About Me

Monday, January 29, 2018

Hard work

I catered a wedding this weekend. It is such hard work! 4 days pretty much non-stop - 3 of those 12 hour days on my feet. But the result is amazing, joyous...and delicious! And for a bonus? While cooking, I was fully distracted and immersed in the experience and (mostly) filled with joy. 

The colors astounded me, as if it was the first time I'd really seen the colors of food. I marveled at the beautiful green of celery and onion as it softened in olive oil. The orange and creams of the butternut squash and apple stew. The pure creaminess of mayonnaise and sour cream as I whisked it together made me smile. A cutting board filled with perfect rounds of sliced carrots.

And serving the guests at the wedding? Seeing the happy faces of the bride and groom? Hearing the nice things people were saying? Joy, satisfaction, and such a blessing to me to be able to bless others. 

The days pass, one by one, and some are like that - filled with good things. Other days are filled with tears, thoughts of "what if....." and stabs of pain that come and go. I remain unmotivated, incredibly low on energy, with a distinct lack of concentration.They call it "complicated grief". Yuck.

The past 3 months have been some of the hardest of my life, and a tremendous amount of that pain has been not just the loss of Matt, but the trauma that surrounds his death. It jarred my nerves, my brain, my physical body. But as hard as the past 3 months have been, I actually have mostly been distracting my mind with television, books, sleep. My counselor says I've been giving my subconscious mind time to work through the trauma of it all. 

Now it's time to get on with the equally hard task of grieving and healing.

Here's my plan: I mean to start purposefully journaling to allow myself to feel - a little at a time - so I can process those feelings and not keep dampening them with tv and books and sleep. 

I plan to spend more time with God praying, reading the Bible - so that my mind and soul will be filled with truth and not lies, lies like, "If you had spent more time with Matt..." or "You didn't push him hard enough to seek help..."  

I hope to start reading through a book on grief - so that I don't fall back on what I have learned in the past, but keep learning how to work through this loss in a healthy way. 

To be honest, I don't want to do any of this. I want to keep watching Call the Midwife on a loop and napping through the afternoon and only crying when it bursts through the little bubble I've put around myself. But I know what old grief looks like - grief that has never healed and has turned sour inside, grief that hardens the heart. And that's not where I want to live. 

So here I go...

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