Day 32 - How grief changed me

 I obviously missed quite a few days - I took about 2 weeks off - turns out blogging about heavy stuff is draining and I probably bit off more than I could chew by aiming to do 35 posts. 

I have been reflecting on how grief has changed me over the last two years. 

In many ways, I am not the same person I was when 2021 began. Grief has changed my thought life, my friendships, my work. 

First - My world got tiny. I often felt myself looking inward (at my usually crappy situation) and feeling a lot of pity, sadness, anger and occasional shame. In those seasons, it’s so hard for me to be an engaged friend. Essentially grief has made me selfish. When you are going through so much stuff, you don’t have capacity to extend yourself to be there for your people. There’s nothing wrong with that - that’s the reality of grief: other people are checking on you for a long time - for good reason. But that’s hard for me- I wasn’t built to be needy, to mope or even be able to answer “how are you doing” over and over when most days I didn’t know how I was doing at all - I was just being. Accepting help and being able to accept that I don’t have the capacity to care for others right now - that was/is challenging. 

But eventually you reach a point of “ok I’ve gotta get out of my pity party phase and move slightly back toward normal.” Normal is an illusion because grief changes you forever but back to a new normal. The timing that each person desires that turning point is of course different. And of course grief is not linear, some days I think I’m back in that pity party but the number of days has become fewer and fewer. 

In friendships, I occasionally feel this invisible divide. I have experienced something none of my friends have experienced. In a satan-driven evil way, I feel very “other” sometimes. God has graciously not let those thoughts prevail. God has also graciously given us people who intentionally remember Jack, recognize that it happened and want to help us understand the person we have become since he died. 

In my work: I work in end of life care. We often reach a point when we have conversations with families about “doing things for their loved one vs doing things to their loved one.” That’s a shitty conversation but it’s a real thing - necessary but terrible. We’ve had that conversation with doctors about our newborn. How wretched!! But I have a tinge of compassion for families as they process that and I can give them a tinge of normalcy that this isn’t new for me - they aren’t so “other” from me. 

Grief has changed me. Us. I don’t recommend it HAH but we don’t get to control who experiences what or when. I’m trying to lean into who this has made me to be instead of leaning away from it.