It didn't happen on your watch Doc.... It just happened....

A recent article I read spoke of the 2nd year of grieving.....
I have been in a dark hole the last few weeks, I was not just a grieving single mother. Tears, bad thoughts, withdrawal, extreme anger and sadness, loneliness....these emotions have surrounded me. It's all too easy to get lost in this, struggling round and round at the bottom of the whirlpool, with an overwhelming feeling that if I was religious or more spiritual, and believed totally that I would see him again, then it wouldn't be so bad......but I'm not.

Somewhere, deep within me, I knew I could crawl out of the sludge at the bottom of the hole eventually. I remembered the glimpses of hope I had in the first year of grief. I remembered my mantra of "joy and purpose". I remembered the self made promise that I would not allow myself to be worse in the second year of grief, like all the books say, yet here I was, drowning in the reality that my boy was gone. I felt like I had a small collection of friends that I let my guard down with, and I begged them not to think I was depressed just because I always cried with them. The rest of the time I wore my masks and became more reclusive.

Then I met someone new to grief. His wife has breast cancer and he had tears in his eyes telling me their story. I shared my story and tears in return. It was an odd moment, one shared by two strangers in the parallel universe of suffering. I thought no more of it until I received a card from him with the following amazing words:



"A good Doctor deals with the known-known's. A great Doctor deals with the known-unknown's, but no Doctor can deal with the unknown-unknown's. It didn't happen on your watch Doc, it just happened while you were on watch...."


                         



Yep, it just happened. There is no sense to be made of it. It wasn't my fault. I have to stop blaming myself, hating myself. I have to move on, if only at a crawling pace. The depth of grief represents the love we have for the one we've lost, and a parent's love is immeasurable. I'm struggling. I'm exhausted. I accept that. Like a pregnant woman who only sees the other pregnant women in the crowd, I am only seeing the death, loss and sadness around me, and there is plenty of that. I give everything I have to work and to my daughter and to grief. There is nothing left for anyone else, and there is nothing coming back for me. There has to be some way to make this pain better.

Note to Readers:
"There has to be some way to make this pain better." The pain will diminish; the thoughts will change from being focused "on the death" or "how he/she died" to "how he/she lived". Time will make this happen..... at the appropriate time.... you can not rush it; but it will happen.