Stuck

I am having a stuck week. Not stuck in anything in particular, just not moving forward in anyway.
This happens to me at least a couple times in a year. It used to happen more frequently, it used to be more symptomatic of a problem or in reaction to a feeling but now it just happens sometimes. It could definitely be the lack of Canadian Summer, the endless days of rain, or it could be the sense of a long winter looming in the near future. It could be the back to school routine or a busy workload. Of course the weather is amazing right now and the kids needed the school routine, but I read somewhere that when "things" get better is usually when people feel their lowest.
I find it hard to write about being stuck. I have been raised to believe that we are not supposed to broadcast our problems, we are supposed to quietly take care of them, get over them or get help for them. Acknowledging that problems exist only make us weak and vulnerable, right? Of course that is sarcasm as I truly believe that it takes more courage to admit to our imperfection and embrace our uniqueness than conform to unrealistic expectations.
Well I get stuck. Stuck in a mood, stuck with a feeling, stuck in a moment or just not moving forward. For a high energy person such as myself, sometimes stuck is a welcome break from a crazy speed, but it is also hard to feel stuck.
I will move again, I can already feel a sluggish momentum forward beginning to swell below the surface, maybe acknowledging my pause has helped. I won't be stuck forever.

Finding A Friend

I find it difficult to make friends (wow that is hard to say). I will justify this by saying that it is NOT hard for me to make friends, I am a very friendly person, it is just difficult for me to relate and get to a level of trust where I consider someone a friend.
Growing up I made friends very easily. I was easy going, talkative, a little bit rebellious, ready for fun. When I graduated into high school, things changed for me. When the politicing started and the hidden agendas behind friendships appeared, when it became important in who you knew and who was considered a friend, I found myself unable to maneuver in the bureaucracy of teen life. When everyone is searching for their identity, struggling with anonymotity or bravado, peacekeeper or troublemaker, I succumbed to the stress of it and became very inclusive in my friendships. I was neutral in the politics, stayed at arms length of the clics and groups and confided in a small number of guys and girls who were less concerned with who was popular this week than where we would meet for coffee and a chat!

At 17 an amazing girl stumbled into my life and it really was a stumble! We were both being wronged by the same boy. He had managed to date both of us at the same time mainly because we went to different schools, it was a typical high school drama. This girl however was anything but typical, she called me up out of the blue, told me what was up and invited me out for a coffee to chat about revenge. We became fast friends, much to the dismay of the communal boy and our friendship quickly blossomed beyond the boy who brought us together. The year that followed was typical girl stuff, movies, coffee, all night phone chats, boyfriends and in March of 1994, at 18, we went on a week long trip to Montreal. We had a blast and I knew that she was a different kind of friend, someone I could be myself with, no games, no politics, no need to be anything more that who I was. In June of 1994 she succumbed to the affects of Cystic Fibrosis and my world fell apart. I felt very alone in the world of teen and the genuineness of her friendship and her ability to be a friend became an amplified emptiness in my life. Her genuine friendship became a model for me of how I should be a friend and how someone could be a friend to me.
Fast forward to 2002 when Flynn died, most of my friends disappeared.
Fast forward to present, I am very lucky in the friends that are currently in my life, they are very special people, very accepting of who I am, unconditional in their love and respect. It amazes me the people that have walked, moved in or emailed into my life. I have found friends in places that I least expected, when I was not looking but usually when I needed them the most.

Helpless

Helpless. The "knock you on your ass", "nothing to grab hold of", most absolute of all feelings. It will drop you to your knees because rarely do you have the foresight to see it coming. In fact I would venture to say that until you have your first experience with Helpless, you don't even know that such a feeling exists. It exposes the fragility of life, the extent of our power, the vulnerability of our belief. At the time that we encounter Helpless, we pray that we never know it again.

