To-Do List

I started talking to someone about some of my feelings about living with loss. I told her I feel retarded in my grief. Like I can seem to handle some aspects of it relatively well, and others seem to nag at me. I'm all over the place sometimes. Like a kid who gets to take the car out on my own for the first time... I just seem to be going wild with it. This free reign to feel however you want, and on your own timeline is way too unstructured for me! lol

Today, a friend texted me for some pointers on how to support a newly grieving couple. This, as I am struggling to roll out of bed and into a Dr.'s office to find out why my abdomen is KILLING me, and my father is being admitted to a hospital 8 hours away with the probability of a very serious cancer diagnosis. You would think that with the weight of all those events already unfolded by 9:00am, I would have tabled it to the bottom of my to-do list something like this.

• Go find out why you are getting stabbed from the inside out and unable to move without wincing.
• Check on Dad and pray he is released from the isolation room (everyone knows about that room in hospitals!) and they diagnose everything as quickly as possible.
• Drop kid off at school.
• Call work.
• Forward meeting information to assistant to cover for me.
• something else
• something else
• something else

oh... and if I can,

• Advise on how to be a good grieving friend.

Yeah, I didn't do that.  This poor momma and daddy made the top of my list. With teary eyes in a waiting room, and as fast as I could, I squeezed in a bunch of texts full of to-do's and not-to-do's as well as some referrals for good reading material. I gave him some decent information, at least enough to point him in the right direction. In one of his replies to me though, he asks, "Is your heart slowly getting to a better place?" I didn't have the gumption to tell him hell no and it's still a huge hole. I didn't want to scare him because I knew the scene he was in is also touchy and difficult for the onlooker. There he would stand, watching his friends in a pain you cannot alleviate in even the slightest, and  knowing it doesn't get that much better than what it is right now, was just too mean of a thing to do to someone.

I told him, "You learn." I wasn't lying... it is that simple. You learn to be angry when you don't have anyone or anything specific to blame. You learn to wipe more tears than you've ever cried in your whole life... combined. You learn exactly what your heart is made of, as you pick all of it's delicate pieces up off the floor and start laying them back into position and you also learn what your partners heart is made of when help them with theirs. You learn how strong and unbreakable love is because now you do it from within because your arms empty. You learn to live a life that would make your baby proud. You do it in memory of, and to honor your baby who unlike a sleeping bundle in the crib,  he or she is always watching. You learn to love butterfly's and rainbows a little more. You learn to make more time for the things that matter most. You learn to value what you do have, and cherish relationships even more. And... you learn to avoid the baby isle in the grocery as if it never existed in the first place... at least for a little while.

The point is, it doesn't get better or worse. It's always the same and it truly does become a "new normal".

Hugs and more hugs for that momma and daddy. I tell my husband I love him for myself and extra for Carly. I hope they love each other for their baby too!

-Tiff

 

P.S. Carly: all those "something else's" up there on my list was me making time to think about you today... like always!

Make sure you hug that new little angel for the parents!