It’s the sort of comment that is so carelessly thrown out and it floats in the air weightless. If it finds a weakness, it sinks in at that spot, driving where it finds deep into the ground. Most of the time there is no weakness – no one knows from anything, and the comment just dissipates. Sometimes though.
“You never buy anything before the baby comes. God forbid something should happen and you would have to pack all of that stuff away. Can you imagine how terrible it would be?”
As it happens, I can. I don’t even have to imagine. I can close my eyes and just . . . be there. I can, if I want to, remember every single moment of it. The packing up of my maternity clothes and then giving them away 3 years later.
I can remember Mr. Spit dismantling furniture, I can remember hauling it downstairs to the basement, I can remember the people we gave it away to, I can remember repainting the nursery so that it could be my office. I’m typing this, sitting where the crib would have sat.
Every single agonizing moment.
I don’t have to imagine.
I got in the car after the conversation, and drove myself home, crying. Angry that I was still crying. It’s been so very nearly 7 years.
There comes this moment in grief where you simply become tired of it. Tired of the fact that Gabe is still dead, I’m still here, it still hurts.
If I am truthful, it hurts every moment of every day.
Not like it did.
Never again like that pain that first happened. But this pain that comes every so often is an echo of that pain. When the random pain from a weightless statement comes home and it becomes the heaviest weight you can imagine.
Not forever – but for a while. You pick up that terrible weight that you carried anew, or maybe it was always there – and you heft it along for a while.
I wonder, in the frustration of still this pain, still there, still hurting, still real –
Why?
Just why. All of those why’s. Why did I get pregnant? Why couldn’t I carry a child? Why did he die?
Why.
Just why.
I find that when I have extreme emotional upheavals, I am thrown in a ptsd moment where I relive Ronan’s birth day. Sounds like you are in a similar spot. Giving you a cyber hug….
Yeah.
It’s shit when this comes out of nowhere.
Sorry babe.
I’m sorry Mrs. Spit. I, too, know those moments and hours and days of agony when the knife twists again. I’m 20 + years out and my other “why” is – Why does it still hurt this badly? It is unlike any other loss. The suicide of my older brother, the loss to cancer of another brother, the death of my parents, the death of my marriage. It seems at times that there is nothing else in my life that I have worked this hard at, for such meager results. I don’t know why. I do know it is. It is like this for all the people I know who have lost a child. We are not nuts, we are not stupid or grieving wrong. It is impossible to explain. It seems impossible to believe it, at times, when I’m the one living it.
I will say that this type of reaction was less the second decade than the first. Not gone, but not as often or, usually, lasting as long.
Sending you love and wishing you peace.
I get hit by grief at such unexpected times. I’m so sorry for your loss. No way to put it…it just sucks.
I think perhaps the echos of grief are always with us.
This child, made of your flesh, has carried your heart with him. The two – the here and now, and the lost to heaven – call to each other through time; and when the two hearts hear the call, the joy of union and the grief of seperation collide. And it gets not easier, and it hurts the same, and the tears come.
sending you hugs….
Really sorry this was said, and that of course it still hurts, always hurts.
Why? That’s a question we can never answer. As Gertrude Stein said, “the answer is, there is no answer.” But it doesn’t stop us asking it, does it?
I am so sorry, grieve comes back so raw when least expected. Wishing that tomorrow it feels better.
Oh Mrs. Spit. Here, at six years tomorrow, feeling the same. Angry, sad and tired. Not all at once. Not all of the time. But it still hurts.
I don’t believe that there is an answer. No answer that I could ever comprehend anyhow. But as Mali rightly says, that doesn’t stop us asking.
It does still hurt — you have a great explanation of how and when that resonates with me a lot. I’m sorry that that was pulled up for you again recently. And I’m sorry that the hurt will never go away for us.
I’m sorry. I’m sorry how it strikes without warning sometimes.
I wish I knew. 🙁
I think that we struggle to make sense of those painful moments of our life. We have this drive to make everything rational and sensible and logical…and yet, sometimes things just aren’t. I’m sorry. If it helps, it makes no sense from where I sit either. And I’m going to say that Reese is definately on to something. Your world has been rocked yet again. PTSD is a logical offshoot.