Grief- Loss of a Loved One

I’m not gonna lie, I don’t want to write this post as just thinking about it brings tears to my eyes.  Losing someone you love is so painful.  There’s that old phrase “‘Tis better to have loved and lost then to have never loved at all”.  Well there are days when I think that’s a bunch of bull crap and I would rather have been all alone and lonely then have amazing people in my life die.  In those moments God usually smacks me up side the head pretty fast and knocks me back into reality and reminds me of how grateful I really am to have loved so many people that are now gone.   I’ve lost grandparents, a dear friend of mine and my husbands, aunts, an uncle, a cousin, and my own dad.  I have grieved each one of these losses individually.  Some I have grieved because the loss affected my own life so much and some I have grieved watching how the loss has affected others so close to me.   Losing a loved one leaves a hole in your heart and an ache in your soul that does lessen a bit over time but that never goes away.  Grieving the loss of my dad, who was my best friend, was definitely the hardest one for me to go through.

I began grieving the loss of my dad before he was even gone from this earth.  When we first found out that he had cancer the doctors told us he had 1-5 years.  I’m a glass half full kind of a girl so I truly believed with all my heart that we would get the full 5 years.  Denial.  There was no way I was going to accept only having one year left with my dad.  As his cancer progressed and after he had had two strokes, we were just a year into his horrible cancer battle, and it was obvious we were at the end.  I was still in denial clinging on to the five years I had so hoped for, I had so wanted, I so needed with my dad.  I remember driving him home from the VA hospital in Palo Alto realizing that I was taking my dad home to die.  It was so surreal.  I still couldn’t believe that I wasn’t getting the five years the doctors said we could have.  I had blocked out the one to five year phrase and had only been thinking about the five years.  One year had never been an option in my mind.  Five years gave me so much more time for so many more conversations.  It gave my son time to grow up and have amazing memories with my dad to remember him by.  It gave my daughters more time to continue making great memories with him.  Five years gave us time, that I could accept.  One year was not an option.  One year was never on my radar.  So when we lost my dad one year after he had been diagnosed with cancer I was distraught.  I was in disbelief.  I was in denial.  This loss was a hard one for me to come to grips with.  My dad was supposed to live until I was old and grey and watch my kids get married and meet his great-grandchildren.  I wasn’t supposed to have to go through most of my adulthood without my dad.  34 years with him was just not long enough for me.  I walked around for a very long time numb to the fact that he really was gone.  A really long time.  

I moved straight into guilt once the numbness started to wear off.  The biggest thing that I struggled with was the fact that a few days before my dad died, when he was bedridden, in extreme pain, and basically comatose, I told him that it was okay for him to go.  I told him that I would be okay.  I gave him permission to die.  I was being selfless.  I hated seeing my dad in so much pain wasting away more and more each day.  But, in this point of my grief I wanted to take it all back.  I wanted to be selfish.  I didn’t care if he would have been suffering at least I would have had him around to talk to and to hold his hand.  (Yep, I was a 34 year old women who still loved to hold her daddy’s hand and who still called him daddy. Not ashamed.).  I kept thinking that if I wouldn’t have given him permission to die he would still be alive today.  I wished I would have never said it. Once again, this dumb redhead thought she was more powerful then God. 

It took awhile for me to admit to my anger with my dad’s death because the only person that I was angry at was God.  I thought that being angry at God was a huge sin so I kept shoving it down deep inside of me in hopes that it would go away.  I couldn’t really be a Christian if I had so much anger at God.  What a horrible person I must be.  I just couldn’t come to terms with being angry at God.  This was the God that I knew without a shadow of a doubt was sovereign and good and “He is allways in charge” (ask me about my tattoo and I’ll tell you the story).   I knew He was the God who would never leave me nor forsake me.  I knew in my heart and believed with all my heart all the truths about God so how could I possibly now be so angry at Him.  I fought this anger for months before I came to the point that I could no longer fight it.  I was lying in bed one night and the anger just came out.  I yelled at God.  I told Him how angry I was that on top of all the other crap He had put in my life (at this point I had a disabled child, a shattered marriage and my grandmother had just died 4 months before my dad) He had chosen to take my dad away as well.  I told Him how unfair it was and how mean it was.  It all just came pouring out like flood gates had been opened wide.  I came to a point where everything I had been feeling had all been said and I just laid there sobbing, exhausted, in the still quietness.  Do you know what I heard in the quietness?  God softly spoke to me.  He said, “Caroline, it’s okay to be angry at me.  I understand.  I can take it.  I can handle it.  I still love you, my child.”  That was it.  Those few words He said to me were full of more healing then I could have ever imagined.  And you know what, it’s really hard to stay angry at someone who is okay with you being angry at them.  My anger had all been released and with that came great peace and a deeper relationship with Christ.

