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.

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.