It doesn't get better, it just gets different.

This morning I read a blog post by Jessica Denis of the Huffington Post. It had been posted to +The After Loss. Denis was questioning, when does the easier part start? She concludes that it doesn’t get easier, it just gets different.

I completely agree. After the death of my husband 18 months ago, my friend Joni told me, "it doesn't ever get better, we just get better at dealing with it." With tears in her eyes, Joni just showed up on my doorstep the day Jim died. I don’t even know how she knew, she just was there. Joni is a high school friend and her husband had died almost 10 years ago, leaving her alone to raise her two young boys. I knew she wasn’t lying, I had seen her slowly emerge from the depths that grief drags us down. But however much I trusted her, I could not imagine her being right. How could I possibly get better at handling the raw, wrenching pain that I felt? She didn’t push the point and just held me as we cried together.

As the days wore on, others assured me it would get easier. I could not ever imagine that ever being true. I would never stop grieving. It would never be okay. Days became weeks. I still cried every day. I sobbed every Monday, reliving the night Jim stopped breathing. I mourned every Wednesday morning, remembering that sunny Wednesday morning when I said good morning to Jim for the last time.  

Weeks became months. The 19th of every month was the marker of another month I had somehow managed to get through without my husband. I missed him so. Sometimes I could scarcely breathe.

I was coming up what I called “my season of firsts' : September ... our wedding anniversary ...October ... my birthday ...In November it would be hard to feel thankful with so much sadness in my heart  ...Christmas … I could not even imagine it...New Year’s  ...So hard to look ahead with so much left behind ...Finally February 19th would bring the first anniversary of Jim’s death.

As the anniversary neared, my grief counselor and I discussed my fears and my plans for getting through it.  While Jim and I were living through what would be his last month, everything was moving and changing so fast. But in retrospect I could remember and re-live again, and again, the horrible details of that month. It was like some Kafka-esque slow motion replay of the anguish, suffering and roller coaster ride of the last month of Jim's life. February 19th came and despite my expectations, of course I survived...What else could I do. Life wants to live. And so, that morning, as I have every other since the morning after he died, I told myself, " if you don't get up now, you never will". And do you know what?  I cannot fully explain it but something magical did happen, after that sad day passed, I did feel lighter! As if a load had lifted off my shoulders. I had lived in such dread of that day, and I survived!

So as much as I’d like it to be different, to believe that someday it will get better, easier...I don’t buy it. Yes, living will get easier, but the loss, the emptiness, the sadness, will not get better. But I am getting better at living with the grief. The blanket of grief once wrapped around me like a blanket, comforting in some odd way, is now more often laid aside, available when needed. Hickman, in her book, Healing after Loss, writes,

We may be afraid to lose the intensity of love for the one we have lost. At first these two, the grief and the love, are so wedded to each other that we cannot separate them. We may cling to the grief in desperation, so we will be sure not to lose the love. 

My grief is a connection to Jim. A connection I do not want to lose.