Trendy grief quote

This 4 year old quote about grief from a Reddit poster called GSnow has been rediscovered and shared around the internets lately, and there's good reason. This is the best description of grief I've ever seen. It's comforting for me to read about grief right now, and I love this.

“Alright, here goes. I’m old. What that means is that I’ve survived (so far) and a lot of people I’ve known and loved did not. I’ve lost friends, best friends, acquaintances, co-workers, grandparents, mom, relatives, teachers, mentors, students, neighbors, and a host of other folks. I have no children, and I can’t imagine the pain it must be to lose a child.

But here’s my two cents.

I wish I could say you get used to people dying. I never did. I don’t want to. It tears a hole through me whenever somebody I love dies, no matter the circumstances. But I don’t want it to “not matter”. I don’t want it to be something that just passes. My scars are a testament to the love and the relationship that I had for and with that person. And if the scar is deep, so was the love. So be it. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are a testament that I can love deeply and live deeply and be cut, or even gorged, and that I can heal and continue to live and continue to love. And the scar tissue is stronger than the original flesh ever was. Scars are a testament to life. Scars are only ugly to people who can’t see.

As for grief, you’ll find it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning, with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was, and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it’s some physical thing. Maybe it’s a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it’s a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 feet tall and crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don’t even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you’ll find the waves are still 100 feet tall, but they come further apart. When they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But in between, you can breathe, you can function. You never know what’s going to trigger the grief. It might be a song, a picture, a street intersection, the smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything… and the wave comes crashing. But in between waves, there is life. Somewhere down the line, and it’s different for everybody, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall. Or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart. You can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O’Hare. You can see it coming, for the most part, and prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side. Soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of the wreckage, but you’ll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming, and somehow you don’t really want them to. But you learn that you’ll survive them. And other waves will come. And you’ll survive them too. If you’re lucky, you’ll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

Updates!

3/17 = My 44th birthday (I'm referring to this year as "The Obama").  My husband and I drove up to north Georgia to visit Mom.  I got to see my brother for a quick visit, and have lunch with my sister and my neice.   I took a couple of old photo albums and Mom and I had a wonderful time looking through them and reminiscing.  Staying in a retirement home doesn't sound like much of a party, but the place where Mom lives has a nice guest room with a little refrigerator and coffee maker, and it's so handy being just upstairs and down the hall from Mom.  I like putting on my jammies after dinner and walking downstairs in my slippers to hang out with Mom, watching Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy.  It almost feels like home.

3/26 = I went to a funeral for a co-worker.  He was in his late 20's, working full-time while pursuing a civil engineering degree, and he died suddenly.  My job entails speaking to co-workers on the phone for a good portion of my average workday, answering questions and making changes to schedules and trouble-shooting system problems and a million other things, and I can honestly say that out of hundreds he was my very favorite person to talk to.   Since he often called my extension directly instead of calling the queue that goes to whoever in my department is available (which is what he was supposed to do), I'm going to guess he liked talking to me, too.  He had a great sense of humor (and by that I mean he appreciated MY sense of humor, ha) and an easy laugh, and a cool accent (he was from Trinidad).   Everyone here in the office was so shocked and upset.  People gathered around his desk and cried.  Our HR department brought in a grief counselor.  I have to admit, I did end up sobbing quietly in the restroom for a few minutes.  A lot of people from our company went to his funeral, which was lovely; it focused very much on being a celebration of his life.  I will really, really miss him.

4/1 = My husband and I were at work when he got a call that his father, who'd had an accident on his fishing boat the previous weekend and hurt his right leg very badly, was being rushed back to the hospital to have surgery and could lose his leg.  We both left work and went to the hospital, very scared.  He was already in surgery when we got there, so we waited, hoping for good news.  The surgery went well, luckily the infection hadn't spread too much.  My father in law was in a motorcycle accident more than 20 years ago and lost his right arm, so he is quite glad to able to hang on to all his remaining limbs.  He had a second surgery a few days later, and will have a skin graft this week. He has a long painful recovery ahead of him.

4/4 = While making dinner our garbage disposal got clogged, and when fixing it my husband took off the pipe attached to it. Unfortunately, this pipe thingie was attached to another pipe thingie, and had apparently been pieced together with some strange elderly material that basically just disintegrated, so the pipes couldn't be put back together.  Neither of us knows the first thing about plumbing.  The next morning, my brilliant and fearless husband yanked the whole thing out and took it to Lowe's, where he managed to find something that looked like it might be the same, and brought it home and put everything together.  So, we don't know for sure whether it was actually done correctly or not, but it's working, so we're considering it fixed.  But we put a bucket under it, just in case.

4/5 am = I got sick.  I woke up in the middle of the night, a little nauseous, and within the next few hours got sicker and sicker until I... well, why don't I just be kind and spare the details?  Let's just say it was most unpleasant.  I don't know if I got some kind of bug or if I ate something that hated me, but I felt a lot better by afternoon, and was fine the next day.

4/5 pm = My poor husband's doomed birthday.  He had planned to go to the hospital for his father's second surgery, but ended up staying home to take care of me, and also to take care of the kitchen sink.  The sink and I were in similar shape, actually.  To celebrate at least a tiny bit, we ordered chinese food to be delivered, which is kind of a treat for us.  Also, I finally gave in and watched Full Metal Jacket with him, it's one of his favorite movies and I had never seen it.  It wasn't an ideal day of celebration, but it had a few nice moments.

p.s  Also, I got a scanner for my birthday!  I am extremely excited about this, since I have a buttload of old pics from forever ago, plus I have a ton of negatives -- many from my photography classes in college that I've never even printed (lab time was scarce and photo paper was expensive).  Stay tuned for old photos!  And when I say "old", I mean like from the 80's.  :D