For those of you who have lost a loved one, you know that it doesn’t take long for people to stop asking how you are and move on with their lives.  We all do that.  We all have our own lives to live, or own drama to attend to and it’s hard to remember that other people are suffering too.  You would think I’d be better at this but I fail daily.  I’ll admit it was hard for me to extend grace to people at first when they’d forget that my dad had just died. I specifically remember going to our Church’s Thanksgiving service the night before the first Thanksgiving without my dad, I had pretty much been crying the whole day not looking forward to our first major holidays without him.  I was talking to someone who asked how my day was and I honestly responded, “Horrible”, to which she replied, “oh my gosh, are your kids driving you crazy, too?!”.  I simply stated, “No, I’m just really struggling with getting through the holidays without my dad.” There was not much left to say after that so instead of standing in awkward silence I just walked away.  That’s when I realized that people who haven’t been there just don’t get it.  They can’t.  But I could learn to extend grace to them just as I would hope people could do for me when I don’t get it.  It’s hard when every one goes on with their lives and you are still stuck in grief.  It’s really easy to just go crawl in a hole and hide and cry.  That’s what I did and that’s when depression loomed over me.  I was sad and I had every right to be.  I didn’t want to be around happy people.  I especially didn’t want to be around happy people who had dads.  This was a healthy time of depression for me.  It would come and go.  Some days I would be perfectly happy and okay with life and then some days it would hit me like a ton of bricks and I just wanted to be alone and cry all day and I gave myself permission to do that.  As time went on the depression decreased.  

Year four after my dad’s death is when I finally accepted it.  This was the hardest year for holidays and special events.  The first year after my dad died we did every holiday completely different then we had done before.  We didn’t do any of our traditions.  Or goal was to just get through them and get them over with.  Year two we eased back in to the traditions but still felt pretty numb.  Year three we were back to doing everything how we had done it when my dad was alive but we had to have others fill in the blanks my dad left.  Year four is when we (the we here is my mom, sister and I) realized that this really is the new normal and it will never be how it was before.  It just kind of hits you like a bolt of lightening out of the blue.  Year four was the hardest but it was also the most therapeutic. We cried way more tears and I think they were the last of my grieving process tears that I had.  My dad was gone.  This was not okay, but I knew that I was going to be okay.  I still grieve him not being here.  That will never go away.  I still talk about him often and think about him daily.  There’s still a hole in my heart and an ache in my soul that I know will be there until I get to Heaven but I have learned to live with them and grow from them and use them to speak to others in their grief.  

Grief is hard but necessary after a loss.  We have a choice to make in the midst of our grief.  We can either use our time of grief to learn about ourselves and grow or we can choose to let it eat us alive and take away who we are.  I have traveled both of those roads in my grief and can I tell you, from experience, that allowing it to help you grow and learn about yourself is a much better use of your time.  You can come out on the other side of denial, anger, guilt, depression and acceptance a better person. You can come out on the other side of it all with the most amazing relationship with Christ if you choose to lean on Him and grow as you walk through grief.  And remember, grief lasts a lifetime so continue to allow it to help you grow.  If you are in the process of grief, please don’t do it alone.  No one has to walk it alone.  There is no need to walk it alone.  Reach out to me, or to your pastor or to someone in your life who you know is a safe place.  Take that step to have a community with you on your long, hard road.  

Grief- Loss of the Ideal Marriage

Every little girl dreams about marrying Prince Charming and having the perfect marriage.  I was no exception.  When I got married I knew I was the right man for me and that we would ride off into the sunset and live happily ever after.  The thought never even once crossed my mind that infidelity and addictions would be a part of my perfect marriage.  Why would they.  No person in their right mind ever thinks before they walk down the aisle, “I can’t wait unit my husband cheats on me and the has a bunch of addictions that almost destroys our marriage.  That’s going to be so much fun!”  Nope, that never happens. 

It took me about 10 years after our marriage had fallen apart to realize that I needed to grieve the loss of my ideal marriage.  I needed to allow myself to grieve the marriage I thought I had so that I could move forward in healing the marriage I now had.  I am pretty sure that we can call those ten years my stage of denial.  Denial mostly came in the form of me acting like we had a great marriage and we were so in love whenever we were around people.  It was a time of sweeping it under the rug and not really dealing with the reality of a broken marriage.  Those were definitely the darkest most hellish years of my life.  Once I realized I needed to fully grieve this ideal marriage in my head I was able to move on to the next stage, which for me was anger.

