Healing and Choices

Moving forward, I think it is important to share my healing thoughts and begin to refocus myself on the healing process.  To that end, I’ve been trying to help others be kind to themselves while taking this dubious “journey.”

There have been two conversations I’ve had the past week that I want to share. 

The language we use to describe our emotional experience can be unkind to ourselves, and through that unkindness, we limit our ability to heal.  For instance, terms like “break down” and “fell apart” and “couldn’t handle it.”  These are normal, colloquial terms that our society uses, but they are unfair very self-defeating.  Crying, screaming, bawling, going back to bed, and responding with outward emotion to the experience we’ve had is completely logical.  You didn’t fall apart, you responded to a tremendous pain and grief that has befallen you, and that, my friends, is perfectly logical and reasonable. 

What difference does the term make?  I think language is important.  Not for nitpicking words, and being semantic, and trying to make other people wrong, but the words we use influence the way we see things and they express the way we see them.  People who have experience a suicide speak of this often.  How other people are so thoughtless, how they themselves used to be so thoughtless, and how now they are sensitive, sometimes ridiculously so, to phrases that we use every day, like “just shoot me,” and “sometimes I just want to kill myself.”  It shouldn’t matter what other people say, but still, those words, they hurt. 

In a grief group, someone told me that what seemed to characterize my grief was an active desire to heal and to take action on things that will help me heal. 

So it is with these thoughts.  I no longer think of crying fits or angry moments as “break downs.”  Doing exactly what is logical and right to do in the moment is the opposite of a break down.  I sometimes get angry, and stress of any kind can cause me to respond erratically, and that is a perfectly normal symptom of PTSD.  I sometimes forget appointments and I avoid crowds and that sometimes means I isolate.  This comes from anxiety, brought on by my PTSD, and is also perfectly normal, and it’s ok.  I will heal, and maybe next time I’ll stay longer or get out the door earlier.  Either way, it really is ok. 

My subsequent thought is along the same lines, but of a different subject matter.  It has to do with guilt and shame and how we think of ourselves from within that emotional state. I don’t like talking about Storm’s suicide, and a large portion of the reason is my own culpability; my guilt and terrible shame over what happened.  I know few others who have a story like mine, and coping with the pain of that daily, understanding the constant humility that brings to us daily, I have a great deal of sympathy for the guilt and pain that others feel.

One of the ways I’ve used to cope with that is to be as logical and objective about the matter as possible.  What do I really own here?  I own some of it; my hateful words, the argument itself; right down to the fact that I bought the gun he killed himself with.  But objectively it is perfectly reasonable to experience an argument with a spouse and to expect everyone to be alive at the end of it. 

Logically, do you really have a reason to feel guilty?  Most of the wonderful widows and widowers interact with feel guilty over arguments they had; times when they used sharp words.  Maybe they weren’t actually there when their spouse died, or they died in the middle of an argument as happened with us.  Much of the time, the things they describe are the things that I miss about my life with Storm. 

I miss the ongoing argument about what restaurant we would eat at while driving down Lancaster; the one where I griped because I was sick of eating food that was served off of paper.  I miss watching him wolf down four dollar burgers at once, and gripe he was still hungry, did I have any more ones?   

I miss the endless debates about where things should be in the garden; even when I knew he was going to do whatever he wanted, anyway.  I miss him cajoling me to make him a few grilled cheese sandwiches because he was too drunk, promising to “make it worth my while later.”  I miss his stubborn refusal to listen, and his compliments on my baking, and his making me blush with his bluntness, and wondering why anyone was this man’s friend?  I miss walking the dogs before or after work and talking about all of the stuff. 

Sure, I remember the big arguments and the important special days, but mostly, I just miss the mundane, “wasted” days where we did nothing but sit around the house.  Except they weren’t wasted.  They were the fabric of our lives together, that made up the whole quilt of my memory of who we were.   

Mostly, I try not to focus on the guilt and the shame and the pain.  I can get bogged down in all that, and frankly, I’m actually entitled.  But logically; what’s the point? 

This whole experience is going to hurt.  Losing the people closest to you is incredibly painful, and learning to live without them is emotional equivalent to learning to live without a limb.  Pain and heartache are inevitable.  But I can decide HOW it hurts.  If it’s going to hurt anyway; if I’m going to lay in bed and cry and feel like crap anyway, why do I need to further add to it by thinking about the worst parts of it!?  That box of tissues is getting emptied that day, either way.  

Honestly; I would rather lay in my bed and think about my wedding day, and how he stopped the music to play our song at the New Year’s Party we crashed.  I would rather think about our many trips to the beach; eating brats cooked over a driftwood fire; drinking beer and smoking bowls while our good dogs frolicked around us. I would rather picture him with a cloud of pit bulls around him; cigar clamped in his teeth, cowboy hat on his head, striding down the street like he owned the place.   

I’m going to cry either way; I may as well cry about the things that made us wonderful together. 

When I start thinking about those things, instead of focusing on every minute and stupid argument we ever had, I realize our life together was pretty lovely, and I am very grateful for having known Storm Treasure.  Because he was so special, it always amazed me that he loved ME!  Frankly, he would be unhappy about me beating myself up.  He would tell me that it was his wife I was picking on, and he really didn’t appreciate me being so unkind to the woman he loved.  He would right.  We loved each other in unreasonable ways.  The best way for me to honor that love is to remember the good parts, and forgive both him and myself for the rest.  That is a legacy of the heart. 

I hope this helps someone.  Shalom.  😊