The Grief Hangover

When I come back to this blog these days, I have to wonder, "How did a family-building blog turn into a grief blog?"  Of course I know the answer to that.  It's so simple it's stupefying: I was supposed to have another healthy baby; instead, she died.

I can still write about family stuff.  I do!  All the time!  But for a grieving person, all roads lead back to the loss.  I am a mother, a wife, and a woman in grief.  All roads still lead to Laurel.

Things are so different day to day.  I have happy days, angry days, productive days, irrational days, quiet and sad days, peaceful days, days of wisdom, and days that are a complete and total mess.  It's not sequential.  Expectations are futile.

These last two weeks since returning home from New Zealand have been particularly difficult.  The trip was wonderful for me in many ways.  It allowed me to exchange a time of year that is notoriously difficult for the bereaved for two nondescript weeks of summer in another world.  If New Zealand was an escape, this is the return.  If New Zealand was a hiatus from tapping into my river of sadness, then, of course, the waters rose.

Over the weekend, I participated in a preschool cleanup day.  It's what parents do for the teachers instead of gifts, which are strictly forbidden by school rules.  I found myself assigned to a room with two women whom I admire.  Two friend-crushes, if you will.  One is a midwife.  She is incredibly sensitive and compassionate and, on the day that I first met her, when she saw the tears welling  up in my eyes, she stood by my side the entire event and helped me navigate meeting the preschool.  She has a way of immediately accessing my most authentic self.  It's a talent.  The other is a neighbor, the very pregnant mother of two delightful children.

On this cleanup day, I started to open up to the midwife about Lauel stuff.  At first, it was about Elsie, stories that I've shared here.  But once I cracked that damn, I just couldn't stop talking about Laurel, about my loss, about the traumatic experience of her diagnosis.  Even when the other mom, the 33-weeks-pregnant mom joined us, I just could not shut up about it.  I could not stem the tides.  At one point, I had a moment of self-realization.  I saw that it was just too much information, too much feeling, too much grief, too much sadness, way too much fear for a pregnant lady, too much, too soon.  I was being totally inappropriate.  In this moment, I was horrified.  And still, my mouth talked on.

Finally, I just left.  I got up and walked out, mid-stream-of-consciousness, leaving them, I imagine, confused but relieved.  I walked home.  I stepped inside, sat down to post in my grief forum, and burst into tears.

This is what I like to call The Grief Hangover.  Drunk on sadness, you lose all control and spill your guts to anyone within earshot, then crash hard with shame and regret.  Your head pounds with the regret.  You swear you'll never open your mouth to anybody, not ever again.  It is so. Damn. Painful.

I have since patched things up with my friends, mumbling some terrible explanation to the pregnant friend, giving her reassurances (reassurances that I, and only I, have a hard time believing), and wishing her a wonderful home-birth experience.  I wrote an apology to the midwife friend, who wrote back a sensitive and lovely reassurance including invitation for much more talk about whatever is real for me, including the hard things.  I have operated like a normal person for all the days since.

But I haven't forgotten.  I still cringe when I think about this, and the other handful of times I've suffered the grief hangover.

***

There have been moments in this blogging adventure when I regretted sharing too much, when I opened up genuinely and authentically only to worry -- perhaps I should not have said that on the internet.  Perhaps I've put more out there than I want people to know.

I am going to try to continue this blog, my tiny and insignificant corner of the internet.  Though I am still committed to talking about my very alive, very vibrant family, I think that my writing can't help but orbit my loss for a while yet.  I will try peeling back more layers of my story, my feelings, my experience.  I want to do this without losing control.  I want to tell this story in a way I will never regret.  Know that I am committed to this: writing that is both mindful and authentic.

Grief is painful.  It is so raw and uncomfortable and unforgiving!  All this sadness and awkwardness (along with lengthy, photoless posts!) likely puts off some readers here.  The good news is that anybody here can simply click away -- and they probably do.  But I don't write for the numbers anyway.  I write this blog because I love to write, and for whatever reason, it's easier to write when I know that somebody will read, even just one person.  So thank you for that.  It's brave to be with someone in grief.  It's brave to listen.  It's brave to sit in silence.  It's brave to read.