Stages of Love

I'm going to talk about grief today, and not just because we just lost that gorgeous face there yesterday afternoon to a very aggressive lymphoma. 

It's been a wild ride, these past few years. We lost my father in 2018, my mother in 2019, the world from 2020 to 2022, and now I've lost my youngest wolfhound, my Ciaragh. So much loss. So much hurt. How do we keep going?

Grief is funny. Not funny ha-ha or funny hmmm, but funny insidious and cantankerous and never, ever satisfied. I've heard all the little adages about grief being love you have that you can't give anymore because the object has passed...love that builds up to where it spills out your eyes and down your cheeks... And while those are valid, they don't strike home as much as grief being the flip side of gratitude or maybe even just a level of gratitude.

If I wasn't grateful that I was Hoyt and Martha's daughter, I wouldn't have noticed that they passed out of my mortal life. They wouldn't still be a part of near daily conversation. I wouldn't have thought of them when I saw a cardinal in a tree looking at me as we arrived back home without our Ciaragh.

If I wasn't grateful for the friends I have, the life I had before, the interactions and bus rides to campus and all the thousands of little things that made my life my own prior to 2020, I wouldn't have grieved the loss of the same for going on three years now. I'm an introvert and the pandemic lockdowns and social distancing should have been my time to shine -- and it was, to some extent -- but it was also painfully lonely in other ways. 

If I wasn't grateful that my dear friend Heather rang us to see if we could foster a 14-month-old Irish Wolfhound who needed re-homing through no fault of her own, I wouldn't be missing the wide-eyed, fuzzy head in that photo.

I've said a few times over the past 24 hours that this is just part of having a dog in your life, and it is even more so when the dog is a giant breed with a short life span. But it's more than that. It's learning to open your heart again and again, even though it is only cobbled together from past hurts. As another friend said, it is learning to "hold them with open hands" because you know what is coming.

It is tempting to close off to everything -- friends, experiences, love, laughter -- but that isn't the right choice. If you don't love, you don't grieve. It's the love and the gratitude that makes the pain worth it.

If you are in that dark place with all the grief, I am with you. When you can, turn some of the pain to gratitude. It will help, I promise.

Notes from Exile: What day is this?

Skylar Austin and Jane Levy in "Zoey's Extraordinary Father"

So, it's week six, and today is Tuesday. My rational mind knows that. But my emotional mind has gone off the rails today. TL: DR - I watched the season one finale of "Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist" and had a visceral reaction consisting of ugly sobbing because I have not let myself feel things that were unpleasant or painful for about five years. 

Lucky you, you get to come along as I not only sort this out but offer some advice so that NO ONE has to do this. Seriously, y'all, the long-suffering heroine who manages to hold it all together in the face of all sorts of awful is a trope that needs to be banished from literature, television, and movies. GONE. So many of my MCs have this either as a personality trait or a goal to work towards and it ends now. In my new series opener, RIFT, launching at the end of this month I created an MC that I didn't really connect with as much as I did with Gin from The Nature Walker Trilogy. Madelyne is honest about what she feels when she feels it. Gin (and I) worry too much about how what we are feeling will affect other people.

My father died in 2018 from complications related to Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia. My mother died last summer after a major neurological event and about a month in hospice. During both of these events, I tried my best to be a grown-up about it. My sister is amazing - she may have had the same need to become completely unglued but you would never know it, and that is what I thought I needed to be. 

I did my best to be okay, I'm okay, everything is fine. This is sad but for the best. They are finally together again. Those were the words coming out of my mouth. But what I should have done was be honest with myself about how much all of that devastated me - and I wasn't.

I watched that episode of this amazing show (seriously, if you haven't seen it GO DO THAT NOW, I will wait) knowing that it would be difficult. But it was more than that - it was painful and real, and absolutely beautiful. I cried, but more importantly, I FELT. So this blog post is more than just an ad for this show (have you watched it yet? No? WHY?), but it is an encouragement to let yourself feel what you need to feel. Go through stuff. Experience things. 

The past six weeks of almost total isolation have gone by so fast and so slowly, in a way, because I'm not letting myself think about why I'm doing this. It's easy to just think about what's happening in the world, far away from my little house on my little street. What is not easy to think about is how this is affecting my relationships with people - how I'm pulling away from people that would normally be my support because I don't want to look as out of control as I feel. The first two weeks I cried every day because I was afraid. But I managed to think about it more as being safe than being stuck, and now I can't believe it's been six weeks.

You will never know how strong you can be until you are. The fact that I am still here and relatively sane is a testament to the fact that I am stronger than I ever thought I could be. The fact that, overall, I let my sister do most of the heavy lifting related to the end of both our parents' lives means that I still have work to do. But I know, with new clarity, that I can do it. I'm thankful, I'm hopeful, and I'm completely congested and horrible to look at - and I don't care.

Well, maybe I care...just a little.