Child Loss Grief is Full of Surprises
But they aren't all bad
As I mentioned in the last newsletter, my grief seems to be moving into a new phase so my grief counseling needs to adapt along with it. The logical side of my brain understands and agrees that it's the right time to adjust my sails, but the emotional side wants nothing to do with learning or trying anything new. It's going to be a little hard and a lot scary, but I know it's necessary.
I've been seeing my grief counselor, Kate, since a few days after Christopher died so we've covered a lot of ground on how to live with my loss. Until now, most of it has been about papering over the holes in my soul so it doesn't burst from sadness before I'm better equipped to handle this reality, but now it's time to see about coming up with a more permanent solution.
One of the things we're trying is Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), a form of guided imagery that helps take the sting out of painful memories so we can live with them a little easier.1 We planned to get to it a lot sooner than now but were confined to tele-health appointments until now and EMDR is best learned in person, so it had to wait until we were face-to-face. I have no idea if it will work for me in the long term but it seems to help Prince Harry.
My first lesson, if you will, was yesterday. Not gonna lie, it was weird. Rather than dive into the deep end immediately, Kate is teaching me the techniques using a distressful memory from my teens that I struggle with but doesn't send me spinning like a top when I think about it. Once I learn the basics, we'll practice on other challenging memories until I feel equipped to work on Christopher's death. Frankly, that will terrify me but we won't go there until we both feel I can handle it.
But EMDR isn't what I want to talk about right now. Instead, I want to share something that came up during my appointment that floored me. It's probably common among bereaved parents but I never made the connection until yesterday.
We were discussing why I'm perfectly capable of talking about or remembering details of objectively terrible incidents in my past without getting upset, much less having the extreme responses that memories of Christopher’s evoke. I can dispassionately talk about an assault that left me permanently, physically scarred, or the domestic violence that left me with broken bones and a skull fracture. Like nearly every other woman on the planet, sexual assault is a part of my past but even those memories don't make me light-headed.
Everything surrounding Christopher's death, however, is still so raw that I could scream and run away from even the most ambiguous situations. Honestly, there are days when even seeing his first name in movie credits or books is too much. Yes, even though it's been more than two years since he died. (This is why I'm in counseling, right?)
Anyway, this dichotomy came up while we were searching for a challenging memory for me to practice EMDR. Christopher memories are too intense but all my other memories are just there. They just blend in with everything else rattling around in my brain's history files. There doesn't seem to be any in-between, any middle ground, on my reactions to memories; it’s zero or 11.
I asked Kate what that was all about. How can I compartmentalize almost all past traumas and just live life but then completely derail over nearly anything to do with my son’s death?
"All those other things happened to you, and only you," she said. "Christopher's death, the number one thing a mother fears, happened to him. You don't respond the same way to memories of your son as you do to those other events because they aren't nearly as traumatic for you as losing Christopher."
Holy crap. Yeah. That makes sense.
This is a pretty big revelation for me because it puts an element of my grief into perspective. I've felt for a long time like there's something significantly wrong with me because everyone seems to be dealing with Christopher's death way better than I am. I have no idea if that's actually true because no one but my husband ever talks about Christopher with me, but from out here it looks like everyone has just moved on. Meanwhile, I'm contemplating whether I can just go full Queen Victoria mourning dress for the rest of my life.2
I've been grappling for months with the question of why I can't just stuff my grief into a box and shelve it in the basement of my soul along with all the other traumas. It turns out it was love all along. I get past things that happen to me fairly quickly but this happened to Christopher, and he matters more to me than I matter to myself.
"But what is grief if not love persevering?"– WandaVision
This realization also gives me hope that EMDR might chip away at this mountain of grief I've been climbing. My old ways of dealing with trauma are outmatched at the moment so it can't hurt to try something new.
Let me wrap this up with a message specifically for other vilomahs. Grief timelines are weird anyway, but they went completely out the door when we lost our kids. Mine is unwinding more slowly than some parents and more quickly than others, so don't worry that you missed a memo about how this all goes. I simply shared this story in case anyone out there feels alone in their grief or wonders why they aren't "over it" yet. You are not alone.
That explanation is over-simplified but I'd prefer readers do their own research on mental health treatment options.
I’m kidding!
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Until next time,
Be well.
Lisa