Mixing Grief with Employment
Heading Back To Work After Child Loss
It’s easy to stop writing — — to stop feeling — — to remain completely numb to the world and pretend you don’t exist. It’s almost laughable how easy it is to simply disappear. I hardly say a word all day. I do what’s expected of me — I move through the motions of a 5-day workweek until I can live for the weekend. I lay down my body on the carpet to be walked upon and pretend that my life holds no meaning. The hilarious part is that most people will continue to tread with no thought and that’s ok. I have always been shy, but since my two losses — I stopped giving a f**k.
I used to think that education and getting a better job was important. However, after you lose a child your matter of importance shifts. You no longer focus on promotions, having your opinions heard, and power of position. For me, I focused on being able to crawl out of bed every day to face a world that stopped. Actually-the world kept moving, but I had stopped. I had given up on caring whether my ideas at work were heard and I slithered into the corner of obscurity. I can’t manage others when I find it hard to manage myself.
It’s not that I have lost my will to live, rather I have lost my sense to live as I did before. When every moment is consumed with the thoughts of my son, I just want to have it quiet enough around me to focus. I focus on his smile, his laugh, his bad jokes, his love for his mama. What part of this world has room for someone like me anymore? This world was supposed to also have him.
I have decided that I can no longer continue working a job where I find no meaning. I have volunteered my time and efforts with life-altering positions and that has brought me solace, but it does not pay the bills. The search continues….but I will hideaway for now. I don’t have the option to leave and I don’t have the independent wealth to quit. I believe that a job is called a job for a reason, but where I used to muddle through, I now feel trapped under a boulder. I keep wiggling my fingers, but nobody notices I am squashed underneath.
They wonder why I am so quiet and why I choose to keep to myself? I have learned that most people don’t want to hang out with a girl with so many problems. Most people don’t want to be brought down by the loss of a child hanging in the air. I am a real hoot when I am out at happy hour crying 3 beers in. So, I thought it would be best to remove myself from their lives and simply do what’s expected of me.
What gets me most is when you make fun of me behind my back or right in front of me at a meeting. I really enjoyed when I was discussing how I am a quiet person who likes to listen and understand people…and then you told me (as a joke) that I must also hear voices in my head. Everyone laughed...everyone laughed but me. I wanted to run away and many times I did calling it a bathroom break. Calling a grieving mother crazy (whether it was a joke or not) is never the best way to win friends and influence people. I heard you in the meeting when I left to go to the bathroom and you whispered under your breath “don’t bother coming back.” That is why I can’t be here anymore. The woman who used to brush it off, bitch about it, and then forget it-no longer can.
I don’t want to engage in the public sphere anymore and I guess that is a problem. I am not sure how best to solve this problem unless I can return to the time in my life where my son is alive and I wanted to excel in life with him beside me. Since I don’t have a time machine in tow, I have to settle for placing myself in situations I can handle. Until you have suffered through an extreme life-shattering loss you will not understand what we go through. The world looks at grieving parents like most people look at a homeless man. Their heart feels something, they are so sorry for our loss, some might even throw some loose change of wisdom our way, but ultimately we are a pariah of a place no parent wants to live. People run away when they see us, they can’t look us in the eye, they cross the street to get away, and ultimately they think one day we might “get over it.”
**newsflash** We never will.
