“Surviving January”

My grief is not my burden. It is not my mistake and it can not be fixed.  But it can be spoken, it can be shared, it can be carried, it can be witnessed and it can be integrated.

This past January it had been seventeen years since the loss of my husband Scott.

I have survived seventeen January’s; in which time I have sunk into the shadows of death, dying and surviving.

I have spent seventeen years unearthing intense emotions that lay lurking in the nooks and crannies of my psyche. Yet, every year there seems to be more.

January is my birth month, it is the time in my life when I am reminded that I am human and in my experience being human has come with immense suffering. It is a time when most would be celebrating their life; yet for me it is spent in deep contemplation in the remanence of death and what it means to survive it.

Every year I think this year my grief story will be different. I will have less tears, less anger, less disconnect, less longing and less heartache.

And you know what…I am right, every year it is different, I am different.  Every year my awareness changes, I feel and remember differently than the year before but the emotions and the memories don’t go away, just my relationship to them.

Grief fucking sucks.

I can’t dress it up, put a smile on it and  pass it off as something else.  I can’t out run it, God knows I’ve tried.  I can’t bypass it, I can’t think my way out of it, or throw toxic positivity at it.

I have to live with it. I have to feel it, I have to allow for it to move through me and not let it consume me.

The loss of my husband changed me. It is not something I will ever get over.  It’s part of what has made me who I am. I will never be the me I was before his accident and truthfully I wouldn’t want to be.  I have learned, grown, accessed depths of myself I didn’t know possible through what I have learned about death, dying and surviving.

It’s a hard thing to explain how grief can become a space holder, how it can effortlessly move us in time from the rational to the irrational perception of who, what and where we are. It is filled with uncertainties and unknowns.  I truly never know if I’ll survive it; in fact, every January I question just that but then February comes and the darkness is lifted and light begins to emerge from cracks and crevices that have been blown open by the healing work that has been done.

What I learned this January is that I don’t want to merely survive it, I want to learn to thrive even more in spite of it.