Author: Ingrid

It Does Get Better

It Does Get Better

by Ingrid ♥ 0 Leave a Comment
Elizabeth Debicki, Australian Actress (no relation, lol)

We made it past another anniversary. I’m not sure if that’s the right word choice, anniversary. We made it through seven years of living after Hunter died. This was more mentally consuming than the grief on the day of the anniversary, December 4th. On that day, I gave myself permission to cry and really feel the pain of losing him. It’s not like I’m always suppressing my grief, but… well, I have to suppress it in order to survive.

I couldn’t suppress my tears in the early days (defined as the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth years). When they came, I couldn’t stop them. It sucked. Seriously, it totally sucked. I remember the first July 4 holiday that Hunter wasn’t here, and I simply could not stop crying. I laid on the couch on the screen porch and cried and slept all day long, all beautiful, sunny, gorgeous. It is physically exhausting to miss someone so much. I do understand how people give up on life after losing their child. I wanted to… I couldn’t stand the pain.

And, yes, I got through it. I tried very hard to teach myself that the tears would eventually stop and the pain would eventually stop, if only momentarily. I also taught myself to suck it up when I could. Not always. But, sometimes, it’s a valuable skill set to pull your shit together. This is most useful in group settings. I think my expiration time (the amount of time I could spend with a group of even very loving people) was fifteen minutes. Seriously. That’s it.

So, if you’re in the beginning of your grief, it does get better. Well, it can get better. But it’s a long, bumpy road. Seven years out – it’s better. But fuck (those two words together always make me chuckle), it’s an arduous path to be on. 

Ingrid

December 17, 2023
Seven years and thirteen days


Seven Years

Seven Years

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It will be seven years tomorrow. Hunter will have been dead for seven years. Is that a long amount of time? A short amount of time? A significant amount of time?

Within the first year after Hunter died, I was fortunate to speak to a wise man, David Francis, who’d experienced the loss of his adult son. I vividly recall our phone call while I was in the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport waiting for a flight out west. He said it had taken seven years after his son died before he found a sense of happiness in his life again. I’m paraphrasing, but I remember that time frame: seven years.

For the past six months, I’ve been focused on the seven-year milestone. The anticipation of the milestone is often worse than the day itself. I’ll tell you tomorrow if that’s true this year. What is true this year is that I do finally find happiness in living. I have built a new life that is not fundamentally founded on Hunter being alive. It’s a new life staked in the present. It’s a life that isn’t based on a particular vision for my kids’ lives.

I didn’t even realize until a few years after Hunter died how I’d led my life with the primary goal of having my children become ‘independent adults,’ the definition of which included a college education, a professional career, a fine group of friends, financial security, loving partners and grandchildren. Frankly, this wasn’t something I even overtly thought or said. It was assumed. Their lives would be full of opportunity. We, their parents, would work our asses off to ensure they could springboard from our home into their independent life.

OK. I knew there were such things as accidents; those are statistical risks. But developing life goals, getting an education, and avoiding drug addiction had to be due primarily to parental oversight, right? I thought that I not only had influence but assumed that with sufficient effort as a parent, I could ensure this outcome for them and, therefore, for me. Not so, then. Not so, now. Influence, yes. Assurance, no.

So, it will be seven years tomorrow, that Hunter died. That’s seven years of learning to accept the reality of his death. That’s seven years of missing him. It’s a life that now incorporates his loss and finds new ways of living each day.

Ingrid

December 3, 2023
6 years and 364 days

And… I’ve Lost It

And… I’ve Lost It

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Yes, there I go again. I have a million or even one thought in my head, and when I sit down to write – poof! – it’s gone.

Maybe this is due to my age. Maybe. I think it’s likely due to the trauma of Hunter dying. His death holds a place in my brain that not only takes up precious brain capacity but also seems to be able to dump on other thoughts. That big black, foggy spot of grief can usurp any other neural connections.

Sometimes, sometimes, I can think straight. Sometimes, I am clicking on all cylinders. More now than before. But it’s been seven flipping years (almost), and I’m truly dumbed down. I let less in and expect less of myself. I had to, simply to survive. Not kidding. There’s too much going on in the ‘Hunter grief/trauma’ space in my brain.

