i was mourning after you
realizing why my grief still flows
People who have experienced grief will tell you it comes in waves. One day you’ll be fine, having reached the acceptance stage, and the next day you’re falling apart and feel like you have to start those stages all over again. It’s a never ending process that can sometimes define your life.
I have been grieving my marriage and 14 year relationship for almost three years now. I go through phases where I’m doing great. I’ll go days or weeks without thinking of him or the damage he caused me. And then a little thing - seeing someone who looks like him, a song lyric, finding some of his belongings in the back of the closet - will set me off and it’s like trying to climb back up a children’s playground slide, scrambling up the incline before you unwillingly slide back down again. One step forward, two steps back.
The triggers come less often, and some things that used to be triggers don’t bother me anymore. I can listen to the songs we shared, I can make the meals he used to love without breaking down. Sometimes I even laugh at the absurdity of it all. But when those trigger hit, they hit hard, and I end up feeling weepy and sad and lonely.
Yesterday I was listening to Manchester Orchestra’s “The Silence” while folding clothes, just absentmindedly singing the words I’ve sung a hundred times before. But this time the words seemed to echo in my head, bouncing around my brain then making their way to my heart where they rattled around, all sharp and prickly, causing it to hurt. Andy Hull sings about mourning, about not being needed, about losing his shape and feeling helpless. And it hits me, there and then, three years later: my grief lingers because I let him make me feel worthless. Unworthy of his love, unworthy of his affection, undeserving of happiness. Without him, I have nowhere to put the love in my heart. I have become someone other than who I was when our marriage was good. I was a partner, an equal. I was loved, until I wasn’t.
I could spend days thinking about why he stopped loving me, or if he ever really did. I could spend a lifetime going over everything I did, trying to find clues as to why he considered me unworthy of his love anymore. How did I fail? What did I do wrong? Is it impossible for someone to fully love me? I did spend a few hours yesterday thinking about all this, continuing to grieve not only my marriage, but my belief that I deserve love. In that moment I felt an incredible sense of self pity. I thought of the new Sufjan Stevens song “Will Anybody Ever Love Me” and cried. Not an ugly cry, not a sobbing cry, just some tears streaming down my face and an ache in my heart that wouldn’t give up.
I’ll get over some aspects of being hurt, abandoned, discarded. I’ll get over loving him as much as I’ll get over hating him. I’ll get over the fourteen years of what I thought was a partnership. But I will never get over him making me feel unloved. That stays with you. It eats at you. It makes you see yourself in ways that others can’t see.
My sister texted me to tell me that Todd failed me; that it’s not that I was unloved, but that he couldn’t love me in the way I deserved. He just didn’t have it in him, he was too self centered. Now I have to really dig deep to find a place in my heart, in my soul, where I believe I deserve love. Because that’s what he did to me. He took my belief that I am worthy and squeezed that belief out of me during the last year of our marriage. For that I resent him. Not for anything else. Not for leaving me so suddenly, not for never talking to me about being unhappy, not for the lies he told near the end, the way he abandoned me when I needed someone to take care of me after years of me taking care of him through his recovery and before, not for how he cleaned out his belongings while I was away without saying a word to me about it. No, I resent him for making me loathe myself, for making me feel worthless, for telling me I don’t deserve his love in so many words and actions.
Maybe I’ll never be loved in a romantic way again. Lord knows I am not trying to find someone else, not while I am finding contentment in being alone. Maybe I’ll finally get myself to realize that this was all on him, not me. And when I do eventually figure this out (thank you, therapy), when I get to that point where I am willing to let him take the blame for not loving me anymore, I can stop grieving.
But you, amplified in the silence
Justified in the way you make me bruise
Magnified in the science
Anatomically proved that you don't need me
Why do I desire the space?
I was mourning after you
I was lost and lost my shape
There was nothing I could do
I don't want to waste away
It was all I gave to you