Most of this anger came out towards Howie.  After all, in my mind, he was the one that had hurt me the most and ruined our marriage.  -Another side note.....I did come to fully realize that our broken marriage was just as much my fault as it was his.  I had my own issues (co-dependency, anger, perfectionism, etc...) that took their toll on Howie and on our marriage as well. But I will save that for a later post. Side note over.-  He sure did get to feel my wrath for awhile.  I can honestly say that I did not keep my anger as biblical anger.  I definitely allowed it to cause me to sin.  That’s when I started to realize that I had some serous issues that I needed to work through along with Howie.  While working through this anger stage I learned about how I was withholding complete forgiveness from Howie and in that unforgiveness I was clinging onto, bitterness brewed.  Once I was able to fully forgive him, the bitterness and anger subsided and I moved forward into the bargaining and guilt stage.

Like I said before, I am the queen of “if only” and you can bet that my crown came out in full force once again for this stage of guilt.  If only I was prettier, if only I was a better cook, if  only I was the perfect wife, if only I was a better mom, if only if only, if only.  This time I decided to throw some bargaining into the mix as well to see if that would help.  God if you’ll make my marriage perfect again, I promise to never miss another Sunday at Church. God if I promise to be the perfect submissive wife will you make my marriage perfect again, please?  Lots of pie crust promises, easily made, easily broken.  Once again, I thought I was wiser and more powerful than God and I had some kind of control.  Oh, ya, let’s add control issues to that above list of all my problems I have had to work on.  The thing I cam to realize with all my bargaining with God is that He was re-working my marriage into this amazing marriage that He wanted it to be through taking away the ideal marriage I had envisioned.  He was turning my marriage into a marriage that I could never had even been able to imagine.  He didn’t want my unrealistic promises.  He didn’t need me to be the perfect wife and most amazing cook to turn my marriage into something beautiful.  He needed me to walk through this dark valley of grief along side Him so that He could sanctify me into someone who more like Him then I had ever been before.  I needed the pain of a broken marriage for me to see how broken I truly was.  I needed my picture of an ideal marriage to be crossed out and ripped up so that God could paint a new, better image in mind and not just the image of it but actually give the real life version of it in my own marriage.  Once again, through my bargaining and guilt He was able to  bring me to a place of acceptance. 

Accepting the loss of the ideal marriage I had envisioned as a young girl and a young wife wasn’t that hard to do once I got to this stage because I was already experiencing a new healing marriage with Howie.  I wasn’t necessarily okay with all the pain I had had to endure through the discovery and healing of a broken marriage but I did know without a shadow of a doubt that I was okay and that I was going to continue to be okay.  I was able to accept this loss so much easier than any of the other losses because God had replaced it with something so much better.  I do realize that He doesn’t always do that with broken marriages and so it takes longer to come to the point of acceptance. I also want to remind you that it took 15 years for me to be able to experience healing in our marriage and to experience a marriage that was better then I ever could have imagined.  It wasn’t something that happened over night.  It was a long process that took a lot of work on both our parts and a lot of amazing, godly people to come along side us and keep us on track.  So please do not feel discouraged if you are in the process of mourning the loss of your ideal marriage and you don’t see a future with a healed marriage.   For me, this process of grieving wasn’t about getting to a better marriage.  It was about getting to a better me and to a place where I was okay if my marriage didn’t come back together because my relationship with Christ was so strong and I knew He would get me through anything.  Acceptance for ultimately came when I chose to accept that God’s will for my life was so much better then the life I was willing for myself.  

Grief- The Life You Envisioned For Your Child

I was only 22 when Gillian, our now 19 year old, was diagnosed with extreme developmental delays at the age of 1.  (I will save you all from trying to do the math, I am now 40.  (LOL). We didn’t fully accept the diagnosis until 6 months later.   She was my miracle baby as I was told I would probably never be able to have my own children.  She was the light of my life and in my mind, at least at the forefront of my mind, just needed more time to develop.  We can call those 6 months between diagnosis and getting help my time of walking through the stage of grief known as denial.  I am sure that if you asked those around us at the time, most of them would say that we were in complete denial and that we couldn’t see that there was something wrong with Gillian.  They couldn’t have been further from the truth.  Like I just said a second ago, at the forefront of my mind I thought that Gillian just needed more time to develop, but in the back of my mind, way down deep in there, I knew.   Howie and I both knew.  We just weren’t ready or at all prepared to start walking down that road yet.  We wanted to enjoy our perfect child in her perfectly normal childhood for a little while longer.  We weren’t stupid.  We saw exactly what was going on with our daughter and we heard everyone’s whispering going on around us which was quite hurtful.  Denial just gave us this beautiful, perfect bubble to live in before our lives and our daughter’s life changed forever. We knew that once we started down the special needs road we could never go back to just being a perfect, little family of three.  Once we started all the weekly therapy appointments (we had at least 6 a week they wanted us to start with) we would never go back to the simple life of playing on the floor with our daughter and just enjoying her for her.   Denial was a gift that I so needed so that I could savor those last precious 6 months of normalcy for my daughter and for our family.  

