Anticipation of a Difficult Day is Always Worse than the Day Itself

Anticipation of a Difficult Day is Always Worse than the Day Itself

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Starting this week, there is a rapid succession of difficult days ahead. That is…I anticipate they’ll be difficult.

This week my youngest son will start Kindergarten. It’s something his older sister dreamed of doing, but didn’t live long enough to do. Next week we will celebrate another of her birthdays without her. She would have been 10. Four weeks after that marks the anniversary of her death at the tender age of four. In the days that follow, I’ll be expected to celebrate my birthday, which fell on the day before her memorial service the year she died.

All of these days carry with them the anticipation of being a grief trigger.  Anticipation can work one of two ways. It can imagine the best-case scenario, or it can imagine the worst.

So when we anticipate a difficult grief trigger, it brings up all the worst-case scenarios our imaginative minds can conjure up.

The first year after losing someone is the hardest. It was for me. It’s hard because your mind has no point of reference to compare to. The first holidays, birthdays, and anniversary of their death (angel-versary, devastation day…whatever you prefer to call it). They’re all anticipated as so painful, you can’t imagine how you’ll survive them.

So let’s get this straight: your anticipation of a grief trigger causes your mind to imagine a worst-case scenario. And since it doesn’t have a reference point to compare to, it compares it to the actual event that is causing the trigger. Your mind tells you the trigger will likely bring you right back to the pain you experienced on the day you lost your loved one. So you find yourself in an anticipatory panic even though you’ve already survived the worst pain imaginable.

In reality, our minds are our own worst enemies. So what do we do about it?

That first year, I felt like cancelling all holidays in an attempt to avoid the pain I knew they’d bring. We couldn’t because we had other young children who expected and deserved the celebrations. So we attempted to change tradition just enough to make them feel different.

For example, for that first Thanksgiving we accepted my brother’s dinner invitation, but requested a few simple things. First, we asked to keep the invite list as small as possible (his family and ours). Second, I requested to sit at the end of the table so that if I felt like I was about to burst into tears, I could easily excuse myself and quickly slip out of the room to be alone. Third, we requested to skip the “what are we thankful for” question tradition. Just thinking of that question that first year made my blood boil with anger.

For the first Christmas after her death, we opted for an artificial tree. It still looked like a normal Christmas for our young kids, but in my mind it was different. While we didn’t buy presents for Margareta to place under the tree, we did buy a wind chime to place in her stocking and then hung it at the cemetery later in the day. We kept to ourselves that year; just a small normal dinner at home. The day was filled with difficult emotions and we thought it best to keep to ourselves and focus all our attention and energy on our kids.

We had more options on Margareta’s birthday and the first anniversary of her death. I scheduled vacation days from work on both those days because I couldn’t imagine being able to function in any meaningful way. For months in advance, I agonized over what to actually do on those days.

I didn’t know what to do to make the horrible pain I imagined any easier. Every time I thought of it, I felt overwhelmed.

How do you “celebrate” a birthday of someone who isn’t there to celebrate it?  You can’t ignore it. After all, you want to acknowledge the birthday of one of the most important people in your life. Do you buy presents and then donate them? Do you make a cake?

And then one sleepless night a few weeks before her birthday, it came to me. Margareta loved ladybugs. I would buy live ladybugs and we would release them at her grave on her birthday. So we did. Seeing the chaos of hundreds of ladybugs escaping the confines of the container they had been held in and exploring their new home injected some needed lightness and smiles into a heavy day that was full of sadness. Releasing ladybugs has become a yearly tradition on Margareta’s birthday. One that will continue for the rest of my life…and perhaps her brothers’ lives too.

As for the anniversary of her death – a vivid reminder of the worst day of my life – I planned to do nothing. And nothing was what pretty much what I did that day. It was an uneventful day. And, of course, wasn’t nearly as painful as I anticipated.

Since that first year, my anticipation of the pain that will be triggered on these difficult days has softened.

Each year I have a larger cache of reference points my mind can compare them to. And each year, the level of pain I anticipate lessens. That is not to say I don’t still feel pain and sadness on these days. But I know that pain pales in comparison to what I felt at her death and in that first year after. And I know that I have survived the worst pain I ever could have imagined. So pretty much anything else is manageable in comparison, right?

I will continue to make taking care of myself a priority on these trigger days that lay ahead of me.

