Daryl Wood's Blog

Today, this article in People magazine showed up in my online scanning. No surprise since grief seems to be my focus at the moment. Just reading the headline made me sit up and take notice. Three years? She is still grieving her husband after three years? Yes, thank you. This is what I needed to hear even though I long for the days when grief isn’t on my mind off and on during every waking hour. It was an awkward kind of comfort to know that my being so sad and lost was not unusual at this early juncture.

While the article talked mostly about the new song she wrote for her husband, I was stuck on the words that fully captured my own experience of ‘I think of him every day.”

If only for the purpose of highlighting for others the potential for years of grieving and, accepting that it may be a long journey, what I wanted to do was to copy this link and send it out. I wanted to send it to all the people (friends, family, acquaintances) who stare at me with disbelief or frustration that here I am almost 16 weeks in (and yes, I’m counting) and I’m still having crater sized sobbing sessions and irrational thinking. I wanted to send it to the people who are kindheartedly telling me what I should be doing to ‘move on’. I wanted to send it to the people who unknowingly are shaming me when they say things like “you owe it to Doug to be happy”. I wanted to send it to the friends who desperately want to help me by offering endless distractions with trips and projects and complaints about whatever or whoever is bugging them at the moment. I wanted to send it to the well meaning folks who tell me their own stories of loss (which by the way if they aren’t about a beloved spouse they aren’t the same thing … and even if they are … they aren’t the same thing.) I wanted to send it to the person who keeps reminding me that I have lots of good memories and all I need to do is shift my thinking to feel better. And I really wanted to send it to those who not so subtly point out how much luckier I am than those who have seriously big challenges to go along with their grief.

I didn’t send out the link. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings or make them angry or to sound ungrateful for the generosity of spirit that keeps them coming back to watch out for me. But I wanted them to see through these words and ultimately through my eyes and heart and mind that it is possible for someone to be engulfed in periods of misery for a long time even when they may also be capable of having calmer, even happy moments.

So instead of what I wanted to do, I wrote this blog. And maybe it hits home for some people because of how hard my friends and family try to ease my despair and support and comfort me. I tell myself that eventually no one will read this because it will be too depressing. Grief is not a comfortable dinner companion. I don’t know that I could keep being swallowed up by someone else’s painful journey. There is more than enough sad news to go around without opting in. But I have to write. That’s how I process and I trust that in my ‘coach speak’ everyone is capable, resourceful and whole. When they’ve had enough, they’ll move on and I will still be writing.

Finally, more than anything, I wanted to read over and over the few sentences in the article that spoke to the heartbreak that cannot be healed and cannot be ignored. “The soul of the song is about how you miss a person so much, because they’re such a presence in your life that it’s almost impossible to imagine that you won’t physically see them again in this life,” she explains. “You wonder, ‘How can I communicate with you? Where are you? You didn’t just die — there’s too much of you left on this earth, too many people that love you.” I wanted to read over and over that someone else knew how hard it is to go on every day searching for their lost love and praying for a normal that looks remotely like the normal that once filled me with such joy.

And I cried. I cried tears of gratitude that somewhere in the world, and probably a lot of places in the world, someone else gets what I’m going through. They know how folded socks, misplaced hammers, empty beds, jeans on a hook, batteries on charge, favourite pictures, scraps of paper with neat printing, a well used tool bag, a stunning sunrise, otters racing across the icy lake, a car sitting idle, unfinished bird houses, green rubber boots, carpenters pencils, a worn out cushion, the kindling bin, a windy day, the eerie silence as evening falls and so much more can be the catalyst for unrelenting sorrow.