I remember denial fading overnight for me.  It wasn’t a slow fade.  It actually happened quite fast.  I woke up one morning and it was like all that was lurking in the back of my mind had shot to the forefront and I knew it was time to move forward with this diagnosis and all the therapies.   As fast as denial left, anger came in.  I was angry at the people around us who had normal functioning kids and just got to enjoy them.  They got to go on with their merry little lives while I was stuck going to various therapies with my child and then coming home and repeating all that we had learned with her over and over again.  My life, as I knew it, was over and they all got to keep going on with theirs.  I was also angry because I felt constantly judged by those around us because they felt we waited to long to get Gillian help.  -Okay, quick side note here.....I realize now (18 years later) that all of these people meant well and cared deeply for us.  At the time that was not at all what it felt like but none of them had ever been in the situation before so they didn’t get that their words and actions were hurtful.  Heck, I would have had responded the same way if I were them, but now that I have been there and done that it has taught me a lot in how to respond and love on people as they start their journey into this world of special needs and my hope is that it will give you some insight into how to respond to those people as well, because I know that none of us truly wants to hurt someone who is going through a difficult time.  Okay, side not over-  It was hurtful to us that anyone would think we didn’t want what was best for our daughter and that we weren’t dong our best as her parents.  It was hard for me to get over my anger but in time, it faded just as denial did into another stage.  

Remember how I said in my post on the overview of grief that not everyone goes through the stages of grief in order?  Well for me after anger came depression.  I skipped right over bargaining and guilt for the time being.  Oh, don’t you worry, I eventually went through that stage and I’ll get it to it, but first depression.  Depression for me came in the form of retreating.  If I hadn’t already pushed everyone away with my anger then depression was going to do the rest of the job for me.  I stopped returning friends’ calls, stopped going to most functions and stopped talking to people about what was going on in our lives.  Most people couldn’t relate anyways so what was the point in telling them all about everything that we were doing with Gillian.  That was my mindset. Poor me.  No one gets it.  No one understands.  I felt so alone in this new life I was living.  Depression got a good grip on me for probably about a year.  I feel that it lasted so long because I didn’t tell anyone about it or attempt to get help for it.  Instead I just became this person that I am sure everyone thought was a b word and I didn’t even care.  -Time for another side note......This is why it is so important to reach out to someone who has walked through grief before to walk through it with you.  Doing it by yourself DOES NOT WORK!   Trust me, been there, done that, couldn’t afford the t-shirt.  So please, if you are walking through grief by yourself reach out to me or someone else that you know and allow us to walk through it with it.  No one has to do it alone.  There’s no reason to do it alone and it will only make it harder on you and those around you if you try to do it alone.  We were meant to live life in community.  That is how God created us so go find community to walk through grief with you.....Side note over-  Depression was a horrible enemy that I allowed to stay and visit for far to long and it likes to try to come back from time to time still, but now I have an amazing community of sister’s in Christ who will come in and help me kick him out.  

I started down the stage of bargaining and guilt while still in the stage of depression.  It was somewhere towards the end of that long year.  I became queen of the “if only”thoughts.  If only I had eaten better while pregnant (umm....I lived on salads and iced tea my entire pregnancy.), if only we had started therapies earlier, if only I had made her do more tummy time when she was a baby, if only I had breastfed her longer, if only I had made her sleep on her back and not her tummy (when Gillian was a baby, the trend was back sleeping only, I have no idea what the trend is now as they are constantly changing it.) if only, if only, if only, they would just come one right after another all day long.  God, however, finally told me one day that I needed to stop thinking that I was mightier and wiser then He was.  Nothing I did or didn’t do caused Gillian to have special needs.  She was exactly how God had made her.  She was everything that He wanted her to be and nothing He didn’t want her to be.  She was created in His image just like me and therefore she was perfect.  That led me right in to the stage of acceptance.

Gillian was still my perfect child.  She was still my miracle from Heaven.  She was still the baby we prayed for for so long and wanted so badly.  Her life just looked different then the life I had imagined.  She wasn’t going to be potty trained before starting kindergarten.  She wasn’t going to get to be a free spirit that played outside with all the neighborhood kids everyday.  She wasn’t going to be reading chapter books by the stack all through elementary school.  She wasn’t going to ever have all her high school girlfriends over for a slumber party.  She wasn’t ever going to get her driver’s license.  I’m not ever going to get to cry when she leaves for college.  I’m not ever going to get to meet her boyfriend, or plan her wedding or hold her children.  These are all things that one by one I have had to grieve.  Some I am still in the process of grieving through and I know as time moves forward and friends’ kids and my nieces and nephews and my other two children hit major milestones in life and it hits me that that will never be Gillian, I will have to walk the road of grief once again as I learn to accept that Gillian’s life looks different than the life I pictured for her as I held her in my arms the day she was born.  I move forward in acceptance fully knowing that many days I am not okay with this loss but that I will be okay and so will Gillian.