With years of reference points to draw from, I’m better able to steer my mind away from imagining the worst-case scenario, and instead try to visualize the best-case scenario.

For example, I know I’ll feel sorrow on the first day of Kindergarten because my beautiful daughter never got to experience its excitement and joy. But in the meantime, I’m imagining those same feelings for my son, and anticipate being able to share in his happiness.

As for the upcoming anniversary of her death, I still plan to take that day off. These last few years we have consciously decided to do something that we think Margareta would have enjoyed. We do this in an attempt to shift the focus from the pain of her death to the joy she brought us while she was here. I also anticipate knowing that whatever feelings come my way that day, I’ll deal with them the best I can.

Regardless of how new your loss is…just keep reminding yourself that anticipation of a difficult day is always worse than the day itself.

The Worst Has Already Happened

The Worst Has Already Happened

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Growing up, I wanted to think I was a “glass half full” kind of person. But the truth is, I was always anticipating and worried about the next bad thing I was sure would happen to me. I lived amid the constant feeling that life around me was unpredictable, chaotic, and often unfair. That is a bitter pill for a little kid to swallow.

My solution to get rid of the ever present anxiety was to continually try to change myself and my behavior.

It was a desperate attempt to control the people and situations around me. I’m sure you can guess that this never seemed to work. It might have an effect for a short while, but then something would “go wrong” again.

Ironically – and unbeknownst to me at the time – it caused even more anxiety. I was constantly trying to mentally catalog the apparent cause and effect my behavior and actions had. If I did A, then B happened. Except that sometimes when I did A, then D, G, or even L happened. It was too confusing and hard to keep track of. But being prone to perfectionism, I kept trying.

Looking back, I have to wonder what my ultimate fear was.

I know for sure I didn’t like the feelings of sadness, loneliness, shame. And certainly didn’t like feeling like I was at the mercy of this unfair universe. But what was it that I was scared would happen if I didn’t keep trying to keep it all under my control? To this day, I’m still not sure.

Those feelings of anxiety and desperate attempts to control the people and situations in my life followed me into adulthood. It just became a way of life for me. And it became more complex as the years went on. There were more people and more situations I had to juggle to try to control. And bigger risks at stake.

Instead of just making sure I was getting good grades in school to get into college, I now had to make sure I kept my employers happy so that I could keep a roof over my head and food on my table. After having a family of my own, I felt the responsibility of not only trying to keep my own life under control and happy, but theirs too. The anxiety intensified, and it became overwhelming.

Overwhelming or not, it was my life, and I did the best I could at trying to balance all of it.

Amid the anxiety and complexity of my life, I was able to find some happiness. My children were beacons of light and love that I held tight to. After ending a disappointing marriage, I found love again and added a stepson and then a daughter to my beloved family.

We were a tight-knit family that focused all our free time on finding new adventures and memories to share. The anxiety and challenges never went away, but it was better balanced by the rewards my family brought.

That all ended on September 30, 2009. On that day my 4-year-old daughter, Margareta, drowned in our pool while we were at home.

On that day, I learned my ultimate lesson: no matter how tightly we try to control our lives and everything in it, we are not in charge of what happens to us.

That stark reality is scary and horrible and can be incredibly unfair, but we cannot change it.

At first, the grief of losing my daughter was like experiencing all those feelings of anxiety, sadness, loneliness, unfairness, and chaos over the course of my lifetime times infinity. True to my lifetime of experience, I tried desperately to overcome the intense feelings of grief by controlling my actions and behaviors. It didn’t work; it seemed to have the opposite effect of just intensifying them instead.

This beast that was grief was unlike anything I’d ever encountered. The harder I fought to suppress it, the worse it seemed to get.

The pain remained unbearable, so I waged this battle against grief for several years. Just as I had done before, I mentally cataloged all of the grief triggers I experienced in hopes to avoid them the next time. I adjusted my response and behavior to each trigger to try to find which ones made the pain lessen. To my frustration, none of them did and the triggers remained unpredictable and intense.

At some point, I realized that my lifelong urge to try to control my life was actually making things worse. And made the choice to stop fighting grief. In doing so, I finally began to understand what I had always been looking for. The irony that I learned this lesson in the face of my worst nightmare come true was not lost on me. It became the silver lining around the dark cloud that I was immersed in.

The reality is that the worst has already happened. My daughter is dead and there is nothing that I can do to change that.

