Perspective

If you ask me how I am doing, I will tell you I am fine. Maybe even OK. If I ask myself this question – I will answer that I am a total mess. I may act fine and look fine, but under the surface I am truly a mess.

I go to the cemetery once a week to scream, cry and throw rocks. I cry myself to sleep. I lose my temper and hit my pillow quite often. Most songs make me think about my dead husband and my favorite television shows still bring me no joy. I turn everything into a joke – because it is just easier for me. I still cannot sleep without drugs.

I have difficulty making normal conversations with people and am most content to hide from the world. I only make phone calls that I have to and truly only leave the house because I have children and have to go to work.

I always feel like I am one step away from falling apart. I should get an academy award for how I act in public. I don’t think anything has changed deep down inside me over the past seven months.

Then I went to group therapy last night and my whole perspective changed.

I sat across from a new comer and this person told the group that their spouse killed themselves one week ago. I couldn’t breathe. I was in awe that this person came to therapy and was even dressed. Then I was devastated all over again for the loss. Theirs and mine.

This person spoke a little, but everything said so mirrored my story I was stunned. I sat and starred at this person, who must have thought I was crazy. But I couldn’t help it. I was transported back seven months and felt like I was reliving the shock and pain and confusion and the plethora of emotions I felt from the very first day. I just remember the numbness and then the pain slowly edging its way into my soul until it threaten to suffocate. I was truly horrified that someone sitting a few feet from me was going through this. I just wanted to save them.

In my own way I wanted to heal their pain. I had become what others were to me – looking for some way to put a band aid over the gaping open wound and I felt ridiculous feeling this. There was nothing I could do and I felt a little how others must have and maybe still do feel about me. Helpless.

All I could do was talk about my journey and hope that if nothing else – this person didn’t feel so alone. But nothing, nothing I could say would make it OK, would ever make it better. Not for this person and not for me. Seven months ago I just wanted someone to lie to me and tell me everything was going to be fine. But no one can.

Nothing makes these awful feeling go away and nothing makes the memories of finding the dead body of your loved one ever feel anything but truly horrible. Maybe memories fade, but some don’t. The ones you can’t run from or hide from – these have not faded over seven months and I wonder if they ever will.

On the train home leaving therapy I was so upset with myself for even talking. How could I possibly know more than anyone else? How could I possibly be so arrogant as to try and help someone else through their pain, when I am still a mess? When I practically live on the edge of falling apart daily.

Then I began to ponder about myself. I am seven months into my grieving. If I ask myself if I have grown or changed or gotten stronger, my initial response would be not at all. But if I look back to the person I was after the first week – then I have to say truthfully that I don’t know who that girl was. I am not her anymore. I am not a zombie walking and talking without feeling. I am no longer shocked by his death and I am not numb.

I am not sure who I am anymore. Maybe I change a little every day. I am for sure not the girl I once was before my husband died. I am not even the girl who started this blog seven months ago. Maybe I am still searching for who I will become.

For now, I am still a mess, but at the very least I accept that this is who I am.