stages

I have now been through almost six months of being a grieving mother.  And I can say, the pain doesn't lesson.  You just change, and adapt to living with it.  It doesn't go away, but you get stronger.

There are a lot of stages I have been through since Virginia's death.  I'm sure there are many more I will go through, but here are some of the things that I have experienced.

For the first few weeks after her death, I wore the same clothes everyday.  It was the first two months actually.  The same pink hoodie, and the same black sweatpants.  Everyday.  When I had to go out (and I didn't go anywhere unless I HAD to) I put on some jeans and then right back to those sweatpants.  John would leave for work in the morning and I would be sitting in a chair in our living room and he would come home from work to me sitting in the same chair.  I couldn't move.

When we made the trip to NC for her memorial, I refused to pack that hoodie or those sweatpants, so I could make myself at least get dressed everyday.  And it has gotten better since then.  Now I am working again, so I don't sit in that same chair all the time.  And even on days off I clean or something.  I frequently want to just stay in bed all day, and just never leave, but I get up, I get dressed, and I keep going.  I made it through my sweatpants stage.

The other big stage would have to be eating, or lack there of.  I have written about this in other blogs I believe, but I had a serious lack of appetite for a long long time.  I lost a lot of weight, and I lived off of forcing myself to drink protein shakes.  It started to get dangerous, and I was not healthy.  So I slowly worked up to eating twice a day.  And now, I eat almost normally.  I made it through my not eating stage.

I know I once wrote on here about not painting my nails or wearing earrings.  After I wrote that, I started to get brave about trying those things out.  I paint my nails colors that make me think of her.  I wear little angel earrings, and some days I just go for it and wear one of my old pairs.  Something about doing those things used to make me feel so bad, like doing them was admitting I was okay with her death by doing something I would normally do.  But I don't have that fear or anxiety as strongly about it now.  I made it through (some of) my irrational avoidance of anything normal stage.

For a while, I couldn't sleep in our bedroom.  Her crib was set up in there, and looking at it being empty was too much, and I wasn't ready at first to move it out of ours and into her room.  But it wasn't just the crib.  Something about being in our bed made me think more about being pregnant than being anywhere else.  I remembered feeling her move and kick, and lying in bed thinking of her and our life together.  When I laid down in that bed without her, I would just sob and sob until John just said "Let's just go sleep downstairs baby."  It happened a few times, we would try to move back up there.  It took a few weeks.  We had to move her crib, and eventually I could sleep up there.  And now I can even sleep up there alone if John isn't ready for bed when I am.  I made it through the not being able to even lay in our bed stage.

Then there is the strangest thing that has happened, and it isn't really something that is over, I'm not sure it ever will be.  My memory is all sorts of messed up, but for me that isn't too weird, because I have always had a bad memory, and I believe my memory is so bad now because I can't focus on anything completely.  But it has also changed in really odd ways.  Like I can't remember how to spell.  And I make grammatical mistakes I have never made in my life.  Numbers get all mixed up, and I'll say things sometimes and the words coming out just don't sound right, and I'm not sure that what I'm thinking is what is actually being said out loud.  It is weird.  It is really weird.  But I know memory is affected by grieving, so perhaps I am not the only one affected in such strange ways.

Nevertheless, continuing memory loss aside, I have made it through all of those things.  Through six months of bereavement.  And it is not the end, there is no end.  But I have been to some very dark places, and made it through.  I would have to say I have gotten stronger, because there is no way I could have gotten this far without getting stronger and learning to carry grief, but I absolutely cannot take the glory.  It all belongs to her, because if not for love between mother and child I would still be sitting in a chair eating nothing all day.  She is my strength, my light, my love, my everything.