Knowing that I survived the worst pain I will ever face has significantly reduced my anxiety and changed my perspective forever. Challenges that used to seem insurmountable or cause for alarm now appear manageable in comparison. I now know I have the inner strength to handle whatever comes my way. I now have the humility to know that I cannot control the emotions or reactions of anyone else. Showing my vulnerability and asking for help is not a sign of weakness, but one of courage and strength.

I choose to no longer look at life with a “glass half full” versus “glass half empty” mentality. The glass is what it is.

We will have good days and bad days. Our experience will include joy as well as sorrow. We will be filled with love and with pain. And we will continually be faced with challenges and uncomfortable feelings.

This is the ultimate lesson I have learned: I am not in control of my life. I never was. The only control I have is the choice to allow life to happen to me without fighting it. To accept each situation – no matter how difficult or painful. And instead, focus my attention and energy on answering the question, “What do I do next?”

Grief and the Loss of Control

Grief and the Loss of Control

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Possibly one of the hardest aspects of grief for me has been that I can’t control it.

The majority of my life was filled with desperate attempts to try to control everything in it. I wanted life to be predictable and – above all – peaceful. The problem has been what I tried to control and how I’d gone about it.

I spent many, many years trying to control the people and situations around me. I did this through careful, strategic use of my own words, actions (or lack thereof), and responses. It was exhausting and depressing. And as you can imagine, it never really worked. Maybe I could temporarily create the illusion of control; but it would never last.

Many, including myself, try to control our lives out of a need to feel safe or secure in our surroundings.

Fear of the unknown can be incredibly scary, and even panic-inducing. We experience many uncomfortable feelings like hurt, anxiety, frustration, anger, or guilt due to various situations and people around us. And we tend to want to do anything and everything to make those feelings subside. Sometimes, we can take various actions to change the situation or influence the person to behave differently.

But many times, we are completely at the mercy of unpredictability and the unknown. Death and grief are one of those times.

On the day my daughter drowned, there was a chaos of paramedics trying to revive her. I remember pleading with whoever happened to be listening to save her. I can hear myself screaming, “Please save her. SHE CAN’T DIE.” This was all amid my hysterical sobs and falling to my knees.

The idea that she was dead and couldn’t be saved was unacceptable. No. Through sheer determination, I would will her back to life. And yet, even on that day while I watched the paramedics and then the ER staff desperately work on her for what seemed like hours, part of me knew she had already died.

The grief that took over in the aftermath of her death was overwhelming.

Looking back, I’m not sure what was worse: the excruciating pain of missing my daughter, or the complete and utter lack of control of anything.

I couldn’t change what happened and bring her back to life. I couldn’t control my thoughts or emotions and was a complete wreck for days and weeks. Things that used to be automatic and easy, like cooking or showering were now unbearable and almost impossible. I could no longer tell my other children everything would be ok when I couldn’t possibly imagine that anything would ever be “ok” again.

But it wasn’t just a loss of control. It was being face-to-face with the unknown.

Questions raced through my head. What if I had just stopped to play with her the last time she asked? What if I had brought her with me that morning? Why did it happen to us? Will I ever be ok again? What is going to happen to my family? My other children? My marriage? What happens after we die? Will I ever see her again? None of these questions could be answered. I couldn’t control any of it by choosing the “right” words or actions.

As time went on, my grief took many unexpected twists and turns. I never knew how I would feel from one moment to the next.

I never knew what would trigger my emotions and leave me a crying mess, or in an angry rage, or in a state of panic. And the triggers themselves were random and unpredictable. I would desperately try to figure out what triggered me to try to avoid it in the future. But most of the time, I felt completely out of control. And despite attending counseling and support groups, there was nothing I could really do about it.

I’m not sure when I came to terms with it.

I’m not sure when I accepted that grief, in its very nature, is unpredictable and uncontrollable. But when I did finally accept it, it had an unexpected result: I felt relief.

It was as if a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. Now, when intense grief appears seemingly out of nowhere, I am better able to accept it, process it, seek support for it. And I know that it will eventually pass.

I don’t know what the future will bring, but for the first time in my life, I’m okay with that.

I work on resisting the urge to control others with my words and actions. Instead, I try to speak the truth and express my feelings and needs. I’m okay with focusing on the here and now, yet not forsaking planning for the future. It takes less energy, produces less anxiety, and provides more contentment. It allows me to enjoy the moment.

But I would be lying if I didn’t admit I still wish I could change the past.

I love and miss you, Margareta.