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Waves of grief

I found the following on website that the link didn’t work when I sent it to anyone else so copied it and emailed it to a couple of people. But I’m sharing it here too because I think that this description is so accurate. It’s something that EVERYONE should read.

When Asked for Advice on How to Deal with Grief, This Old Man Gave the Most Incredible Reply

Someone on reddit wrote the following heartfelt plea online:

“My friend just died. I don’t know what to do.”

Many people responded with words of encouragement, but one response in particular, by an older gentlemen, really stood out from the rest…

“Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child. But here’s my two cents.

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love.

So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gouged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out.

But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything…and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

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Wave of light

It’s october 15th – it’s a day for lighting candles for babies and children who have died. Who good to remember them. How much it sucks to have joined those who do it for such a personal reason.

We grieve and remember our lost baby and all that they would have been to us in our family. Those lost dreams.

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Unformed and raw….

 

I keep thinking that I want to write out my emotions. I keep feeling like I want to share. And then I decide I’m too raw, I’m too weak, it’s too fresh and that people don’t want to read or hear feelings from that place. I recognise how those thoughts won’t be well formed or even linear because that entirely how my thoughts are. There’s this overwhelming fog that stops some level of process and function. Not so much that you can’t focus but so much that you don’t feel you always makes sense. Why would I put that down on paper?

But the reality is that maybe I need to do this for me, for our baby, for our family and for those who walk alongside us or others.

Our baby was ‘only’ 10 weeks gestation. We never even got to see that baby. We didn’t know if it was a girl or a boy, although in my head he was totally a boy because it is what I know. But what hits me so hard is how much love my heart has for our little one. I am flooded by this feeling of love I will never get to share with its recipient. Flooded with a sorrow that a part of family will always be missing. Devastated that a part of my heart will always be broken. When the sonographer confirmed our baby was gone a part of my heart shattered and though I am assured and understand that the rawness of that reality will go, the brokenness of that reality will always remain.

At 10 weeks gestation our baby was just a quarter of an ounce heavy and only around 4cm long. Such a tiny speck but the baby had our DNA and all of it’s arms and legs and a heart. At 10 weeks they were our baby as much as when they would have been 10 weeks post natal.

I fight the feeling to lessen the reality of this babies life. I fight the feeling people will think we are ‘over reacting’ in our grief since we had not met them, or seen them or held them. I fight those feelings because this baby was every bit our baby as Zachary and Solomon and every bit a part of our family and my heart.

I grieve the love we never got to give them and the fights they never got to have with their big brothers.

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Miscarriage processing

I want to write but my words feel lost. I feel pulled to write but I don’t know what to write. I’m nudged to put thoughts down but don’t know what those thoughts are. It’s like there’s two parts of me fighting over what I should do.

We were pregnant. For 6 weeks we knew about a baby who would join our family next April. We were apprehensive about the change that this baby would bring but we were excited. Excited for our boys to have another sibling. Excited that this baby would get to have our boys as it’s big brothers. We were excited for Christmases and birthdays and family holidays and weddings. We had dreams and we thought about practical things like bedroom arrangements and car seat positions.

At 9 weeks and 5 days pregnant having excitedly told some of our closest friends the night before about our new baby I discovered I was bleeding. I struggled to get the words out to tell Ross. My voice wouldn’t work. My brain could not comprehend. I tried to reason that this happens to so many women whilst at the same time being filled with this dread that I knew what was happening to my body.

We lost our baby over that weekend and I lost a part of my heart with it. Our family will never feel fully complete as there will always be a part of it missing.

1 in 4 pregnancies end in miscarriage. I knew that 1 in 4 end this way and yet somehow, despite a totally normal fear that we would lose the baby, I never dreamed that it would actually happen to us. I was comfortable being 3 in 4. It was safe there.