Helpless is that feeling that twists your stomach and pounds your chest, that liquefies your limbs and sucks the air out of your lungs. It is the awareness that envelops the reality of eminent death. It is the inexpressable second right before a new life is born. The moment that you are slammed with the knowledge that you have limited ability to change the course of this life. Life and death will proceed and you may not be included in the decision. It is the moment in a life that you realize you may have a plan but it is not your plan.

Loss is a trigger for Helpless. Our vulnerability, our desire, our plan all exposed and changed. It may not be a death that reminds us, it may be a relationship that cannot endure the ups and downs, maybe a job that could not survive the economy, a diagnosis that takes away our health. When there is nothing left that we can do to change the circumstances, we are reminded of that feeling of Helpless.

Today I wanted to remember Helpless so that I could remember that following Helpless, there is clarity, determination and the insatiable need to take claim of your life again.

From a Five Year Old Mind

I remember when Rhys was five and all his perceptions of Flynn and death changed from statements of fact to questions of why? Rhys was three when Flynn died and had lived with his and our grief for two years. His questions became a transcendence that mirrored our journey of grief and how it had evolved.

Ash has recently turned five. He was born two years after Flynn had died and his experience with death is limited to what he has been told about his brother's death, his paternal grandfather's death and more recently the death of his Great Grandmother when he was only two years old. His understanding of death differs greatly from Rhys's understanding at the same age.
We are very honest with our children, we do not use words like "passed away" or "sleeping." We do not tell them that the people who died were sick, if we can name an illness we do. We have explained the permanence of death as the body ceasing to function and we have tried not to complicate their understanding of death with philosophy until they are ready to conceptualize on their own (our ten year old is there now, but that is another blog).
I will interject here to tell you that although this all sounds good, Landy is known for wanting to give his children all the information in very adult terms. Rhys and Ash are very bright and sometimes that can be misconceived as capable of handling adult concepts, it has backfired many times.
As of late, Ash has become very interested with the topic of death. He has graduated from the kiddie cartoons and now some of his movies have themes with death as a central storyline and obviously our family has experienced death as well.
Due to our honesty, Ash is aware that his Grandfather died from a brain tumor when Landy was only thirteen. He knows that his brother died because he was born too early and was too small to survive and he knows that his Great Grandmother was very old and died due to complications from her age. In working out what this means to him, he retells the stories of these deaths, adding his own twists or changing facts, making the sombre into dramatic tales.
Here is an example of how he recalls what he was told of his Grandfather's death:

"So Grandpa had cancer in his head and it made him sick and so the doctors needed to make him better so they took a saw and they cut off his head to take the cancer out but when they put his head back on he still had cancer and so he was mad and then he died."

We have corrected Ash's version of the story many times, but each time the illness and the death are much more dramatic than the reality.

We were at Disney World when his Great Grandmother died, and it has definitely affected his explanation of how she died:

"Great Grandma was at the top of the castle with Cinderella and then the fireworks went off and Great Grandma fell of the top of the castle down to the ground and SMOOSH, she was dead."

I am sure that if my Grandma could have input she would find this story comical and enjoy the energy that Ash puts into the story.

Losing a brother is the most difficult for Ash to understand, maybe because unknowingly we explain it differently. The death of a child is hard to explain or make sense of and Ash's grasp of Flynn's death becomes internalized in how he talks about it:

"Flynn was born and he was a big person and so he died and then I am going to die because I am becoming a big person too."

When we explain that Flynn was not a big person, he was a tiny baby, Ash wants to know when he will die since he did not die as a baby. Landy tells him that he won't die, but I don't want to mislead Ash so I tell him that we do not know when we will die but that we hope that we all live to be very old. I hoped that would make sense to Ash but the other morning Ash came into our room and this is how the conversation went:

"So will I die tomorrow?"

"We do not know when we will die but we hope you will be much older than tomorrow."

"When will you die? Will you die tomorrow?"

"I hope to be old too, and watch you grow up and I hope that it will be a long time from tomorrow."

"So then not tomorrow?"

"No Ash, not tomorrow."

