Starting a blog hasn’t been as easy as I thought it would be. I have posts started for a thousand different topics, but getting through them has been tough. I can only do what I can do, so I ask myself, what are the basics? Well, the things drilled into my head over the years have been Keep It Simple Stupid, Stop Overthinking, and the one that brought me here, Do What You Know.
Do what I know. Well, let me discuss a subject I know all too well. A subject that I have written a whole book on. How do I know it? I’ve lived it. I am living it. I will continue to live it. And if you are here, you want to know about it, so let’s dive into what I am sure is one of many posts I will have on the subject at hand.
Grief. It’s such a dark word, isn’t it? A dreary, desolate, sad word. It evokes such heavy emotions. To me, it seems like everything that could ever possibly be written about grief already has been, yet it’s such an unknown, misunderstood, taboo topic. It shouldn’t be. If people who REALLY understood the ins and outs, the ups and downs, the thick and thin of it were the ones to help others through their Pit Of Despair (1000 bonus points if you name that movie), grief would be as commonplace a subject these days as Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. Grief shouldn’t be a subject to be ashamed of, to hide from or to feel like can’t be openly discussed. Grief isn’t limited to just being a response to a death, and most people don’t realize that. We grieve any kind of loss that impacts us deeply. So why shouldn’t we discuss it the way we do TikTok videos while sitting with our friends at Starbucks?? “But Lacy, you’re so young. How can you possibly know what you are talking about?” Friends, grief has no age restrictions. It’s not biased at all. It doesn’t care how old you are, how much money you make, what race you are or what you do for a living. It’s an Equal Opportunity Emotion. And unfortunately, I am no stranger to it.
No, I don’t have a PhD, an MD, or an LMNOP behind my name. What I do have, though, is life….what I do have is the very traumatic life experience of losing the man I loved with every fiber of my being by suicide…during the COVID pandemic no less. That was the hardest loss I’ve ever experienced. I have the life experience of losing my cousin just a couple of years later in the same manner. I have the life experience of helping friends and loved ones through their own dark thoughts of suicide and have helped them off the proverbial, and even sometimes literal, ledge. I’ve done it all while working multiple jobs at once and being a mom and a girlfriend, a friend and acquaintance. I have the life experience of watching the man I love at this time in my life laying in a hospital bed after a stroke, not knowing if he’d be able to speak or walk when he opened his eyes, and then staying by his side while he recovered, all while trying to figure out how I was going to pay the bills that month. Real life experience… Sometimes, the life experience outweighs the degrees. I don’t care what anyone says.
It would be nice if grief was the same for us all. If it was simply a straight-lined thing that was as predictable as a clock. Unfortunately, it’s not. Grief is a cycle. A great big circle. Right? Isn’t that what they all say? Well, let me tell you, grief is no circle. It’s no shape at all. It’s going from here to there and then zinging to over there and then back there, but WAIT!!! We are going over there! It’s the biggest zig zag you will ever experience in your life. It’s mind-boggling and dizzying even though you aren’t going in a circle necessarily. And THAT’S OKAY! Feel it. Go through it. Do it. Zig. Zag. Zing. Yes, you experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance, although I loathe those words. They are so clinical. The Five Stages of Grief. You feel what you feel is what I say. You’ll most definitely go through all of these things in whatever pattern, for as long as you need to. Notice I said NEED. Not that you go through the pattern for 6 months. Not for 5 years. I said for as long as you you need to. There’s no timer. You’re unique. Your journey is not the same as anyone else’s, nor does it follow the same pattern. We all tend to have similarities, but our experiences are as unique as our fingerprints and snowflakes. No two are quite the same. It’s the similarities that allow those of us who have walked this path to be able to understand your peril and to help you navigate those horrible waters.
Grief can manifest itself in many ways. It can be an emotional response. It can be mental, or it can be such a deep grief that it becomes a physical manifestation. My own personal experience was physical. When Mark died, I had never experienced anything so deeply painful. I lost 30 pounds in 2 months. I never slept. I cried all the time. I literally had a list of “ailments” that I took to the doctor with me because everything was physically wrong with me, and when he came in the room, I begged him to not think I was crazy. Then I burst into tears. I told him about what had happened, and he so very kindly put his hand on my knee and told me, “Lacy, I am pretty sure what you have, and rightfully so, is Broken Heart Syndrome. It has been known to kill people when they don’t get treated for it.” I never knew that was a real thing!! Here I thought I had early onset arthritis, insomnia, ulcers, cancer of some sort, and the list went on. No, none of that was what was wrong!! He proceeded to examine me and he treated what he could, recommend therapy, which I was already doing, and told me that time was what it would take. To this day, he still treats me for my Broken Heart Syndrome, and at the time of this post, it has been three years. I have been blessed to have a doctor so caring and understanding, and I can never begin to thank him enough for being exactly the doctor I needed, when I needed him.
