Grief Work

At this point, you must see that I am procrastinating packing the remainder of the house. We are supposed to pull out of here on Tuesday afternoon, if all goes well. I have several hours of packing left…but will get a lion’s share done tonight and tomorrow afternoon.

Something I haven’t shared much about with you all is what I am doing to help me with my grief. Notice I did not say “combat” my grief, but it isn’t something that I should be fighting against. It is something I am learning to live with. I have used this analogy with a couple of groups of grieving friends. One groups thought it was great, the other group thought I was a fruit loop. Choose your camp. I used to care what people thought of me. It is no longer a priority in my life. I see grief as a linebacker; a big, burly 350 lb guy that grunts and the ground squeaks when he walks under the weight of his massiveness. This linebacker called Grief is holding my hand. We are forever entwined in my life. Somedays, I am not paying close attention to where I am headed and I trip over Grief and he falls on top of me….and the pain I feel as he is literally crushing the very breath out of me is all-consuming. I don’t think I will survive it. There are days when we walk easily hand-in-hand, talking about Joe and laughing about the antics he got up to during his life. We reminisce about his smile…his inability to spell words so creatively with his dyslexia. It is a give and take relationship with me and Grief. He does have a firm grip on my hand and we are in it together. That is how I see grief. For my rugby friends, Grief is a huge 8 man that is from New Zealand and most likely a Maori guy with swirling tattoos and built like Dwayne Johnson (the Rock).

So what have I been doing to work with my grief? I spent the last year meeting with a Stephen Minister from a local Methodist Church. I have come before my parish leaders several times telling them how much this is needed in our own parish, but it appears the Catholic Church in Omaha has not caught on to this phenomenal program. My mom and dad both served as Stephen Ministers…my mom is the Stephen Ministry leader for her very large Lutheran Church in Texas. Stephen Ministry is a listening ministry. The people who go through the program have a year or more of intense training. If someone is going through a hard time….a death…an extended illness….a divorce….an estrangement….a loss of a job….so many things that can cause a lot of stress – they can ask for a Stephen Minister to start meeting with them. A woman is matched with a female Stephen Minister and a man meets with a male Stephen Minister. They typically meet in their home or at a set location where there is privacy for just the two of them to talk for about an hour a week….or whatever they decide. My Stephen Minister’s name was Laura. She would ask me questions and just listen. She never gave me advice or anything like that. She would just ask more questions. Listening to what I was saying out loud helped me sort through everything. She often let me talk about Joe unceasingly….she would ask me how I felt close or not close to him that week. She asked about family dynamics with our complicated sudden grief along with my terminal illness mixed in. Laura was a safe place for me to just talk. I always was so amazed at how much I had to say each week. We then ended each hour with a prayer between the two of us. I met with Laura for the last time this past week. I will miss her a lot. Stephen Ministers typically cannot have more than one care receiver at a time. She has been assigned a new person. I have no doubt she will be a blessing to her as she was to me.

I have been to a class at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Elkhorn called “Jesus Wept”. It is a day long retreat which really helps me to focus in on Joe and my grief for him. I met some wonderful people there….couples who are also grieving for their children. Some of them I will have long lasting relationships with because they are the people I feel safest to just talk to around. They GET IT. (and I am so sorry they do). They are my new tribe. They come to the table with their big linebackers holding their hands as well. Some of the moms get together via zoom for about 90 minutes once a month to go over a chapter in a book we are all reading together on grief…or to hear a guest speaker talk to us about how to help our living kids deal with this horrible loss. I love this group so much. There are a few of us Catholic moms who have spun off and meet in a coffee shop in Gretna every now and then. One of the moms said it best when she said,”I knew I had found my people when the first tear fell and everyone pulled out their kleenex from their purses and threw them in the middle of the table for us all to use.” (and we did use them all up that day).

All of these groups are great…but they are not meeting very often. I knew I needed to have more help on a more frequent basis. I joined a program online called Tender Hearts. It is run by a grief expert named David Kessler. Yes, I pay something like $34 a month, but I have the ability to sit in on zoom grief meetings four times a week. I also get a 10 minute video and homework to do each week. I have gotten to know a lot of the other grieving moms from all over the world who are on the site. We let each other talk about our ups and downs, and about our kids who have died. There is no real cross talk…we just witness each other’s grief. I have been so impressed with David’s program, that I signed up to take his grief educator’s course. He only offers it once a year, and the timing was not great, but I am almost done with it now. The course ends at the end of June. I spend maybe 5 hours a week working on class work or doing labs, which I really enjoy. I hope to take what I have learned and be a peer to peer grief educator up in Montana. We already have met and bonded somewhat with a family in our new neighborhood who also lost an adult child. I would like to hopefully get involved in Compassionate Friends (which is a nationwide program for grieving parents, siblings, and grandparents). We’ll see how that goes. Right now, I know that almost everyday of the week I can hop online and zoom with fellow grievers who are learning to live with grief. It is a safe place for me to share my feelings and thoughts and to be witnessed and not judged. It has really helped me a lot. The number of “aha!” moments I have had is embarrassing. I was a perinatal grief counselor when I was in the Air Force as a nurse. I took a LOT of coursework on how to deal with people in grief. Yet I was totally immobilized by grief when Joe died. This has really helped me realize a lot about myself, my family, my friends, and my former friends. I am hoping to pretty much turn over a new leaf when I move. It is a scary thing, change. I have had a lot of it in the last few years and in the process I have been hurt very deeply by a lot of people who probably don’t even realize that their silence was deafening to me. I have a lot of good, solid people in my life. I don’t necessarily need all the ancillary ones anymore. I just can’t carry friendships that are mostly one-sided anymore. I am so very tired. I now have defined what I need for my own journey going forward…and people pleasing just isn’t in the cards anymore. Crazy that it took getting stage IV cancer and then enduring the death of a child to wake myself up to all of this. So I am tightening my tribe and moving on….with Grief holding my hand as I move away. I feel healthier emotionally than I have in a long time and I am so very thankful for that. That doesn’t mean that I don’t break down and cry a lot….because I do…and that is okay. The tears cleanse my soul so I can pick myself up and continue on. Joe would want that for me.