. I love you all.