***Grief Trigger Warning***
Guys, this post has some pretty graphic imagery about how this season is making me feel at times. You know how sometimes you’re in the mood for a happy movie because you’re not in the mood for something sad? If today is that day, please don’t read this post right now.
If you ARE sad already and you’re trying to figure out if it’s “normal” to feel this bad, this lost, this overwhelmed, this some-kind-of-word-that-“sad”-doesn’t-do-justice, read if you’re looking for confirmation that this season messes us all up for awhile. I’ve talked to other survivors a lot lately. It’s going to get better (reminding myself AND you.) Don’t give up trying to go through it instead of sitting in it (at least not forever.)
Oh, and this one will not be in order because, even as I am trying to upload my older posts in order of their occurrence, this one I feel the need to throw out there today. I don’t know why…I just need to. So maybe I’ll post this one again when I get to the right chronological place. Okay, here goes:
July 21st, 2023
The cemetery is hard.
People tend to think you should go there a lot, “spend time” with him, maybe that will make you feel closer to him.
It doesn’t.
If anything, it does the opposite.
When I am sitting propped up on pillows in my bed at night, I can close my eyes and listen for his breathing, wait to feel the covers rustle on his side of the bed, catch a smell that reminds me of date nights because I sprayed his cologne on a little throw pillow. It’s an elusive feeling, almost ethereal – like you can almost see him there or, if you close your eyes, turn away and turn back, maybe it never happened at all. Sometimes, I fall asleep now trying to listen, wait, smell….
The cemetery, though…
Everything around me screams that he is gone. All the way gone. No mulligan. No do-overs. No rewind button. No, no, no…
I know that he is not there. Not his spirit. I hope today, when I was there at his grave, that he was deep-sea fishing in beautiful turquoise waters, with a sailfish (the bucket list fish he never caught here) on the end of his line in the great ocean in the sky. I feel sure Heaven has oceans, somehow. Since there must be beaches or us Florida people might be slightly disappointed. (I kid, I kid…)
No, I know he is not there…but I do know that his body is. I saw him in that wretched casket that they want you to think of as having a “beautiful finish” when you’re looking for one to lay them in…so you can put them in the ground inside of it. (Mind you, I know that these people are doing a very difficult job in the very best and kindest way that they know how. The people I dealt with were full of compassion. But nothing in the world would have made me think that any casket that would be “laying him to rest” was beautiful, in any way. I think they would all understand me saying that.) I know this is a lot of imagery. Sorry, not sorry. It’s stuck in my head every single day and you’re reading to find out where my head is these days or because you’re looking for answers as to whether what you see, hear, feel, smell during grief is “normal.” Well, here it is.
As I kneel on the ground beside the place where a few random weed-looking leafy things have begun to sprout up over the dirt that still sits, too recently disrupted to contain grass (note to self: bring grass seed and watering can next time), I know his body is approximately (if folklore is correct) six feet beneath me. He was six feet even. If they’d stood him up in there, he could reach me.
The body, his body, that I used to wrap my arms around and he’d kiss my forehead then rest his chin on my head as his arms, so much physically stronger than my own, wrapped me up in a safety that made me feel as good as the forehead kiss. The body, his body, his chest that I would lay my head on at night and his chest hair would tickle my face but I didn’t want to sit back up. The body, his body, that was the keeper of his voice as he would tell me how much he loved me, that I was the only woman in the world to him, that I was beautiful, that I was smart, that I was talented…and all the things that I felt that day that I was not. He always gave me back things I thought I had lost. He also gave me things I had never even thought to have. Some memories that I will hold like glittering treasure within me.
I don’t have to “sit there and think about” his body being beneath me in the dirt, lest you’re saying, “Try not to think about that part; think about those memories.” As my tires crunch against the gravel when I pull into the gates by the road, these thoughts, the unbidden and unwanted ones, are already coiling around me, squeezing the breath from my lungs. I was here in May and there was a flag laying over him…it’s in my house now. So, as I actively try to think about good things. About where he really is right now, about his smell, his sound, his touch, his face, his eyes….I’m trying…I’m trying…I’m trying…nope. There’s the dirt again. Still there when I open my eyes.
Today I had AirPods and my iPhone. There is zero cell service where he is but I have all of the important songs downloaded so I can listen offline. I played music and, although it made me cry, with harsh sobs that hurt my throat and squeezed my chest and weakened my knees until, there I was, down on the ground with them in the dirt beside him. I stay there so long that my legs begin to have pins & needles from kneeling so I pull them around front and cross-cross them, always ready to leave but never ready to leave. So more music. More memories. More crying. But maybe distracted from the dirt a little bit. I look up to the sky, knowing God sees my tears and counts them, saves them. I feel a tear slip off of my chin and watch it drop to the mound of dirt below me. It makes me think of the movie Tangled. It reminds me of when Flynn Rider died in the end and, as she cried, Rapunzel’s tear dripped onto his chest which began to glow as he returned to life. I randomly think that if his chest started glowing, I couldn’t see it from up here and I wouldn’t even know…at the same time that I remember that cartoon movie are cool but the caricatures can do things we never can. Not ever, ever.
The sobs have stopped. The dirt is still there. But, I feel, somehow, maybe a strangely odd bit better. Like all of those tears, all of those rib-racking sobs, had been hidden away in a pressurized compartment which was becoming too full, the compression becoming too much for the steely outsides. Now that they’ve been released there is room to store them up again for awhile, I guess. I lean back with my hands on the ground behind me and haphazardly wonder whether anyone was in the cemetery witnessing my display. When I walked from the car, I could only see one grave…now there are others all around. I glance furtively around, not because I care if anyone saw my ugly crying, but because there may be someone else who needed their moment of depressurization. No one. But still, it’s time to go.
I had felt dread coming here. I know what it means to be here. I know how it feels to be here. I know he’s here but he’s not here. But now it feels as if I don’t want to leave because I’ll be leaving him again. (Yes, I still know he is not actually here; I cannot control the inert thought pattern. As I said, they do their own thing, coming and going as they wish and I do not own the key to the lock that would keep them out.) When we left my sister’s house after my nephew passed away so that we could drive to a place to stay for the night while the police finished their necessary plundering, she began to cry and said “I can’t leave him here alone.” All I could say was, “Julie, he won’t be alone. They’re going to take care of him.” Because he wasn’t fully gone in her mind yet, and being taken care of was important.
This makes me wonder when I will really, fully believe that he is gone. Gone, gone. The for real, this is it, never going to change, like it or not, imaginary breathing beside you in bed is GONE, gone.
There are times when I fall apart because I think I’ve just realized it, that this is all really real. And then my brain throws out flares and pulls the rip cord that inflates the rescue raft and there’s some kind of chance, theoretically, that this is all just an awful dream. *pinch*pinch*sighhhh*
Driving across the crunchy, loose gravel is just as hard going out as it was coming in. It’s for a completely different reason but I can’t describe it. I’ve not said one word to him while I was here. Because he’s not here even though he’s here. And if I want to talk to him, I’ll do it in our bedroom at home because it feels more likely that, if there were holes in the floor of Heaven, that would be the place he’d most likely hear me from. I hope he only ever hears the “I love you”s and “I miss you so much”s, not the sobs. I would never want him to be as sad as I am, not ever. I guess now he never, ever has to be.
I love you, baby. I miss you so, so much. One way or another, we’ve got this, K? See you later.
Postscript Edit: the photo from this post is not from today; that wouldn’t have been possible today.
God is in the Outcome 