So what does deep grief feel like? It’s different for everyone, but there are some very huge similarities. The deep kind of grief that causes Broken Heart Syndrome isn’t to be taken lightly. It surely isn’t for the weak. It’s like having your heart ripped out of your chest, but yet your heart’s still in there beating. You have a deep, dark cavern inside of you that seems bottomless, yet you are at the bottom. No matter how hard you try, you can’t climb up and out. Your head is in a gray foggy cloud all the time. You know what is going on around you, but you don’t. Nor do you really even care most of the time. Everything sounds like you are living inside a tin coffee can. You hear the voices, but you can’t understand them. You sit and stare at the TV, but don’t know what you watched. You forget things you would have never forgotten before like birthdays or holidays or even what day of the week it is. You can’t remember if you ate that day or if you brushed your teeth. There are times that you feel like you are in a black hole and you are screaming at the top of your lungs but no one can hear you. You panic when you are around people. You don’t want to be around anyone, yet sometimes you don’t want to be alone. You feel like you have a huge boulder on your chest and you can’t get up, and you can’t catch your breath, you can’t think. Your thoughts don’t seem to ever get into any kind of order, like your ducks keep waddling off, yet you don’t have the energy to try and get them in line. “I don’t know” has become your answer to everything. Decision making is impossible. Nothing makes sense. You feel scatterbrained. You feel like you are losing your mind, losing yourself. People may even make you feel like you are losing your mind. I have two words for those people, and they aren’t nice. Have you felt any of these things? Do any of these things sound familiar? All of them? Guess what? It’s normal, and it’s OKAY! Feel them!!! Just don’t unpack and live there.
Someone recently shared with me about her experience with her medical provider and her own grief journey, and what she said both angered and saddened me. She was told that her grief was “asymptomatic”, meaning it was in her head. OF COURSE IT IS!!!! Grief is not something that is completely physical, which it can be, as we know. Grief, itself, is not something that can be diagnosed with a series of medical examinations or tests. Grief is a feeling, a mental and emotional state. Immediately, my response was a bunch of very choice words to describe what I thought about this guy, but then, when I cooled off, it was that this medical provider had clearly never experienced this kind of grief and had no empathy for her situation. My suggestion was to get another opinion. This diagnosis only added to her stress of grief, which unfortunately is a symptom no one discusses. I recently read a book on grief and its effect on survivors of suicide, as I am part of THAT club unfortunately. It was written by a medical professional and there was no doubt who penned it, even without looking at the cover. Within about two paragraphs, I could feel my anger building, my blood pressure rising and the top about to blow! It was so clinical and so….wrong. There are so many books out there like that. People study and have the “want” to understand and to help but just can’t. There are some subject matters where experience is key.
How do you survive this new existence? One minute at a time. One breath at a time. There is no magic answer. No set of instructions on how to move forward. What I want you to know above all else is that everything you are feeling, whether I have described it here or not, is completely normal. I tell all people grieving this…Feel what you are feeling. I give you permission. My therapist told me this shortly after Mark died, and it was the thing I needed to hear most. He gave me permission to feel what I was feeling. He gave me permission to be in the place I was at that moment. It was okay. That has become my words to people all the time. “Feel your feels. I give you permission. It’s okay!” Sometimes, especially when we are deeply grieving, we need someone to give us the okay to do things, to feel things, to think things. So yes, I give you permission. Feel. It’s okay. Just don’t unpack and live there. Welcome to the Club. You are now a card-carrying member of a Club you didn’t ask to join. We have meetings and everything. Just ask any member. Sorry you have to be one of us now…..
Like I said earlier, I am three years into my grief journey. It isn’t over. I know it never will be. But my life has continued on. Life moves forward, just as it was designed to do. No, time doesn’t make things better. I hate when people say that. I just want to say “No Susan! It doesn’t!!!” (Sorry if your name is Susan…it was just the first name that popped into my head lol) Time does not heal all things. What does happen is that you adapt. Your life adapts around your grief and around the hole that has been left. You figure out how to live life without your person and you eventually create a new life. The old you gets shoved in the closet while you figure out who the new you in this new life is going to be. Our loved ones have gone on, and we are still here. We have to continue on with life, and we can. It is possible. I promise. I still battle all of things associated with grief. They come out of the blue and they hit hard. But I know now that it is simply that: grief showing me it is still there, and I face it bravely and barge through it until I start to feel a little better. I will never be the same. I will never be the me I was. But I will be something different. You can, too. And that’s okay.
Love you most,
Lacy
