The Messy Art of Grieving

Ialways let my husband review what I write before I post it. I am looking for feedback and suggestions but most of all I am looking for confirmation that what I am writing is not dripping with woe-is-me-pity. I can’t stand pity. I want to empower people to advocate for themselves and in sharing my stories truthfully, I hope it puts us all on the same playing field. No matter the struggle. We are all connected. His comment to me on this one was “it’s saying that you’ve been through it and sometimes you are still there”. Grief is so messy.

So there it is and I am so ashamed.

As I set out to embark on this writing adventure, I had set goals for myself to write maybe every couple of weeks. If I am guesstimating correctly the last time I wrote was in May.  It is not that I have not had something to say but rather the content and tone of my thoughts have been so dark and self-defeating. To sit and write them would be to have to claim them as my reality and my truth. The dark sadness is exactly what I vowed not to marinate in when I set out on this writing adventure.

But maybe the best way to stop marinating in it is to simply walk (swim?) right through some of the sadness and shame with you.

I’ve been trying to pinpoint exactly what has been at the center of my gloom. Is it depression? Is it grief?  According to Merriam Webster the definition of gloom is:

1 a. partial or total darkness or b. a dark or shadowy place

2 a. lowness of spirit or b. an atmosphere of despondency

I think 1.a. is the most accurate description of my recent mood. Dark and shadowy.

Death and loss aside, I have to admit that I have let other far more nefarious emotions latch on to my psyche during this time of uber vulnerability.  They are not new emotions.  They are ones that I work hard at navigating when I am on my “A” game. Slowly they erode the light from within and pluck away at my self- confidence to the point that I believe the negative monologue (bullshit) constantly playing in my head.  I have no one to blame but myself. (Something else to be ashamed of right?)

Shame. Shame for so many things.

Ashamed because I am not a better person. Ashamed that I am not a better daughter/wife/mom. Ashamed that I can’t protect myself and my loved ones. (Two of my three children are dead. Right?) Ashamed of my grief. Ashamed that I am not taking care of myself. Ashamed because although I know what I need to do to take care of myself and set boundaries and limits with people, when I do it, I am ashamed that I feel so much pain around it. I am ashamed of being overweight, aging and my body failing me. I could go on forever.

Literally, the first thing that my brain says to me when I wake up in the morning is “You are so disgusting.”  What the Fuck?  I am so ashamed of being ashamed.

Is anybody else’s brain as twisted as mine???

How can I possibly be helpful and supportive to people when I am mired in so much shame? And how on earth did I get here?

The long and short of shame is that we feel it when we believe that we have violated some social norm or personal standard that we have set for ourselves. No matter, mind you,  how unrealistic or ridiculous that norm or standard may be. I know that the standards that I set for myself in some sort of mystical, realm of non-reality are completely unattainable.  And tbh our societal norms have literally gone OFF THE RAILS lately.  

But I think that it’s time to look inwards and reassess my reality. I want to look my shame straight in the eye. And the best way to do that is just put it out there.

I can’t speak for other women but I can pinpoint the precise moment that I latched on to the foundations of a shame filled life pretty early on. Shame about body image, weight and unattainable perfection that at 54, I still can’t seem to shake.

It was Junior year in high school to be exact. A very small, beautiful girl moved into town. She was so sophisticated and delicate. Did I mention small too?  Even though I was relatively new to the school also, the novelty of me had quickly worn off and she was a superstar. She had a cool car, she was tiny, very pretty and her parents owned an inn.

You can call me many things, but you can’t call me small, delicate or tiny in stature or personality.

As an adolescent, the activity of sport eating with my brothers quickly caught up with my metabolism and BOOM! I had big boobs and was very curvy as a teenager but I wanted so desperately to be tiny and beautiful. (None of that has changed by the way.) So along came Miss Tiny from out of town who had 24 hour access to a fully stocked, commercial grade kitchen in a big, unsupervised inn and it was a recipe for disaster.

There was a reason she was so tiny.

Everything that went in, came up. Nutrients and calories never had a moment to take root. For me it was a magic solution to my big/small dilemma that took root and I ended up with a raging eating disorder for the next oh, 15 years maybe? No matter how small I became it was never small enough. And that became the theme for my life. Not necessarily about being small but I was never enough.

In my early thirties I found a great therapist and finally got a handle on the bulimia. What I did not know then is that while I no longer engaged in the binge/purge cycle, the same twisted, unrealistic thought patterns still ruminated in my head. It’s like it went from the binge/purge cycle to a more generic perfection/failure cycle. Definitely not a win/win situation.

During this time I left my really nice husband and I gravitated towards a very charming, sociopathic man who was as crazy AF. And of course, I married him.

Ten years later he cheated on me with a 16 year old and then my neighbor (Who I can only describe as a tobacco chewing troll. No word of a lie.) And, as I found out later, he’d been doing so for the duration of our marriage with just about everyone else in a 50 mile radius who would have him. I was clearly not good enough as a wife. So. Much. Shame.

