Letter 27 – A Hardened Rock
Dear Garrett,
If I wait too long between appointments to see Tricia, I can feel myself turning to stone. I get stuck in my own thoughts. I feel myself sinking down into a sense of defeat, and I stay there. It feels like a logjam of stuckness, which usually means I need to sit down with someone who knows what it’s like and pour out all of my confusion, regret and sadness until there is nothing left. Afterward, I often feel a sense of having been cleared out. That something has been moved within by doing this.
If I didn’t have a guide, I don’t know what I would be like right now. A hardened rock, is what I imagine. When you first died, I went online almost immediately to find something I could connect to. Others who had experienced what I did, and what had happened to them. A lot of what I found online was terrible. Parents who were stuck in their grief, years after the death had occurred. Parents who messaged that it felt like everything happened yesterday, no matter how long ago it was. Parents who said they were just going through the motions, hollowed out shells of their former selves.
It was terrible, to think of an endless future of essentially nothingness. Is this what I can anticipate? I thought to myself. I don’t want this to be me. All these people so stuck in their sadness. I have a daughter. I don’t want her to have an empty shell of a mother for the rest of her life. I don’t want that for the rest of my life.
It is so easy to get stuck in my grief.
I don’t want to do the things my counselor suggests. It’s hard, and I find myself often saying, no, nope, I’m not going do that. I resist. Things like, talk to your son, right here, in front of me, and tell him how sorry you are for whatever you did that hurt him. Talk to him, right now, directly from your heart. No. There was no way was I going to do that. Talk to my son, out loud, in front of someone else. No.
Until, one day, I did. Until there was enough trust between us that I did what she asked me to. And it is healing, to do this. In little, tiny, sips, it is healing to identify and speak out loud all the things you think you did, or didn’t do, on behalf of your child. To speak out loud in whatever messy way you can, helps. To apologize from the bottom of your heart, opens the door to forgiveness. From exaggerated, and grief-stricken, to hopefully something better.
I am supposing that restoration can only be found if you look hard, and speak the words, and do the work. It is very difficult, especially if you don’t have someone prodding you ever so gently to do it. I thank you, Tricia. And I resist you. And I accept you. And I resist you more. And then I eventually do whatever it is that you ask me to do, in your gentlest way, and I see what you had thought I might see, and I feel a little more emptied of my grief and my sadness.
