It Wasn’t on the Calendar

Looking for a file on the computer, I stumbled across the one that held pictures from Justin’s accident scene.  We buried Justin on Saturday, October 2nd. That following Saturday, October 9th, Doug left for Minnesota to take care of the paperwork concerning Justin’s vehicle. He would then travel to South Dakota and the University to collect Justin’s belongings and to clean out his office at the college.

I had viewed the pictures when Doug arrived back home, not right away though – we had a van load of boxes and bags to unload and sort. You just throw yourself into “task” mode and do the next thing. You unpack clothes and launder them, you sort what you will keep, what you cannot bear to keep, realistically what you have room to keep.  I learned from both my father and mother’s death that this sorting is done in stages, if you are torn about an item – put it in the “not yet” pile. You know that eventually you will let go of it – but not yet.

I look back at the calendar for 2010/11, at my work and teaching schedule, I  wonder how I managed it all. I was grateful to find “me” described in a book that I continue to resource, “When the Bough Breaks” by Judith R. Bernstein.

“The newly bereaved are impatient, have little frustration tolerance, jump out of their skins at sudden sounds, are generally keyed-up…… the adrenaline in their nervous systems is pumping…..creating restlessness, the need to move, keep busy.  ….There is a driving sense of having to keep all the ducks in a row, trying to keep control because life is really out of control.  In addition to being an attempt to keep order and control, hyperactivity serves the second purpose of keeping the mourner busy enough so he can avoid the anguish that faces him if he slows down.  In a way, the activity is a desperate search for what is missing, all the while knowing that it can’t ever be found.”

Yes, so much of that is, was true for me, I was “hyper-efficient.”  The white banker’s boxes lined up on shelves in the basement with their contents marked on the outside.  Justin’s kitchen items integrated into our kitchen, books separated by topic, going to Sam’s Club for more banker’s boxes. I laugh when I read efficiency experts who say you should only ever touch something once, put it where it belongs the first time, don’t create stacks. Their worlds must be so sterile, so clean, so unapproachable. For in reality, all those boxes need to be touched again, need to be taken down and sorted…again. Physically wandered through, the touching of memories, the letting go of what you could not immediately evaluate in the first sorting. With time comes the realization of the duration of this process, you come to understand that your initial efforts were only the precursors to tasks that would need revisiting.  Boxes that were stored a year ago, will need to be gone through again, eventually paring down to just a handful of boxes.

How our child died also shapes our grief process. Justin’s was a sudden death, not to make light of it, but his dying was not on the calendar, not even in pencil. From the the time the boys were small, they learned to check the calendar. We always had a central calendar that orchestrated our lives. I still have all of our family calendars, they are a gold mine of information. We often joked that we lived and died by the calendar. Well, it wasn’t on the calendar.  I have even said to Justin, in my mind, that all this is impossible, how dare he die – it wasn’t on the calendar.

In the same book as quoted above, I came across a quote from another author,

While the grief is not greater in sudden death, the capacity to cope is diminished.  Grievers are shocked and stunned….The loss is so disruptive that recovery almost always is complicated.  This is because the adaptive capacities are so severely assaulted and the ability to cope is so critically diminished that functioning is seriously impaired.

–Theresa Rando in her book “Grieving”

I read further on where Dr. Burnstein elaborates a bit on this,

Parents can’t absorb this assault all at once.  They need to take one step at a time.  They need to take in the enormity in small stages and postpone emotions that are too overwhelming.  It is helpful to let the reality seep in gradually at a pace that can be managed.  Keeping things the way they used to be in one of the many forms this postponement takes.

And this is where I love this author, herself a bereaved parent, a researcher, a brilliant woman who found the “experts” so very wrong in their management of grief, in their imposed time lines of grief – notice that she says “postponement”…not denial. I do wish I had a dollar for every person who thought I was in “denial.”  I have learned that you cannot please people in your grief.  Carry on and they say you are in denial, shed a tear and you are falling apart.

Two years is still considered “new grief.” I can hardly grasp that in less than two months we will mark the second anniversary of Justin’s death. We still keep a calendar, sometimes things even make it to the calendar – it is far less crowded these last few months than it has been in the past. I believe there to be a reversal of priorities occurring, that which was postponed is now moving to the front in degree of importance.  Almost as if a certain weathering had to take place, the exterior is starting to reflect the changes that have taken place interiorly, in darkness and silence.

I would posit that this transitioning is the most fragile for the grieving parent and least understood. This search for new meaning in their lives, yes – even with surviving children there is a desperate search for reasons to live.  You can vocalize all you want about the “wrongness” of that reality, that we have so much to live for – but that is a gross misunderstanding of this process, none of it is predictable or neat.  Emotions and thoughts steamroll over you and they must be allowed to be felt and examined.  How can one re-invest energies into a purpose without first acknowledging the absence of meaning and purpose?  How wrong it would be to focus all that was invested in the child that died on the surviving child or children? Is that a fair burden to place on them and their grief process?  We cannot simply swivel our gaze on our surviving son and expect him to fill Justin’s absence for the reverse would be true as well, no one could ever fill Ryan’s absence.  or the well-being of our surviving child, we must feel Justin’s death on every possible level and find a purpose that captures and embraces who we have become, we are different people now.

The calendar still lives on my desk, right in front of one of my keyboards…I keep a bottle of white-out handy, there is more flux in the schedule these days. I no longer feel compelled or guilty that every block is not filled from top to bottom, how can God send me something new if I have already filled up my dance card?  Some days I even forget to look at the calendar – even though it is right in front of me, sometimes I even toss it the side, choosing instead to live in the present moment.