Battling Grief
waiting for the acceptance to stick
I’ve been through all the stages of grief as far as the end of my marriage goes. I didn’t go through them in any particular order; they came and went and came back again and stayed a while. I thought once I reached acceptance that would be it, I’d be done with the grieving and I could get on with my life.
But that’s not the way it works. Grief does not happen in a straight line, it does not happen in an orderly fashion, and it certainly does not dissipate once you accept that what you’ve had is gone.
I’ve had a hard time accepting my emotions as part of a grieving process. Grief is for death, I thought. I felt like I was co-opting a widow’s experience by claiming to be grieving. But my therapist and other people assured me that what I was feeling was indeed grief and the more I dove into my feelings, the more it felt like something in my life certainly died.
There’s been a lot of reminiscing on my part lately, and not the good kind. I’ve been looking back at the last year or so of my marriage and realizing that things were not as great as I forced myself to believe. The pandemic definitely did a number on us. The isolation, the depression, the anxiety all played roles in turning our marriage from a somewhat cozy coupling into a quiet, lonely relationship. I think about it now and I can see it, I can see the way we both settled into our pandemic personas. Me, sad, anxious, quiet, happy to sit in my corner on the couch and bury myself in a hockey game or whatever had gained my interest on my laptop. Him, also quiet, reserved, his boisterous self depleted of energy, happy to go to AA meetings every single night, coming home long after I was in bed.
But what was before that? Before that was a surface happiness. Before that were vacations and dinners out and laughter. Before that was an intimacy we somehow lost. Before that there was a feeling of unity, of togetherness. Even when he was drinking, when things felt like they were at the bottom, there was an unwritten pact we had that we were in this together, that we could overcome anything. And I guess that’s what I’m grieving. The good times, the laughter, the togetherness. That part of us died last year, and it died so gradually, so quietly that I didn’t realize we were in death throes until he sat on the couch and asked me for a separation. When he did, my mind immediately went to all the good we would be leaving behind; I was ignoring the last year or so of silence.
I’m mourning what we had, what we lost, and I wonder if that’s being fair to myself, to sit here and constantly grieve things that no longer were. But grief holds onto you, it digs its claws into your heart and soul and refuses to let go once it works its way in there. There is no reasoning with it, no politely asking it to leave. I wonder how long I will keep this up for, pining for things that I’ll never get back, being sad and morose about a life we no longer had.
It’s better this way and I know it. But that doesn’t keep the grief from welling up, from making me cry in the middle of a workday when I hear a certain song, from keeping me up in the middle of the night thinking about what I could have done differently. I’ve been through it all: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, acceptance. I’ve gone round and round on them, back and forth, hardly being able to catch my breath as the stages changed. I’ve been caught off guard by the anger and knocked out cold by the depression. I’m tired of this. It’s been almost a year. When does it stop being so difficult? When does the acceptance stage really take hold, when can I move on?
There are days I’m really ok. There are days when I’m happy and thriving and feeling like I can get on with my life. Then I’ll be hit with a memory of the times we were good together, I’ll be thrown into fourteen years worth of memories and I’m back to square one. Grief is not linear, people tell me. It is not kind, it is not careful with you, it is not reasonable. But it’s there and I hope one day the acceptance can stick.