I’ve worked super hard to get some semblance of a life back. I stopped working. I slept. I exercised. I learned how to practice yoga and meditation (and I do it). I journal. I go to therapy. I take medication. I lowered my expectations of myself.

I’m not saying that it’s not better. It is. It’s much better. I don’t have as many open wounds. I used to feel like I was walking around with open [emotional] sores. Imagine you have an open wound on your forearm without a bandage on it. You can ding that puppy anytime and very easily. Now imagine those wounds all over your body. Ok, it’s metaphorical, but you get it.

This is now. Today, my face is covered in a rash – hives around my eyes and really all over my face. Why? Hell, if I know. It could be a food allergy. It’s more likely anxiety. My husband just found out he has a tumor on his kidney. No more information than that so far. Even though this is considered urgent, he can’t get an appointment with a specialist for three weeks. I’m not one to get all wound up. I lead a half-billion-dollar pharmaceutical business, for crying out loud. I know how to stay calm. But now I know that you can end up on the other side of the statistics. So they say it’s a one-in-a-million probability. Well, once you’ve been that ‘one’ instead of the other nine-million nine-hundred thousand nine-hundred ninety-nine people, you know that you’re not safe. It could be you, whether the ‘one’ is a bad thing (e.g., cancer) or a ‘good’ thing (e.g., winning the lottery).

So, life can be a little scarier after you lose a child. It’s not rational. You’ve got the same probability of any one outcome as anyone else. Having something bad happen doesn’t doom you, but it doesn’t keep you safe, either. This wasn’t our first experience with child loss (I’ll go into that some other time). Having lost one child didn’t make us immune from losing another – no matter how much effort we put into keeping them alive, raising them well, and being good parents. We didn’t get a “pass” on life’s difficulties. They came even after we lost our first child, even after we lost our second child, even after my husband was diagnosed with chronic illness, and even after having one of our kids struggled through a gender transition (we strongly supported them, by the way) and certainly, we won’t necessarily get a pass now with this tumor. We might. I’m still hopeful that we might get a pass. It might only be a tumor and not cancerous. But it might not be only a tumor.

So, maybe not so unexpectedly, I got hives on my face. That’s hives on my face right where everyone can see them. The body keeps the score. You know the book?

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel Van der Kolk, MD

I end here today (god, that sounds like a preacher).

Ingrid

November 25, 2023
6 years and 357 days

The Emotion-O-Meter

The Emotion-O-Meter

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I woke from my Saturday afternoon nap in that groggy, half-in-a-dream still state with a bit of a headache, considering if I wanted to lift my head or fall back into the bliss of my dream. My dreams are almost always a life where our older boys are between two and ten years old. I’m simultaneously loving being with them and in a constant state of alert because I know that Hunter is going to die. I just don’t know when, and I have to keep him alive and bask in the joy of living with these beautiful kids.

But that’s not what this is about, this entry today. It’s about the realization that since Hunter died, it’s like the dial on my emotions has been turned up, and I feel everything, yes, everything, more deeply. For example, the nap from which I’d just woke included a glance at the back of my gently snoring and napping (well, maybe not gently snoring but definitely napping) head of my husband. His hair was soft and slightly curly in a shiny silver color (as Hunter called it) interspersed with bits of black. My eyes water as I look at his head, and I feel the absolute deepest love for him. I cherish his now silver hair and the fact that I can so deeply sleep beside his gentle snores in the middle of the afternoon. I think of this man’s massive head of wavy black hair when I first met him and how that drew me to him. I loved his wild dark hair, and yet I cherish him with his short silver wavy locks.

It’s like I don’t have regular-size feelings anymore. I have feelings that have been cranked up by the dial that regulates my feelings, the emotion-o-meter. It’s now perpetually turned to a higher setting. Every emotion is so much more intense. I didn’t know pain before Hunter died. Well, I did.

I knew pain when Alexandra, our first baby, died. Then, I felt like I was crawling out of my skin. I felt like a wild squirrel stuck in a cage, incessantly trying to jump and claw its way out. There was no way to relax, no way to get comfortable, no way to come to grips with the reality of not having my baby. Eventually, that feeling and all the other feelings of pain and grief decreased and normalized. The intensity reduced because I got help and I worked through my suffering. But really, it went away because we had Hunter.

