Homework, sort of.

11th January 2020

 

My trauma/grief/anxiety counsellor has given me some ‘homework’. Instead of watching TV to put off, avoid, distract, he wants me to see what actually happens if I do what I want to with my evening. What feelings will arise?…..which is a conundrum because I’m an analytical griever.

One of the things I’ve found hardest to deal with is the nature of my grief. I want to cry and lose my appetite, lose interest in everything and basically fade out. My husband died, and took half of me with him. How else could/should this manifest? And yet.

And yet there is my sunshine, asleep in her cot upstairs. She’s my second chance at happiness, and so for many reasons I am not wasting away in a corner, beaten daily to a pulp by grief. But I hate that I’m not, because it feels disloyal. Onlookers might wonder that perhaps I didn’t love Steve that much after all, given that I – we – are functioning so well; we’re out laughing and having fun. The thing is that I absolutely know how utterly I loved him, and so regardless of how it seems to onlookers, it’s wrong and disgusting to me. I’ve been wondering for a large part of the last two years “What’s wrong with me?”

Two things have occurred to me recently though.

The first, only a couple of months ago, was this:

 

If I hadn’t managed to ‘pull myself together’ on a day to day  – which has become month to month – basis, if I had been unable to get out of bed, face life (I really didn’t want to at the start), eat, drink or engage, then I would have missed the first two years of my daughter’s life. Those are two years and the basis of our bond that I could never have got back or made up for. In essence, much as a despise the control and containment, it has allowed me to access her. 

 

The second was this, and I’m quoting from my stream of consciousness journalling five nights ago:

 

I told my trauma counsellor that I don’t even dream [of Steve] and that I want to. My mind is not cooperating and helping and I don’t trust my memory to keep it all safe. I don’t dream and that’s scaring me. I think I feel let down my by emotions, like they’ve simply abdicated their role. My heart’s abdicated and left my head to do all the work. And I don’t trust my head to remember the feelings, even if it remembers all the facts.

That’s it. I’ve just put a finger on it there.

My brain has out-thought the feelings my heart had.

But I know that Steve was a feeling. He was my feeling.

Steve, you’re how my heart felt. You’re how my heart feels, when my head’s not in the way.

 

XXXX