Daryl Wood's Blog

I’ve done lots of hard things in my life and, right now, it feels like the hardest thing I had to do was hold Doug’s hand as he took his last breath. Today I sobbed through my whole 25km bike ride and kept replaying the experience over and over. I wondered if he really did stop breathing, if his heart really did stop beating, was he really ‘gone’. I sat with him for a couple of hours after he died and was taken away by the soft and kind men from the funeral home. And that was hard too. And I’ve been doing so many hard things since then.

Actually I did a lot of hard things during his illness so it’s been nine years of doing hard things. And today when I was trying to make something work and avoiding having to make a phone call and struggling with a tangled extension cord I just felt so defeated. I had this feeling that if I had done the hardest thing of my life – letting him go when I wasn’t ready – then why can’t life be a little easier now? Why can’t the hard things just ease up? Why can’t I catch a break? After all, I’ve proven I can do hard things so I don’t need to keep proving it over and over and over again. At least that’s how it felt this afternoon. I’ve had these thoughts before but when I am sitting here reflecting tonight there is something else that floats to the top of my mind. Something that makes me cry. Again.

You see what I know is that I have absolutely done a lot of hard things since Doug died. And right alongside that some pretty extraordinary people have picked me up, helped me, supported me, comforted me, acknowledged me, listened to me, held me and done some things that for me would have been very hard. And they have done things that were pretty easy but in my state of despair looked so hard. And they did some things that were hard for them too. And I have kept going and they have kept going. We have all found some way to keep going and doing the things that can sometimes look so hard.

And yes, when I do some hard things I feel relief and I know Doug would be so proud of me. Now I am tasked with the opportunity to be proud of myself if I decide to see these hard things as something worth doing or necessary to do. And most of the hard things I feel I have to do are things I would have done easily. So what happened? Why is this drama unfolding so often these days?

The answer is grief. My grief. And no one understands the particular characteristics of my grief but I know its breadth and width. I recognize the sound of its breathing in my ears, the heat of its intensity, the growling of its roar when it sneaks up on me. I feel the grip it has on me in spite of, or maybe because of, my willingness to let it play full out until it exhausts itself. Only then is there some deep sighs and the relief that comes from letting come and letting go.

Grief may have hijacked my confidence and independence but it hasn’t stolen my tenacity. The last time I saw my mother before she died suddenly in September 2009 I told her that I was proud of being tenacious because I learned that from her. So that will be my defense against the relentless drive of my grief that makes so many things feel hard until they are done.