Where has the last month gone?....the last three months for that matter? This has been a fall to remember - trips to New York, Kona, and Sacramento, visitors, garage sale, new school year begun, raising up Scout (she won't leave me alone for two seconds...honestly. I love her madly, but it's like having a new born. Oh, how I've forgotten. I type threee words, throw her toy - she fetches and if I'm not fast enough to throw it again she growls her impatience. How did I live without her? And now the holidays! How the heck did that happen already? Thanksgiving was at my house - my 2nd without Apu.
I finished my end of the quarter conferences with my nursing students today. Another quarter completed, another group one step closer to completing their dream. We need them badly, these bright, young, enthusiastic professionals. We just can't seem to educate them fast enough. I'm so proud of all of them.
I now have a little more time for reading other things besides medical resource books, articles, and student papers. I've just started a book that a friend gave me called, The Year Of Magical Thinking" by Joan Didion. She is an author of some renown, having written several books, but this one is about her personal bereavement as she grieves the loss of her husband. (Scout is now on my lap which is not quite big enough for her long body [thanks to the dachshund ingredient to her mix]. I have to fold her into a circle so she can settle. Maybe one of those papoose things would work). Oh, yeah...Joan Didion...
She compares this loss with the loss of her parents. A friend of hers wrote to her at that time on the death of a parent: "despite our preparation, indeed, despite our age, dislodges things deep in us, sets off reactions that surprise us and that may cut free memories and feelings that we had thought gone to ground long ago. We might, in that indeterminate period they call mourning, be in a submarine, silent on the ocean's bed, aware of the depth charges, now near and now far, buffeting us with recollections."
Like Joan, my father is dead, my mother is dead and while I felt devastated I could still go about my daily tasks - function to some degree. With my husband it is very different. It effects me profoundly everyday. I feel that the fog is only beginning to partly lift. My father was only 62 when he died of a brain tumor (my age-yikes) and my mother followed 14 years later to the month. We had time before with both, to prepare, but still loss is loss. I think of my children and how they are managing their grief.
Joan writes, "Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life." She state how virtually everyone who has experienced grief mentions this phenomenon of "waves". Even I wrote about this sensation some months ago in my blog. (Old Post Review).
Eric Lindemann, chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital in the 1940's, interviewed many family members of those killed in the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire. In his famous 1944 study he described, "sensations of somatic [physical] distress occurring in waves lasting from twenty minutes to an hour at a time, a feeling of tightness in the throat, choking with shortness of breath, a need for sighing, and an empty feeling in the abdomen, lack of muscular pwer, and intense subjective distress escribed as tension or mental pain."
Tightness in the throat.
Choking, need for sighing...
Joan said such waves began for her on the morning of December 31st, 2003 (24 days after our son was nearly killed in Prague). Mine started anew on August 14, 2010.
No one can believe how bad,and raw these sensations are till they have been there!The physical manifestations from loss,and emotional torment are mind boggling!Deep is deep!Live,and love!....Pat-E
Posted by: Pat-E | December 01, 2011 at 12:24 PM
UP - The recognition of your experience in Didion's words is totally what you are creating here for others ... the truth in your heart, courageous ... xo
Posted by: Nathalie Hardy | December 01, 2011 at 07:12 AM
These 'waves of grief' keep rolling in...some are gentler than others...some come crashing in like breakers. I'm not sure if this sea will ever calm completely...maybe it's something we just become accustomed to...but it seems to be ever present...if only subliminal at times. Now, whenever I think of something that we were planning to do together...that's when it hits the hardest...that's when the sighs come. This has indeed been the hardest thing I've ever faced in my life. It colors everything in a different light going forward...
Keep your eyes on the horizon Patti...
Posted by: Jim | November 30, 2011 at 05:24 PM