I am not the person I used to be…
Day 1 — #writeingrief
I am not the person I used to be. I said this to my husband on the phone from Florida back in April as I was watching my father die over a handful of weeks.
“I am not the same person,” I told him. “I am changed forever at a level that I don’t think either of us understand.”
Watching my father die and knowing that his death was caused by intellectual — albeit bad — decisions, and being entirely helpless to stop his horrific hurtling toward his end, I was drowning in all of the stages of grief at once even before he was dead.
It wasn’t like I had never experienced grief before.
Four miscarriages in two years injected grief under the layers of my skin, deep enough that I couldn’t reach it, on the surface enough that it was often an open wound I couldn’t heal.
Two of my dogs died from what I later discovered was carbon monoxide poisoning from a furnace leak. If I hadn’t trusted my instincts about their deaths and pushed for answers until we realized the furnace was to blame, odorless gas could have killed my daughter in her crib. I went into a tailspin of anxiety attacks, their frenzied razor grips dulled only after my therapist tried EFT Tapping.
Those events in my life now seem to have detachable grief. I can pluck the screaming agony part of that grief from the empty feeling of loss, separate them so that I just feel numb and void.
This grief is biological. This grief is cellular.
This was my Dad, the human being who was literally part of giving me life. The man who taught me life lessons that I only appreciated after I left home. The man with whom I spoke deeply throughout my childhood, my teenage years, my early adult years, about every aspect of life and love.
And this is the man who in recent years frustrated me. I lashed out and lectured him about staying in a loveless marriage to a pill addict for far too long and failing to live his life to the absolute fullest.
“By the time you get out of this marriage, you’ll be dead,” I said. “If you don’t die before that,” I added.
My father’s divorce was final a few days before he moved back in with my Mom — 20+ years after their divorce; a handful of days before he went to the hospital for an outpatient treatment; about two weeks before he was admitted to the Emergency Room and began to die (or be killed — that is another layer to this grief).
My father finally escaped a dead marriage only to die horribly less than six weeks later.
This grief is complicated. This grief is killing me.
I am not the person I used to be. I function. I reach for glimmers of joy, moments of connection. But I am forever changed, and I don’t know how to live as this new lifeform. I am foreign to myself.
