Things You Aren't Told...
11:11 AM
There are things you aren't told, when someone you love dies. Details are the places that catch you in the undertow of grief, pull you off balance and leave you sputtering in pain:
1) No one told me that fresh graves subside with rain and look like an earth quake hit them. It is very disturbing to go visit and find that the earth shifted and his grave sunk 6 inches below the level of the ground.
2) The marker/grave stone takes months and months to come in. In the mean time, I hate the feeling of his grave being unmarked. It feeds my fears of him being forgotten.
3) Receiving a hospital bill is a punch in the gut, every time. Not because of having to pay it. But because it's beyond the hardest thing you can imagine, to read all of the procedures and tests they did on him, all of the machines he got hooked up to, all of the stuff they had to pump into him, while he was dying. And then they attach a number to each one, as if to say, that is how much his life was worth. It re-traumatizes every time I see his name attached to one of those documents. More than one bill has been thrown across this house, in the throws of agony and pain from flashbacks and the feeling of his dignity and worth being stripped, line item by line item.
4) The pain gets worse as time goes on. Not better. Healing doesn't start once the funeral is over. The grief, through the first year anyway, gets bigger and bigger, as more and more time passes since you last saw them, held them, watched them live. And then there are all of the "firsts" without them and they happen every single, relentless day.
5) The echos of them are everywhere you go and in everything you do. They are torture, for years. I'm told they become happier reminders at some point, but it's a lot farther down the track than you are led to believe it will be when the unthinkable is still only theoretical.
6) If one is completely honest, in the trenches of this kind of loss, you don't feel like rejoicing that they are in Heaven. I'm sorry. It's the truth. Although you know they are and you can be thankful for it, you are still left to live for an undetermined amount of time, in the ever continuing pain and widening abyss of their absence and the crushing weight of that is far too heavy to even imagine.
You are, however, somehow expected to rise above that debilitating agony and rejoice daily. It's unfair and ridiculous and Lala-landish.
Just a few of those "small" details one isn't told about. I'm sure there will be more, as time continues to move forward.
Written by Christi Brown
Written by Christi Brown
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