"Okay, can I have a snack?"

"Absolutely!"

And so we wait for the next round of questions and stories to sort out the difficultly of death.

Anatomy of a Griever

For any scientific or literal people I will ask for your forgiveness because the way that I will use the word "anatomy" deviates slightly (or a great deal) from its technical or literal meaning. I could not find another word that would help to illustrate the meaning behind this blog.
I speak with people all day about the way that death and losing a loved one changes you. I talk to them about the expectations we place on ourselves, how we think we should react and behave a certain way. I make them aware that we also put expectations on those around us to have an amount of grief or understanding that they may not have. I talk to them about how grief affects them on every level. In having these discussions it occurred to me that the changes I was discussing always related to philosophical, spiritual, emotional and short term physical changes. I am becoming aware that in being a support to grieving people I am learning and something that I recently learned is that I did not accommodate for the permanent changes that take place in regard to your senses, memory, perception and how they are physically apparent and how it contributes to your grief journey over the long term.
The only way to make sense of what I am trying to say is to explain it using my own experiences and the awareness I have gained working these past seven months.
I am acutely aware that my sense of smell has changed. I know now that is very closely tied with my memories and how I remember certain things. Vaseline Intensive Care will always remind me of my Grandma. I have a very strong sense of smell (not always a good thing) and when I was losing Flynn there were many different smells that surrounded his dying. At times it is those smells that make me remember or bring comfort to a time when I need to remember. There was the smell of the sterile environment like the alcohol, sanitizer, and staleness of closed windows and doors. The medicinal smell of antibiotics, saline solution, iodine and soap. The metal of the tools in the room seemed to give off an earthy, cold smell that has stuck with me and all of this was mixed with the smell of blood and sweat. At times I have come across these smells and it can bring back a sense of loss or the chaos of the experience, sometimes the smell does not come from something that I can see but rather seems like a form of memory recognition and it allows me to reflect on the memory of the day and take things out of it that are more important than the chaos. This is one of the ways that my anatomy has changed.
I have had some very physical changes, not noticeable to the eye or even with an x-ray. The hole in the middle of my guts, what started as the pit, the insatiable hollow gnawing just above my stomach after Flynn died. Now it is replaced with a scarred over space that if I do not take time to appreciate it, I am reminded of its existence. A doctor would most likely read this and scoff but I felt it for years after Flynn died, it was so physical that there were times I wrenched at my middle trying to fill it or pull it out. It flares up when I am exhausted, when I watch someone hurt, it reminds me, it is another way that I have changed.
My hearing has changed, although there is a bit of a joke in this statement, I do struggle with my actual hearing at times, I mean now I listen for different things, I am not sure that I listened before. I take note of what people are wanting or trying to tell me. I hear them and I respond with sincerity. I hear joy and laughter and I hear sadness and fear, I hear more than the words. I am more aware of inflection and that words are only half of what someone is trying to say.
My arms have undergone a change as well. They hold the most significant memory for me, that of holding Flynn after he was born. He only weighed one pound six ounces, but I remember at the time thinking how substantial he felt in my arms. I am blessed that my arms remember him and at times I feel the weight and warmth of him in my arms like I held him only yesterday, I am so appreciative to have this change to my anatomy especially when my mind struggles to remember the details.
The most meaningful change has been to my heart. I am sure that again, to look at and examine it as a medical profession, it would probably appear the same as any other heart. But it was never so apparent to me that it was a part of my body. I am conscious of its existence now, I feel it beat as a reminder of my life within me. I can feel it swell with love, respect and joy and I also feel the muscles in it tense and move with more force when I am faced with other's pain and sadness. I am so grateful that it has adapted to accommodate my changes, the way that life has grown for me from the moment of tremendous loss to one filled with love and purpose.
It may not be an evidenced part of my anatomy that has changed, it would not qualify as anything that needs to be investigated medically but it is definitely a measured change in my metaphysical anatomy that I have encountered as I work on my journey of grief.