Another year
was ushered in.
Just another in a long line
of New Years
you
didn’t
live
long enough to see.
Another year
with fireworks and revelry.
As I sit in quiet anguish,
reminded of all the
coulda
woulda
shoulda’s
your life will never be.
Another year
in which they’ll say,
“Time heals all wounds”.
But after too many years,
I’m
still
waiting
in silent misery.
I’m certain you’ve heard that saying. It’s a nice thought. But the truth is not so simple and clean cut as that. It makes me think whoever coined the phrase hadn’t yet suffered the devastating loss of a loved one that both shatters and redefines the world you live in.
Another new year was ushered in this past week. It will be another year that my daughter did not live to see. An unwelcome reminder that she has been gone for more years than she lived to experience. It takes me further away from her. Further from her birth, her short life, and the impossible moment of her death.
It is distance.
It is both good and bad at the same time. Both painful and liberating. It can both soften your devastation while solidifying the difficult reality of loss.
It can help close the door to the agony of early grief, just as it unearths new aspects of grief that you hadn’t expected. And weren’t altogether ready for.
I no longer fear that if I close my eyes I might be forced to recall and relive the worst day of my life. I’m no longer a complete wreck who can’t manage basic functions in the world around me. I am no longer at the mercy of uncontrollable waves of emotion that might leave me a crying, angry, trembling mess for the majority of the day.
But it isn’t just distance. It is distance combined with hard work. If I had not acknowledged my grief or faced my emotions head on, I might still be trapped in a web of despair concealed by numbness. I might have completely cut myself off from any meaningful interaction with life. Or swallowed my pain and pushed it so deep that it transformed itself into a devastating and debilitating illness.
Distance has given me perspective. The perspective that the four years I did get to spend with my daughter is much more than those who are denied the opportunity to have children in the first place. Or those who lose children before they even take their first breath. And while I am forever grateful for having more than a few days, weeks, or months with her, distance also makes me envious of those who got to spend more time – even decades – with their children.
Four years worth of memories of my daughter don’t add up to much. I don’t have a treasure trove of stories to tell. The milestones are limited and weren’t cataloged all that well to begin with. After all, I was expecting a lifetime of them. She didn’t have friends, lovers, or children who will remember her in perpetuity. Her brothers were too young to remember most of the time they spent with her.
All those everyday moments I took for granted are eroding away on the treacherous path of distance. Details are being lost to time. My mind tries to fill in the gaps based on pictures or conjecture, but it only serves to make me question the validity of those memories I once felt so sure of.
I don’t know what distance has in store for me. Each passing day, week, month and year seem to bring new healing and personal growth. For that I am truly grateful. But it is always with an undertow of longing. I suppose it is representative of life itself. With love comes pain. With pain comes understanding. Understanding leads to growth. Personal growth brings wisdom, purpose, and fulfillment.
I suppose if I am forced to live the rest of my life without watching my daughter grow, I will continue to try to grow and thrive in her honor. From that perspective, I can’t wait to see what the future will bring.
For many, welcoming in the New Year is a celebration of optimism and hope. Many see it as a fresh start. The New Year’s resolution tradition is a yearly chance to improve your life and perhaps yourself.
Of course, this isn’t a view shared by all.
My 4-year-old daughter died on September 30, 2009. In my overwhelming grief, I had been preoccupied with anxious anticipation of how I was going to handle Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. I had agonized over what I should do or not do to make those three holidays any less painful. I had worried about whether I would break down or have a panic attack on days that were supposed to be celebrations. Since I had never been much of a participant in New Year’s Eve festivities, it didn’t even occur to me that the New Year holiday would be a big deal.
And yet, I was completely blindsided by just how painful the New Year’s holiday was for me. In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, I began to realize I was actually dreading it.
New Year’s would bring me no resolutions, hope, or optimism. All I saw was more impossible pain on the horizon. The harsh reality that my daughter wasn’t going to be alive in 2010 made me downright angry that this new year was being welcomed and celebrated by the rest of the world.
Some of you reading this may feel the same despair I did those years ago. The idea that anything good can ever happen again may feel impossible. The mere idea of smiling, laughing, and enjoying life may feel like a betrayal of your loved one. And if you feel that way, it’s okay. It’s a normal reaction to grief.
Perhaps it is like a New Year’s resolution. Not the myriad of resolutions that are doomed from the start because they are too ambitious and too vague. Most people fail these broad resolutions because they try to take on too much at once. They don’t have the willpower to change the lifelong habits that are barriers to their goals.
The resolutions I am suggesting are ones that have very specific, small, and ACHIEVABLE goals. The key to success is to try to un-learn every day habits that normally get in the way of achieving your goals. You can change your habits by setting mini goals that are SO simple to achieve, you actually do them. And if you do them consistently for a certain length of time, they become new, positive habits.
Getting back to the idea of allowing yourself to look for hope in the New Year. If I were to suggest mini goals based on my personal experience with grief, here’s what they might be.
One of the hardest parts of grief is our natural reaction to try to suppress the pain. This might be done through outright denial, keeping busy (and therefore distracted from it), numbing it with drugs or alcohol, etc. The problem with this approach is that suppressing the pain only makes it worse. And it can even prolong the severity of your pain.
By saying or writing one word that describes how you feel each day, you begin to learn how to express your feelings. And when you express them, you can begin to work through them. When you work through them, you can ultimately let those painful feelings go. Words that I might have used four years ago to describe how I felt could include: despair, guilt, panic, fatigued, hopeless, numb, disbelief, angry, despondent. The list goes on.
When you are deep in grief, you tend to focus on what you’ve lost and the searing pain associated with it. Your world might become bleak and filled with despair. By acknowledging one nice thing that happened that day, you can begin to create a habit of gratitude, hope, and optimism.
Even if you had this habit before your loss, you will likely experience it in a more meaningful way. Nice things could be as simple as someone holding the elevator door for you. Or as significant as a friend stopping by to say hello and let you know they care about you.
This may not be difficult for some. But for myself and many others I know, this can be challenging even when you are NOT grieving. But in early grief, your energy is usually completely gone most of the time. Even basic chores like cooking or laundry can feel downright impossible. If there is one time in your life that you need to take care of yourself, it is now.
For example, you can ask your family or friends to help with things you normally take for granted. Things like cooking a meal, doing a load of laundry, etc. You can eat something healthy when you don’t have any appetite. Or take a nap when you feel exhausted. You can let yourself cry if you feel the urge. Taking care of yourself could even be something like treating yourself to a massage to help relieve the aching tension you are likely feeling.
For some, this may be the most difficult mini goal of them all. For a long time it was for me. I felt that if I smiled, it would somehow mean I was okay with my daughter’s death. For a long time I literally thought I had to be miserable for the rest of my life because of how much I missed her.
Yet, for the sake of my other children, I forced myself to smile again. At first, the smiles weren’t authentic. But eventually the fake smiles led the way to real smiles. Further down the road, the permission to smile led to feeling happiness and even joy once again. Happiness and joy lead to hope and optimism.
That is my ultimate wish for you – happiness, joy, hope, and optimism. You will likely have to re-learn how to invite them into your life. Yet your ultimate motivation and guide will likely be the deep, enduring love you feel for the loved one you lost. And I know there is no end to the depth of that love.
This website was inspired by the memory of Margareta Sol Kubitz in hopes of helping others work through the pain of grief.