That place of open refrigerators,cold asparagus, and the color beige

So you know that place of standing in front of the refrigerator with the door open eating cold asparagus?  That is where I am at, mindless, numb, eating cold asparagus because I can’t remember what I was supposed to be doing.  The brain and body exhausted. It all seems one large pile of beige, not easily discernible, just beige with lots of cat hair, even the cats are beige.

I finally called Compassionate Friends last week to ask for information and received a wonderful letter with a contact name and number for a local chapter. I have been reading all the information they sent on the sudden death of a child and the death of an adult child, part of me is wondering why I waited so long to reach out to them, the other part of me realizes that everybody’s time frame is different. I find I can only read a little at a time, its hard to read when you are crying. You take your glasses off and hold the paper really, really close and that doesn’t help, so you put the literature down, tidy up and have another go at it. It is a process, a messy, drippy process, the puppy gets upset, the cats hover, your other work looks accusingly at you from your desk.  Schedules, action items, unanswered emails, it is all just words, beige words that demand your attention. I keep on coming back to the grief literature from TCF, there is a relief in reading that you aren’t going crazy, that you are normal, that there are others like you who speak the same language.

I had a startling moment of clarity this week. I had overslept. I never heard the alarm, the cat, nothing, just that icy dread in your chest when you wake up and realize you are never going to be where you need to be in time to do what you are supposed to do.  Doug had an unplanned trip to the dentist. I had another visit with the foot doctor. We met in the kitchen later that morning before he rushed out to work.  I don’t even remember what we were talking about but I looked up at him and said “we are exhausted aren’t we?”…and he said “yes.”  Was one of the most intimate conversations we have had since Justin’s death and it lasted all of 30 seconds, but it was a raw acknowledgement of our reality and somehow there was freedom in that acknowledgement.

I have had the contact number for the local chapter of the Compassionate Friends for over a week now and this morning I knew in my heart that I had to call them. I had put it off, maybe out of fear, a natural reticence to take another step in unfamiliar territory, but I called. May God abundantly bless that person on the other end of the phone. She gently asked for a little information about our situation, and my voice cracked, I couldn’t speak, and that was okay with her, she spoke the language.  o gentle, so kind. They meet next week, come to a meeting she said and bring a picture of Justin so that we can get to know him. What a gift, what a kindness.

I feel like I am in Frost’s yellow wood where paths diverge, except my divergence is the path of my former self, my former life, and the path I now need to take. I confess to looking back longingly at the old path, for awhile you can still see the old path even as you step out onto the new path. But I have a trail marker on the new path now, our first Compassionate Friends meeting, something to look forward to in an odd way, to go and be with  others who have had to step out onto this new path.

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain