Time Marches On

Well, yesterday was December 7th. Just a regular, average, every day kind of Sunday. However, for me, yesterday, December 7th, 2014, marked off four months since mother's been gone. A third of a year. 122 days. 2,928 hours (as of 12:50 am). But hey, who's counting.

Maybe me. Maybe just a little. Maybe every now and then. In that relatively short period of time, we have celebrated seven birthdays (me, two nieces, three great-nieces, and an aunt), the birth of a new child, Labor day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving. All of those are big "family" days in our family. All celebrated without "her." All those "firsts."

We still have so many more "firsts" to conquer. Christmas is just on the horizon, then New Year's, then her birthday. Oh my, how time marches on.

This thing called "time" that they talk about healing all wounds. No, I think not. Time cares very little about my wounds. My pain. My grief. If time "cared," it would stop or at least slow down. It would let my emotions catch up before running off into the future like she never existed - never mattered.

But time doesn't stop. It doesn't even slow down. Babies are born. Other people die. People get married. They get divorced. People laugh. They cry. Time just chugs on along.

People try to care. Those closest to you still ask from time to time how you're doing? If you're okay? They genuinely care. It's not even that the others "don't." It's simply not their pain. It's not their burden to carry.

The truth is, while time "HEALS" nothing, it does change things. It changes the intensity of your grief. It allows the raw wound to simply scab over a bit. It allows a bit of perspective.

I will never be "over" any of my losses. That's not possible. To borrow and paraphrase a bit, great love often results in great pain. I have found that the length of time I go without crying is greater. However, the triggers are often weird, crazy stuff that I could never anticipate. I have found that I can talk about her without crying. However, sometimes the funny stuff makes me cry the most. As I spoke to a friend (who also recently joined the deceased mother club), she said something that we all feel at one time or another - "sometimes it feels like she's been gone forever and sometimes it seems like I just got off the phone with her."

Those are the crazy tricks that "time" plays on you. I read this earlier and I like it. I think it gives people permission to grieve AND move on because sometimes the moving on becomes the hard part. So if we acknowledge the change, it might help...

“I don’t think you ever get over the loss in your heart,” Elizabeth Harper Neeld, Ph.D, said. “And that has nothing to do with your spiritual strength or trust, or even with whether you’ve been true to your grieving,” she said.

She goes on to express the heartache she experiences when holiday season arrives, and her son’s presence is missing; yet, she’s obtained a state of calm and acceptance. “If something happens, or we’re somewhere Cliff would have been with us, we’ll say ‘Hi Cliff, wish you could see this…something like that, but it’s not heavy,’” she shared. “We take stock and say: I am changed by our loss, and I have changed my life as a result of my loss. And we are not shriveled permanently like a dry stick because of our loss. We can feel alive again…probably wiser, maybe quieter, certainly full of gratitude and a desire to contribute to what we have been through.”

I think the bolded part is phenomenal. Just my nugget to hold onto when I'm 2,928 hours, 122 days, 4 months, and 1/3 of a year into this load of crap.