Hunter was our Pinnochio – a real, live boy. The exaltation we experienced with his being became our focus. Did we continue to mourn Alex? Yes. Definitely, but it was a more manageable grief, like many people describe. It could still be intense and terrible, but the frequency of those painful times decreased. Instead of hourly, they reduced to daily and weekly and monthly, and… you get it. And, we had our distraction. We had Hunter to take care of twenty-four hours a day.

This time, when Hunter died, there was no distraction. In fact, as I reflect on the last almost seven years, I see that almost instantly, I knew that I had to face my grief head-on, and it was going to be terrible. It was going to be terribly difficult, and it has been. It’s been a lot of damn work with the primary reason that my emotion-o-meter is stuck on a high setting. I’ve found that you can’t replace your emotion-o-meter. You can provide a bit of damping with professional help, medication, and friends. But you really can’t fix it. I have to live at this higher level of emotional state. That doesn’t mean I must express those emotions; I’m not at their mercy (always). It takes a ton of time, effort, rest, and knowledge to feel everything deeply and stay sane.

What do you think?
Ingrid

November 11, 2023
6 years and 343 days

It’s Getting Better

It’s Getting Better

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It’s been seven hours and fifteen days
Since you took your love away…

Lyrics from Nothing Compares 2 U – Sinead O’Connor
Writer/s: Prince Rogers Nelson
Publisher: Universal Music Publishing Group

Those words strike so poignantly as I now view time with the lens of before and after Hunter died. It’s been seven hours, three hundred forty-one days, and six years since I learned that Hunter had died. In big round numbers, that’s three hundred forty-two days and six years since his documented death date. So, if you ask me now how long ago he died, I’d say, “…coming on seven years on December 4th.” All events are put into the context of ‘before or after Hunter died.’ Kind of like before or after Christ, but, yeah, not really, but I do understand why Christians view time that way. I mean, I do now.

Fuck. I say “fuck” a lot now. I guess I always have said “fuck” a lot. Seems like more now. I know I sigh a lot. Big sighs. I was a sighing machine the first few months (years?) after Hunter died. I didn’t even realize it until our son Jake told me. “Mom, jeez, you’re sighing all the time! Loudly.” I guess that would be pretty irritating. It was a physical reaction to the astonishment I felt each time reality seeped into my brain, saying, “Hunter died.” My body, very naturally, simply took a deep breath and pushed it out. A way for me to stabilize. A way to keep standing, sitting, or simply be. I’ll bet I sighed nearly a hundred times a day. Because it was a continual shock to realize that he was gone. It took years to accept, truly accept, that it wouldn’t change. He really wasn’t going to come back. And there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

I’m a thinker. I like to use my rational brain. I’ve spent years honing my analytical skills. My education was as an engineer. My career was in a company that focused on science. It was all about problem-solving, optimizing, finding the critical path, and creating a unique solution. Yet I couldn’t think my way out of this box. Fuck. You’re starting to get it. Fuck means I’m at a dead end. My mind will keep searching for solutions to the dilemma of Hunter dying. When I think I’d found a solution, my mind would query, “Is that really true? How could that be disproved? What is the next logical conclusion? Does that make sense?” Invariably, I’d realize, “Fuck.” Dead is dead.

Please don’t start with religious beliefs. I’m happy if that works for you. It doesn’t work for me. I’ve educated myself on the gamut of ‘what happens to us after we die’ beliefs from Christianity to Judaism to Buddism to Native American spirituality. Nice concepts, all. Not buying it. Seems that throughout time, we humans have been looking for ways to deal with the grief of losing our dearest and most loved ones. What if they are simply gone, and we must deal with that? What then? That’s what I ask. How do I keep living without this most precious person?

That’s what I’d like to deal with here. How do we live? How do we truly live again when all the assumptions we’d made about our value in life are in question because this absolutely fundamental piece of our world, this person, is no longer here living with us?

What do you think?
Ingrid


November 10, 2023
6 years and 342 days