Grief, Recovery, Loss
Until I started working with integrative, trauma-informed therapists, I had never been taught how to grieve, or what to expect during a time of catastrophic loss. I guess my vision was that you push through life’s struggles, you suffer in pain in silence, and then you feel really sad when it’s over. I could not have been more wrong.
Some people say there are “stages” or “waves” or similar visualization that barely begins to describe the experience of grief.
I didn’t know that grief doesn’t start with the loss, it begins when the loss becomes an inevitability and it impacts your thoughts, which impact your feelings, which impact behaviors.
One of the big takeaways I got from a program of Dialectical Behavior Therapy and Cognitive Behavior Therapy is the importance to taking on life mindfully. Not jumping to conclusions or making quick, rash decisions based on how you feel in the moment.
For a while, I felt that a drastic change in my life was necessary and I hatched a plan to go to graduate school full time starting in the fall. After taking in all the information, and making decisions cautiously, I’ve decided to take one class in a social work program online starting this school year, while teaching full time again.
It’s not exactly what I *want*, but change itself isn’t going to make the process of grief any easier, and my goal of earning a Masters in Social Work now may take me a few years taking classes evenings and in the summer.
My two big external goals for this school year is to continue being a kick-ass father and badass teacher after a year on work leave during the hardest school year of my life. My other goal is to create moments of joy for myself and savor them. This is the hardest one, and a goal I thought I had, but never really did.
Simply “finding joy” was never a real goal of mine. I had personal goals and professional goals, which I considered to be connected to joy. Making a professional benchmark or owning house I felt were in and of itself joy, but they aren’t. Actually feeling happy requires *not* wanting, I’ve learned. Being with loved ones, or just experiencing a joyous moment alone has little to do with attaining things you want.
Erin had a few years of remission before the cancer came back and spread (the hospital used the term “no sign of the disease”). We started looking towards adopting children and expanding our family as soon as we got the nod from her oncologist, who wrote a letter to the adoption agency saying Erin had a clean bill of health. We bought a house with the intention of filling it with children. Just a few months later, we got the awful news that the cancer had metastasized and our goal was to keep Erin alive and as comfortable as possible for as long as possible.
I did not sit with the loss of our potential big family until recently. I launched back into a task-oriented mode and a little over a year later, the pandemic started and I was “doing” a lot, but not fully processing the losses. I didn’t understand how my wanting of things to be different forced me into suffering through the pain and not always savoring those happy moments.
I’m now working with incredible clinicians who’ve helped me understand how to take on the rest of my life. I’m being open and vulnerable with those I trust about my struggles.
I cannot change past behaviors, but I can process them and learn from them. Pain is inevitable, but suffering does not have to be.