This week I’ll finish my fourth school year After. Four full school years. This is the first year I didn’t take a “Cooper” day to recover from a surge of grief. I had hard days and I had sick days (covid and pneumonia will do that), but no “Cooper” days.
These realities—both the fact that it’s been four school years and that I didn’t take any “Cooper” days—are consuming considerable space in my heart and mind.
So am I all better now? Back to my old self now? Nope. Seriously—that’s not happening. There are still many days I’m exhausted from trying so damn hard to be okay. I still require time to myself. I’m generally a lone wolf when I’m not at work. I’ve always been that way to an extent, but my lone wolf tendencies have increased exponentially in these recent years. When I’m alone, there’s no pretending necessary.
Many reading may think, “She (or your grieving person) doesn’t have to pretend around me,” and in a few cases, that’s true, but very few cases. Remember Jack Nicholson’s “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH!” speech? Yeah. That. Because the truth—my truth, their truth, grief’s truth—is dark and twisty and ugly. It’s heavy and unending and relentless, but it’s also my reality.
Of course, it’s not only my reality; we lost Cooper, but there are so many more. We’ve all lost loves—some to tragedies that reached the national news, some to the slow-motion horror of terminal illness, some to invisible battles discovered too late. In the past year alone, and just in my small world, the losses have been unfathomable.
We all see. We all know.
But, we are human. Death and grief and honesty unleash our emotional squeamishness. Believe me when I say we are aware. Better to stick to sunshine and happiness, right? Easier, certainly, if that approach works.
Except it doesn’t. Not for me and not for other bereaved parents I know. Pretending is crucial, because life does go on. We have jobs and responsibilities. As impossible as it seems in those early days, the world keeps turning, and we keep living. Pretending is a necessary and exhausting part of this existence, this unrequested life. You think I’m crabby now? Imagine if I stopped pretending.
From time to time, though, even the best pretenders among us need respite from the ruse. We need to lay down our heavy burden and just be, without fear of dragging others down with us. We need to talk about our person. We need to talk about the how of it all, the why.
We need to find our listeners, and we need to be those listeners for others. I have steadfast friends who manage to “love me anyway,” and for them I am grateful. The friends who walk this same path are a completely different flavor of friend. They understand the day-to-day weight of outliving a child—a weight no scale can register. I have friends I’ve never met in person or have met only once, but in one heartbreaking way, we are close. We don’t know each other well, but we do know each other deeply.
Four school years and countless lessons and bad days later, everything and nothing has changed. I carry the same grief, but instead of it stabbing me with each breath I take, my grief is heavy—so heavy—and less stabby. I still need people who meet me where I stand, where I kneel, where I sob, but now I can be that person for someone else.
Sometimes, I’m the hugger; sometimes, I’m the hug-ee. That’s just life—just being human.
Woods Writes 