6 years ago today, I accepted an award for the challenges, choices and changes I was making in my life. I accepted this award from my concurrent disorder support worker. A special hand on this journey, a crucial time in its beginning. An award she had nominated me for. An award I didn’t feel I necessarily deserved, yet knew I did all the same. I remember the feeling of that time. Tearing myself apart, inside-out, trying to grab hold of any kind of understanding of the 5 “W”‘s of ME. Something I had struggled in for several years prior. Self-image. Enduring trauma, it changed everything, including all I ever knew of me.
Looking back, I could never have known true impacts and how vast some are and can and would be. How long some linger. How quickly some seem to fade away. Almost any and every area of life. From minor to major details and scenarios. Every ounce of the heavy that is grief I have, still do and always will carry, it weighs in and impacts life.
If I have learned anything about grief it is this… Grief, is love. It is love with no place to go. It is what lingers in the absence of something we have come to know, so well. It comes in many forms, many scenarios, touches many facets of life and living in the thereafter of it, can bring us to places and scenarios we never dreamed. The good, bad and yes, the ugly.
The misunderstanding I still see, feel, receive… It’s never changing. I’ve just learned to adjust and adapt to what surrounds me. To LIVE, in a manner which my loves are safe. My grief is love. It is entitled to be safe. The grief I carry bridges into my living son. That love in grief, it carries us. We remember. We laugh. We cry. We allow our grief to BE. When you’re searching for a way of survival in unchartered waters, we grab what we can in hopes we can survive. I hang onto memories that brighten faces and spaces… I allow space for that. I forget my son is the BIGGEST piece of a love I grieve….. He IS a world in himself and what we always dreamed he may be and more!! His dad would be so bloody proud, and he is so much every part of his dad. I take that love and apply it to the grief I carry for a love of my life, in my life, that made him. It truly is the ultimate peace in grief. A living piece. I am blessed for it. I celebrate that. I am faulted for appearing “stuck” to the blind eye. Grief, it has its demons. And this scratch I’m itching is the result of 7yrs of a rough bloody go!
It’s been a ride and many strides across this pond. I look at that woman from 6 years ago and am proud AF of her for hanging on. For gripping on for dear life that time she felt she couldn’t hold on much longer, and the noise… ughhh the noise. The noise. the naysayers and the novelty of boundary crossing, well it has long worn off and the running to stand still I have felt bound to, it’s finally lifting. The hyper vigilance I feel in parenting, let alone living and being…. It has crawled over me too long. Regardless of why, how, when… all the shit that ppl just do not get, just know, this has all been enough to make skin morph to depths unseen.
6 years ago, I accepted an award, so naive to what was before me still. Seeing more depths of grief after the loss of a child proved too insane to process. I am pushing 7 years into what feels like the war of a bloody lifetime, the war within me, isn’t so much the noise anymore. This chart I’ve navigated, the heavy ass, pea soup thick fog of it finally falls away from my shoulders and the pond that fog sat over moves further and further behind. The good never fades. The laughter always carries. The love forever lives. This day, this hand on my journey, all the hands that have graced me…. good, bad, ugly… I know the ugly truth more than some will ever understand or give me credit for. And ignorance, especially in grief, will always be bliss.
Live real & laugh and love abundantly.
Forever grateful to the hands that grace this climb with loving support… you all know who you are!!