In recent posts, I've been mopey and sad, but a funny thing happened after I finished the second window painting (it's called "I have no words," but I think I forgot to label it). I felt calm.
My other hospice chaplain friends kept telling me, this is what grief is - you've had a serious loss, just let it happen. And so I did, as much as I could (and I've written about some of that here, including crying in church). I was reading some of the material I had on grief, and as you might guess it sounds very different when you're in the middle of it rather than reading it in a detached way, as something that applies to someone else. But the one thing I hadn't done was go back to Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. (For some reason, she wasn't mentioned in the hospice materials I had, but I have a lot of other pastoral care material from seminary.)
The one thing I remember is that the "stages" of grief isn't quite right: they come in a jumble. And, feeling this calm, I looked at the list. I recollected the early jumble - the denial ("we may get back together!") and the bargaining ("I have a better sense of what you need now!"). And of course the depression. For me that mostly showed up as not sleeping very much, and of course crying and crying.
It took me a couple weeks to find any anger there, but when I found it, it very clear and pushed the other pieces away. And I made myself stay with it, rather than hiding from it, pretending that it wasn't there; and I didn't go try to argue with her, because - you can already see this, right? - that would just be more "bargaining," a step backwards rather than a step forwards. Was I really going to win that argument? What would a "win" even look like?
A big part of this was the twelve hours I spent in the car by myself, driving back and forth to Virginia. A lot of remorse, slowly chewing on things, thinking them through, trying to digest them. By the last part of the drive, my thoughts were starting to take other paths - there are other things to think about, after all.
One thing that surprised me in Virginia: I saw an old F/friend, and she asked how I was doing. I gave her a hug and said I was hanging in there, that I'd been dumped. Very matter-of-factly she replied, "We didn't think you were really going to get married anyway." Huh.
I told this story to a friend back in the midWest, and he basically said, "yeah." And I realized that I had also known it for a long time, too, even though I hadn't wanted to admit it to myself. So I threw myself into the painting, talked to some F/friends around town, and just went into the anger. Then the anger went (mostly) away.
It feels odd to say, "I'm all better now," because it hasn't been that long; but I don't think I've ever really just got down and faced my emotions like this before. The anger in particular seemed to burn hot and clean. And then the acceptance just seemed to roll in of it's own accord.
There's more to the story - there's always more to the story! Even I'm sometimes embarrassed when I say, "let me give you the short version" and somehow it starts back in 1991. But for a blog post that is completely on "how I'm doing," I think it's long enough.
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