Yet, life continues on, and many good things happen in the midst of our sadness.
Jaal's proposal was accepted to join the Grand Canyon two week rafting trip the first two weeks of spring quarter. He will go with his two professors and undertake a research project while on the trip.
Tony and I got a used TaB little travel trailer we can pull with our car so we can get away for the weekend in cold, rainy weather, like today.
My school was recognized for its excellence in instructional improvement, and we will be videotaped, with interviews and classroom videos to showcase our progress to have highly effective classroom instruction throughout the school. The years of work are paying off.
On the other hand, our car keeps having trouble and needing major repair, I have my fourth cold since July, our house sits on the market with no visitors and declining property values, we remain unsure about what we want to do, or will be able to do, in our future and when something good happens it still feels completely crappy. So, it's not all going smoothly.
What I've been thinking about the last few days is how when something good happens, it seems as though I will increase my sadness to balance the happy thing. So, if one day something good happens, that night, or the next night I will cry for longer. I'm not sure if it is that Lev is missing out on it, or that it seems unfair for anything good to happen when Lev is gone, or is it a cognitive dissonance, an imbalance I feel of such sadness mixed with the good thing that my emotions are just confused.
The image that came to me this weekend is of a gallon bucket on sadness that I am always carrying within me. It is full of grief, and has not diminished. When I add tiny drops of happiness, some sadness washes over the sides, bathing me in grief.
Like if I have a nice piece of chocolate cake, it is delicious, and I enjoy it. Then I think about Lev not being able to have any and I am sadder than before I ate the piece of cake. Net negative cake experience, hence weight loss.
What I can now imagine in the future, and I could not before, is an image of exchanging my gallon bucket of grief for a five gallon bucket. It would contain my gallon of grief, but have room to add happiness to it without needing to overflow with grief. I don't think the grief will ever really diminish, but I think I will be able to add other feelings and experiences to it. Before I could not imagine this, even though I read about it and heard other people talk about learning to live with the grief. Learning to live with the loss, learning to be the new person that I am, one that will always be sad, and filled with grief yet allow room for good things, too. I recognize that I have not allowed that space yet, and I am not ready to, but I can imagine it, eventually.
For now, I have accomplished the act of seeming fairly normal to others, which is a good survival instinct, and lets me get through the days. I recognize that I am not ready to let myself be happy, and I have accepted that. I eagerly await the relief of sleep at the end of each day.
I'm not sure how people continue on, carrying around this much sadness, but as I continue to accomplish it day by day, the question answers itself. You just do.
Grief is just missing someone a lot and understanding that it can't be fixed.
