Nobody Taught Us How To Grieve

I have this habit of trying to minimize things, and I do this mainly in my own life. I find myself thinking so many times that I should give myself some grace, that we had a baby who passed away, and that struggling because of this is normal, and yet the next second I will think, well, some people lose children much older, other people lose more than one child, other people have stillbirths further in pregnancy than I did, all of it to convince myself that my situation really isn’t anything I should be suffering and grieving for, that really I just am making excuses for myself, and that grief is a thing that does not belong to me, or with me, it is instead made for others

And this is how I have lived for this entire year, trying my best to ignore, to minimize, to pretend, to try and tell my mind that really it is not that serious, that really I am just a weakling and that really I just need to get it together

Four months or so ago somethings began to happen in my life. It is hard to describe, but in essence my brain has literally felt on fire, in a constant non ending loop, unable to rest and to stop. Every morning I woke up I was overwhelmed the second I opened my eyes, I started to hate the life I had to live, I did not want to get up, I did not want to take care of my children, I did not want to clean the house, or do the dishes, or anything really, what I wanted to do was to sit down and fantasize and make a perfect plan on how I was going to end my own life.

It is true, and I do not want to admit this, it is embarrassing really, but nonetheless it is true.

Slowly my life has been breaking apart, I have fallen back into old sins, I listen to music I should not, I say words and things I should not, I was angry with God, I was in pain, and in misery, and I stopped caring about what was good and true. It felt so strange to get back to this place where I saw sin and I was no longer turned off by it, instead I welcomed it, and I did not care to fight against it.

The problem is that I had decided I did not need, nor did I have the time to grieve. I have other children who need me, I have work to do, a house to clean, a husband to tend to, a million other things that need to get done and I do not have time to sit and think about it, I do not have time to sit and cry,

eh, I think, I’ll be fine, I have been always fine after all,

eh, I think, this really is not that big of a deal everyone else has moved on

eh, I think, I really need to just move on

In my head somehow I had not earned the right to grieve, I had not endured enough tragedy to ever be so sad, to ever be suffering, to ever be in pain, and yet my brain was on fire. I could not cope, and everything around me was falling apart. I became obsessive with things, loops, non ending thoughts and ideas.

I thought that ignoring my grief was the right thing to do, that it was the strong thing to do. I thought getting out of bed, making breakfast, cleaning the house, writing on here, taking care of my children, going on with my life as if nothing happened meant that grief would just go away, slowly slipping away into the cracks of the day when I allowed myself to cry while I drove in the car, kids in the backseat so they could not see me. but turns out, grief does not disappear, it does not go away just because I refuse to look at it, just because I pretend it just is not there. It followed me everywhere, and everywhere I pretended I could not see, grief waits, it is what it does best, and that is also what mine did. It waited. Despite the months I had spent trying to reason with it, telling it that other women have it worse, that other mothers have to bury older children, that other women have lost more children than me, that I have with me three healthy children, that I should be grateful, that I should move on, that I should be fine by now. Despite months explaining to my grief that really it had better things to do, and better people to serve and follow, despite many of my reasonings and arguments, yet it waited, seated in the corner of my bedroom every single night. Always. There. Waiting.

I was being watched. I ran away with my wounds this grief wanted to touch, and I could not allow it. I ran, and I ran, for as long as I could, between trees, rivers, the trips, the goodnight kisses to my children, the laughs, the joys, I ran, and every time I looked back, I had never made it far. There it was. Waiting. I had tried to reason with it, and it would not leave me be, so slowly I began to lose control, like an animal being watched and followed, I lashed out, I screamed at it, I demanded it leave or else I would instead leave myself, and yet, it waited, same as always.

Eventually I grew tired, and so I lay down, and waited for it to consume me, my legs could no longer run anymore, there is only so long you can run from something that lives inside you, there is only so long you can pretend you are not wounded before you begin bleeding over every thing you love…

and so I did the last thing I wanted to do, I went to confession, silently hoping the priest would send this grief away like a demon that plagued me, my heart pounding the entire time I waited in line, trying to muster up the courage to tell him all that I had done wrong, how far I had fallen, how much evil I had allowed in my life, and how far away God felt from my heart. As soon as I sat down, my heart softened, and before I could even say a word, tears fell from my eyes and the words dried up from my mouth, I could taste the salt of them as they made their way down my face, and for the first time since this all happened, I said it

“my son died”

Putting my burden into words felt like freedom.

