Grief Work

This blog has been woefully neglected while I mainly blog about the emptiness and failure of my uterus, but this doesn't really fit there. And it's not really knitting, either.

I'm sad. Which isn't really accurate enough. I am profoundly sad. I am "my heart breaks a dozen times a day" sad. I am learning how to be sad and letting it suck in the entirety of suckfullness.

Which feels like losing ground, but really, it's not. It is learning how to feel my emotions as they occur, not forcing them away and alphabetizing my soup cans. And I hate it. I hate every second of it. I feel weak. Worse than weak, I feel vulnerable and oh my god, there is nothing I loathe more than feeling vulnerable.

So, the reason? My grandma died. That actually happened in 2002. But I just shut down that whole process until December of 2014. Because in order to deal with grief, I had to first deal with my anger at my mother. And that was just something I wasn't able to do.

Just before Christmas in 2001, my mother let me know that it might be the last time to spend time with my grandmother. We were planning to travel to see her.

Then my husband's grandmother died. It was nearly 2 years to the day after his grandfather had passed away after a sudden and horrible stroke where really important parts of his brain died instantly, but his body was slower to catch on. My husband is an only child. His father is an only child. His mother had a brother, but she may as well have been an only. His grandmother had been sick with lung cancer for months, she insisted it was just a bad cold. So to her, she had a very bad cold for six months and had home hospice for several of those months. When she passed away it was the last of my husband's grandparents. It was right before my mother and father in law's anniversary and right before Christmas. The funeral was just the five of us in a mausoleum chapel and then some crappy restaurant for lunch where horrible Christmas music was playing. Seriously, there was some German techno thing that was just beyond ridiculous.

So, when my mother called me two months later and told me that it looked like the end was coming, I made plans to go with her to be there. She was going to call us and we would meet at her house and then drive down together.  My husband and I packed our bags and basically waited for her call. I tried to reach her for several days to get updates. After several days my stepfather answered the phone at their house. He was surprised, he thought I was with my mother. She had been gone for several days. In fact, my grandmother was gone.
I had no idea.
He must have reached her fairly quickly, because she called shortly to say she had meant to let me know, but she just could not get cell phone reception. So she didn't call to tell me that she left, and she didn't call to tell me that she was gone. She just....didn't.

How do you even deal with something like that? The hurt and the anger were completely overwhelming. And the grief. I couldn't deal with all of it. I had to just shut it all down to get through it without just screaming at my mother. So I never dealt with it, just put it all away in a corner of my brain. And then in December, we unpacked that box. And I have felt like a raw nerve for the past 5 weeks. I alternate between sadness and anger ad just feeling so....angry. And also still hurt by my mother's behavior.

There are so many times where I rationalized and excused her behavior. This time, I could not. It was damage that I wasn't dealing with, but at the same time I could not ignore. It was really the beginning of me extricating myself from our relationship.