There are bad days, there are dreadful days, and – as therapist Conal Healy discovered – there are days when you are asked to imagine the unimaginable.
Did you ever have one of those day when you had to: Think the unthinkable, ask the unaskable and speak the unspeakable? It happened to me with my two children.
I had just been told their mother, Anna (my wife of more than 30 years) had terminal cancer. The worst type. The teams of doctors said she had days to live, not weeks, months or years. Days.
And we, her family, had to make some big decisions.
It was one of the hardest conversations of my life – I had to ask my two children how they wanted their mother to die.
That day we thought the unthinkable, asked the unaskable and spoke the unspeakable. That day we found the courage to have that conversation. We found a way through. We talked. There would be no resuscitation, Anna would pass peacefully.
We decided. We kept going forward.
Anna died six months later, in her sleep.
***
The labels attached to me changed when Anna died: Husband to widower, depression to grief, binge eating became comfort food.
I ate too much junk. Drank too much cheap red wine.
Was accused of wallowing in my misery. Was asked if I was suicidal.
Like an old telephone, I took my mind off the hook and went a little crazy.
The meds helped, at the beginning.
***
I kept going. Battled through grief and loss.
Just kept going forward.
Words spewed into my journals, revealing the secrets I had kept hidden from myself for decades.
Like an old telephone, I took my mind off the hook and went a little crazy.
Conal Healy, Grief Survivor
My mind became a Rubik cube – I couldn’t tell which part of my brain was telling me a truth. Or a truth that would ease the deep pain I was enduring.
Just kept going forward. Step-by-step on God-forsaken Grief Road. Ultimately, it is a road you have to walk yourself.
People will come, give you food, water, walk with you for part of the way … but you are the one walking the path that stretches to the farthest horizon.
Over time, I learned to be resilient. I learned how to cope.
Learned to stop looking at the rutted route that lay before me and begin to see the patches of blue sky that broke through the storm clouds that hung overhead.
I began to see the dappled light that played across the blasted heathland that lay on either side of Grief Road.
How long does Grief/Loss end? Hard to tell.
When the Good Days outnumber the Bad Days?
When the person you lost stops turned up in your dreams/nightmares?
When you no longer cry when it’s their birthday? Anniversary?
Me? I think it’s when you let them go … and then welcome them back into your life.
- Want to know more? Follow Conal Healy’s Diary of a Grieving Husband blog – coming soon to the Wisdom with Whiskers website.
