Obsessions

Mondays are proving to be hard days. I find myself obsessed with the time on the last day of your life. Looking at the clock, I desperately try to recall what we were doing at that precise moment. As 834 pm draws near, the time when Hannah screamed for me; my anxiety increases as the adrenaline surges through my body. My heart begins beating wildly. I start to hold my breath because the broken shards of my heart stab me with every breath.

I knew immediately why she screamed. Even though I was in the house, it was shrill and panicked as it easily penetrated the walls. As I was searching for shoes, I called an ambulance. In a panic, I told the dispatcher, “It's my husband. He's probably had a heart attack, come now!”

Imagine her confusion when she asks me where he is and if he’s conscious, my voice shrill with panic, I tell her, “I don’t know, I can’t find them. But it’s bad please hurry!” This was my worst fear and to my horror quickly became a reality the moment I saw your face.

I don't choose these thoughts. Most days I don't know the day of the week, but my body remembers every Monday. Somehow. Every damned one. This is what trauma and grief rolled together look like. It's a mind fuck and I hate it. I still shake my head in disbelief that you are really gone!

Then, out of the blue , a gem like this will show up and make me smile through my tears. Deep within your work backpack was this song list with a bunch of “our” songs that you labeled “Dar” on your phone. Thank you, babe. I really needed that reminder that you and I were real, and it was amazing.

Days after Rick passed away, I started writing letters to him nearly every night. I missed him. The void he left was vast and the longest that we had ever been apart was five months when he was on a cruise to the Mediterranean while in the Navy. This letter was one of the last ones I wrote to him.

I have heard it said that grief can make you obsess about the most random things. Rick died on a Monday evening. So, one of my obsessions was Mondays and the time. I had heard people say that the first year was the worst. Enduring the “firsts” was a special kind of torment for those grieving and mine was just beginning. The first morning, first week, first month, I had so far to go before I hit the one year. How was I going to manage that? How would I survive it? Due to the fact that Mondays hit me hard no matter what was going on, it was easy to countdown those Mondays. 52 Mondays. Fifty-two wasn’t very many, I told myself confidently, “I could do that!” It was the first of many of my survival tactics to help me through this hell that had become my life. A sort of “light at the end of the tunnel,” I desperately needed  to see an end to this torture. For a person whose cup is half full it is important for me to know there is a potential end in sight. The first year, three hundred sixty-five days, or fifty-two Mondays quickly became a countdown of sorts, a way for me to give myself those much-needed pep talks when I was drowning in the abyss of grief and so scared, I was not strong enough  to endure the agony a minute more.

The sudden loss of Rick made me experience what I now know to be typical feelings and physical sensations during deep grief. For me, every minute of every day I was plagued with these very real, physical effects of grief. Some of these may sound familiar to those of you who understand grief. They included nausea, foreboding, anxiety, lack of appetite, shortness of breath, physical pain, irregular heartbeats, chest pains, inability to sleep, nightmares if I managed to sleep, overwhelming feelings that I lost something and should be looking for it, brain fog, memory loss, racking sobs taking over my entire body, shakes, weakness, restlessness, adrenaline rushes, inability to make decisions, urge to run away from the pain… the list is very long, but these were the things I struggled with for the first two years, although the first year they were much more intense and long lasting. Using Mondays as a countdown for the first year, when the pain would lessen, and the grief would be easier to bear and be less consuming. Fifty-two Mondays. Yes, I could do that, feeling a little hope rise in my chest. It seemed as though I was reverting back to my childhood where my survival techniques as a child became my survival techniques as a widow.

Promptly it evolved into an obsession with Mondays, and I was powerless to control it. In the first few months I would watch the clock tick hour by hour. As it got closer to eight thirty-four, the time when Hannah screamed, my body would have a visceral reaction and would cause those body sensations to escalate instantaneously. It would start with a panicked feeling and the shakes would initiate. My heart would begin beating wildly and the movie reel would start to play repeatedly from the moment I saw him on the floor of his shop until we as a family walked out of the hospital leaving one of our own behind. I tried with all my might to push it away and I could  not do it. It was relentless, horrific, and during these moments, I doubted my ability to survive this mental torture. To make it worse, when I would try to sleep at night the movie reel continued making me unable to sleep or when I did, I was plagued with nightmares and the very real feeling of ribs cracking under my hands.

Those rare times when I was too exhausted or too sad to look at the clock, there were those moments where I would feel suddenly overwhelmed with anxiety, my hands would shake, I would start to sweat, and the fight or flight moments would consume me. I would look at the clock and sure enough it was 834pm. My body remembered even if I hadn’t. I never got a break from it; I couldn’t seem to escape it and it was maddening.