When my son was born with a genetic defect, I clearly failed at producing a healthy normal child even though I had already produced a “perfect” one before him.  Failure and shame.

I can think of many other examples throughout the years that I have been able to mentally twist to reinforce my shitty self-esteem and compromise my ability to be a normal, realistic human being.

But all bets are off now. The death of Cameron last year thrust me towards my current downward spiral and it is taking every tool in my magical bag of survival skills to keep my shit together.

There is a difference between guilt and shame and that’s important to the story.

The difference between shame and guilt is that when we feel shame we tend to lump our whole self in with the emotion. We look at ourselves entirely through a lens of shame and negativity.  It skews our perception of everything around us and how we operate in the universe. We’ll call them our Shame Shades.

With guilt, the emotion is more directly associated with an act that we have/have not committed and causes us to move our attention outwards to a person or persons that we may have hurt or harmed. Guilt just adds fuel to the proverbial shit show shame fire.

I am plagued by guilt when I think of my daughter’s very short life. I removed her and her sister from a very volatile situation, yes. But I took them away from our home, family structure and security at such a preciously vulnerable time. Could I have muscled through the abuse and violence a little while longer?

If I had, maybe my daughter would not have been left in the defenseless position of having to fight with an absolutely unhinged father. At every visit having to defend me, protect her sister and fend off his advances.

All of the trappings of the “normal” life that she’d lived up until that point were completely out the window.

At home with me was no better because we lived in terror. Stalked daily, sometimes 40-50 calls a night, breaking into our home, drive bys at night. He terrorized us and there was no relief. No matter where we went, he was there.

I fought so hard to protect them, to keep them safe and our court system completely failed me.  Failed them. 

The pain that she endured because I was not enough haunts me every minute of the day. The scars that it left on her heart took her to places that no parent wants to imagine. And ultimately, because of bad choices made to escape the intractable hurt, to her death and away from us forever.

Guilt and shame.

At the end of the day I know that I could not have done things any differently than I did. The rational me knows that I had no choice. Every day had turned into an unpredictable nightmare.

The ashamed me tells me otherwise.

He was in law enforcement and would clean his fire arms after 10 or so beers. Usually while he was calling me a slut, telling me I had to forgive him or, insisting so convincingly, that everyone hates me.

Sometimes, when he went out to the barn to sneak more alcohol or when he passed out, I would take the shotgun out of his cruiser’s trunk, grab his service revolver and his personal gun and hide them.

He’d wake up in rages and chase me around the house naked. Screaming at me that he would take absolutely every single thing from me, would turn every single person against me, take my daughters from me and leave me penniless if I left him.

If I would only fuck him and forgive him. That pretty much summed it up for him.

Sometimes he would grab the steering wheel when I was driving down the road at 70 miles an hour. Or he would open the car door at the same speed and threaten to jump and kill himself while the girls were in the back seat. Or, after I left, would try to drive me off of the road. On several occasions. Each time calling the police to self-report that he got distracted and just happen to swerve into the wrong lane and I just happened to be the car coming towards him.

Ok. So I really didn’t have a choice. We were terrorized.

So back to guilt and shame. Guilt because I allowed myself to become that abused person. Guilt because I exposed my children to their very sick father. Guilt because I was not strong enough. Shame because as a part of that abuse process my ex systematically wore down my self-esteem and, when you hear over and over that you are worthless, you begin to believe it. It just becomes the “truth.”

I am not making excuses. I am trying to take responsibility for my current mindset and make peace with the past and peace with myself. It is hard enough to lose a loved one. Lose a relationship. Lose a dream. It might just be the human condition to pile additional, completely unnecessary bullshit on top of it. Are there people who don’t do that? 

How do we undo our unhealthy, twisted conditioning so that we can just grieve? To feel our emotions and move through them as opposed to getting stuck and making whatever “shituation” worse.

All I know is that the “what-ifs”, the guilt and the shame are not serving me well at this point and I need to practice what I preach.

• Practice mindfulness and be aware of the sinister inner voice that is the earworm in my head.

• Turn on the blinker and change the trajectory of my thoughts as quickly as they come. Even if I don’t believe them. I know that with practice the good thoughts will outweigh the bad and the positive thoughts will assuage the guilt and shame.

• Trust that eventually, the gloom will be compartmentalized and reserved for times when I need to honor that feeling. But I will not let it be compounded by guilt and shame and I will move through it.
  

Grief is such a personal journey. It is longing for our loved ones, reliving memories, remembering the lines of their face and the sound of their voice. And being sad for our loss. Grief is permanent but it becomes a part of our everyday fabric as we learn to live life again and it does become less intrusive. I promise.

You do you. Do what you need to care for your heart. Use my cautionary tale of emotional paralysis over the last few months and don’t let unnecessary garbage interfere with your process. Don’t let others tell you what is right and wrong. Only you know that for you.