There it was, out in the world, out for everyone to hear, out of my mouth rather than the tips of my fingers, I heard myself say it, and finally the walls fell, and out of the darkness a voice in the light told me

“you grief is not a sin”

I had never called it a sin, but I treated it like one, something shameful that I needed to hide, something that got between me and God, something ugly that had attached itself to me and only if I were stronger, more capable, better, then I could rid myself of it, and so for the first time I looked at my grief with eyes that wanted to see, expecting a foul mouthed animal ready to consume me, but instead I found a reflection, a wounded thing, sitting quietly where I had left it…

love…

that’s all it had ever been

love with nowhere to go

love without a home,

I loved my little boy and then one night at one in the morning a doctor walked into a room and told me he had died, and somehow I expected all the love I had to have died with him as well, but it did not, it followed me, it sat with me besides his little grave, it followed me through the trees, across the rivers, into different cities, through ordinary mornings and days, and many nights kissing my children goodnight, it sat in the corner of my bedroom waiting, and all this time I had been begging God to take it away.

and thank God he did not,

you cannot bury grief, you cannot hide it, you cannot ignore it, you will drive yourself into madness much like I did, nobody teaches you how to grieve, and I hope you never have to learn, but grief is not a monster, it is a mourner. All those nights I thought it was watching me, hunting me down, waiting for me to finally lie down and give up, it had only been keeping watch. Grief sat at his grave when I could not, it had keep memories when I tried to forget them all, it had cried out when I refused to shed a tear, it did not come to ask me that I die along with my child, that I take my own life to end my pain, it came to ask me to mourn him.

Somehow I expected grief to feel different, I made it my enemy from the start, pushed it away, pretended it was not mine, prayed to give it away, but it cannot be done, grief is a weird thing, it is a like a limb, a body part, an organ, but instead it is a new part of the soul, one we might gain along the journey of life. I cannot wish my hand away, I cannot wish my kidney, or my brain away, they are part of me, I cannot wish away who I am either, and grief is like that, it is part of me, it is part of my body, part of my story and I will keep it until the day I die. I did not know one could gain things like these in life, a new emotion, a new soul altering experience. I can never wish being a mother away, that is now part of who I am, and I can never wish away that having a child who died is part of who I am as well, to be rid of this would mean getting rid of my son, and that is something I cannot do, the same way my soul bears the mark of being his mother, it bears the mark of grieving his departure.

And so grief no longer walks behind me, it no longer is something I hide, it is part of me, it is a tender friend, the remembrance of the bad news but the comfort of the good, and that is that grief is just love, a love that has made home in my soul, right next to the part of my heart that bears the name — mama — mama to all of my children, including the one that I have lost.

For those that might be concerned please rest assured that I received much needed help soon after I started having thoughts about dying. I very much doubt that would be a thing I would ever do, but for some reason my brain enjoyed dwelling on those thoughts, making up stories, escape plans from my grief, that is how much I did not want to face my pain and sorrow. It is pretty clear to me that I suffered some sort of postpartum depression, which I have had before but it became much worse with the added issue of my son’s death. I am getting treated, I am taking the steps needed to get well, and I am doing so much better.

we talk so often about postpartum depression when it comes to living babies but I did not get any help or care for these things after my birth, it is like because of his death I no longer was a mother who would also still experience all the postpartum things any other normal mother would, it felt like because he died so had my job and role as a mother.

This is all very vulnerable to write and tell the world, but my hope is that maybe i can give words and comfort to someone else carrying the same pain, it is hard to be in this middle place where our pain does not feel justified or acceptable, or at least that is how I have felt, that this all wasn’t that big of an issue, but pretending it did not happen or it did not impact me did me no good, very much the opposite, it took me getting to a scary place to finally admit it.

I never got to take my baby home, I never got to mother him in a way that would have given me peace, I have yet to try and hold another baby for fear of what that might do to me, he was the last baby I held, the last baby in my arms was him, looking as if he was sleeping peacefully, and it is the last thing I hold that was only, and lastly his, and for now that is how it will stay, my arms being lastly his