They say time heals all wounds and I would say it’s true. While it may never heal the pain within our grief, it does remove some of those awful feelings and sensations that accompany such a profound loss. When Monday rolled around, I would obsess about the day. I would try to recollect what we did that morning. Was it our typical chat over coffee before we started our day of working outside? I had taken our dog Maizie to the vet to see if she was pregnant around three pm. She wasn’t and I was devastated. When I pulled up in the driveway Rick and Hannah were taking a break and drinking a beer. I threw myself onto his lap, hugging his neck as I sobbed to him that Maizie wasn’t having puppies. He held me while I cried, then started teasing me for crying about it to begin with.

All the while gently wiping my tears he said, “Babe. It’s fine, she’ll have puppies eventually. Things happen for a reason.” Then he gave me a quick kiss and with that he and Hannah went back to working in the dog runs cutting the overgrown brambles and bushes in the drizzle of Texas. We went to dinner that night and while I can’t remember what I ate no matter how hard I try, I can remember exactly what he ate. His favorite meal. Steak medium rare, baked potato, and sauteed mushrooms on his steak. I can recall how much he enjoyed that meal, none of us knew it would be his last. It’s one of those strange things that give me comfort to know he thoroughly enjoyed his last meal.

This game with the clock continued week after week with me trying to memorize exactly what that day looked like all while trying to navigate the other layers that complicate grief and mourning. And every Monday, as the evening drew closer, my heart would race, and the unrelenting movie reel would begin. I would sob for the ending of our epic love story and the sheer trauma of it all. Much to my surprise this went on way longer than a year. According to my Facebook posts it took seventeen months! I’m glad I didn’t know.

What I did notice over time was that things slowly healed and were less raw, even while the obsession with Mondays continued, even if I would forget about the day of the week, my body would remind me. I would try to figure out what was bothering me. One look at the day of the week and I understood immediately why my body was freaking out. Thankfully, month after month it got easier and less overwhelming. In the beginning I never missed looking at the clock at precisely eight thirty-four, but as time marched forward, I would miss the time once in a while. I took it as a sign of healing. A glimmer of hope soon followed.

As the months went on, it became more common for me to not even notice the time, it would fly on by without me even noticing. I found these moments contradictory. On one hand I knew it meant I was healing and yet on the other hand was terrified, it meant I was forgetting him already. That would send me into a different spiral of anxiety and despair. There was always something to send me into a spiral. It made me weary. Hopelessness would settle into my bones as it felt unrelenting. I needed a break from it all.

Ever so slowly, bits and pieces of that Monday faded away. I recognized it as healing. But the unreasonable fear lingered that somehow, I would forget about the love Rick and I shared or that in some way not torturing myself with the time on Mondays was a dishonor to his  memory. Then, I would have to work through that piece until I felt resolved about it. I felt as if I was on this constant journey of learning, healing, and understanding myself within grief and I wasn’t really a fan of it. It was too much work and was all too painful. I frequently doubted my ability to cope much longer.

It has been almost thirty-two months since that fateful  night and while a lot of those obsessive behaviors with time and Mondays have subsided, I continue to learn new things about myself and grief as each “layer” carried with it its unique challenges. I rarely think of Mondays in terms of a countdown on the clock anymore. Which frankly is a relief, that truly was awful. I do continue to remember the twenty fourth, or dare I say my body remembers. It’s the same as Mondays were. Those visceral reactions start creeping in or I might wake up and find myself taking deep breaths over and over to calm my flight or fight before I realize the day. For some reason, it’s comforting when I can pinpoint the reason for certain feelings. It helps me feel like it is somehow more manageable when I have a reason for why I feel as I do because so often in my experience, there is no rhyme or reason. It just is. Having no ability to control when grief shows up  has been a tough thing for me to come to terms with, it’s so inconvenient.

I will close with another shocking piece that I knew nothing about. The grief and missing him doesn’t “magically” get easier at the one-year mark. While I understood that on a deeper level, I was sorely unprepared for it to still be as painful as the night he died. In fact, this second year has in many ways been harder. I thought a lot about why this may be. While I think it’s different for all of us, for me I was numb, heartbroken, and holding on by a thread during that first year. I was unable to process all that I was experiencing. I think it’s possible I disassociated when it was too painful and I needed to protect myself, as I had learned to do as a little girl. In turn, my grief fog was heavy. I was simply surviving.

Towards the end of the first year, I finally came to accept that he was gone and never coming back. That is what sent me into my very first deep depression. Acceptance. That is when the real work began. Starting with navigating my new life without him in it when I still wasn’t sure I wanted to. The numbness lifts and the stark reality sets in. I am alone. He is never coming back. Everything that was part of my everyday mundane life with him has changed. Each change was a reminder how deeply my life was interwoven with his and how I was impacted by his death. Each change was painful until it wasn’t. Then, another change would come up. It was a constant feeling like the Universe was reminding me Rick was gone, as if I could ever forget. A new emotion arose from the ashes, though I hadn’t felt this feeling since I was a little girl, and it was just as unsettling for me as an adult.

Fear.