I have had a moment arrested in my mind’s eye for a month now. It is a picture of Norsemen at our dining room table. The table is happily cluttered with coffee and tea cups, tea pots and cats, tins of cookies and electronic devices. Ryan was home. We only get to see him a handful of times a year, so these moments are precious. I stopped what I was doing to just cradle the moment, two beloved faces, one with a snow white beard looking over his reading glasses, and one with dark coppery hair, looking over his glasses. A peaceful sense of camaraderie and contentment warmed the air. There was plenty of communication devices to be had, an iPad, a Tablet, notepads and cords. Some may say “Why? Why when you are so rarely are together did you have those things out? Why spend time with a smartphone instead of the person?” Four years ago, I would have asked the same question. But allow me to share with you what I realized as I stood there, drinking in those faces and making a memory. I realized that we had survived, our little family group had survived, and we were beginning to thrive.
I was asking Ryan questions about an App that he had purchased for me and it was a joy to have him give me a tutorial on how to set up my categories and folders. He has a constellation App that was captivating, just point it at the sky and it points out the constellations and star clusters, pure magic. He and Doug were talking all sorts of computer talk, tech stuff that is fascinating. The hours passed so quickly, we were way into the late evening hours and it had felt like only minutes.
I thought back to a webinar that I had attended two years after Justin’s death about family dynamics and grief. After Ryan’s last visit, I re-visited the four stages listed below, stages that can occur after a life changing tragedy.
- We re-form. Everyone is kind and loving, on best behavior.
- We storm. We work out our individual differences and needs. Tensions arise, snarling and biting often occurs.
- We norm. We learn how to live in our new life, we become task focused, we approach a new normal, we learn who each other is all over again.
- We perform. We work together cohesively, our “performance” climbs upwards.
And I could see how we had indeed experienced all those stages. The “polite” stage. I remember saying to Doug those first days after Justin’s death that I never, ever wanted to have a cross word again, the thought was inconceivable. And I remembered the storms. And that time of storming was all the more painful and confusing because I didn’t understand what was happening, how can we snarl and snap? We should be all loving and understanding, but it does not work that way. The storming is necessary as we figure out how we grieve, as we figure out why we should keep on living.
We are four and a half years since Justin’s death, and I can feel in my heart that the fifth anniversary is a benchmark. A place that we can stand together and see where we have been, honoring every single day that we have stormed and normed. I treasure those moments of cohesion, where we explore the “new” us and it feels pretty good. I realize that most of that work was done on the interior, individually. We each had to be responsible for our own grief work, and that work will never end. It was the fruit of that interior work that came together to create a new harmony. Now we are warriors together, we have hammered out new inside jokes, we have affirmations that connect us, and we are learning to laugh again.
Speaking of laughter and technology, Ryan filmed me in time-lapse eating a turkey sandwich and the replay was the funniest thing I have ever seen, how wonderful it was to have spontaneous laughter from all of us, to laugh at myself and with myself, to hear laughter from the Norsemen. I know their eyes will always have shadows, the work of grief is not about eliminating the shadows, it is laughing with the shadows.
I still cry, tears happen every day, dried salt tracks on my face in the morning tell me I still cry at night, that is part of the new me, and laughter is a part of me now too. Evidently turkey can be hysterically funny.
We have stormed and we have normed. And now we climb upward.
You write so beautifully. Thank you for sharing this.
You give me hope as we hobble along as a broken family trying to find a way to deal with life without Amy. Thank you for sharing the four stages above.
Oh, thank you. Sometimes the family dynamic is the hardest part for me in grief. We are learning to laugh through those dark circles, we are constantly figuring out how to be in different pages of grief. But we are still a family. We are changed forever, but we are still “us.”