Grief Is Not What You Think: Happiness Can Happen

Grief is not linear. It is not a connect-the-dot picture where the end result is clearly comprehensible.

Grief is not a map that you easily follow by reaching marked destinations.

There are so many things that grief isn’t.

Through my life experiences and especially the loss of my son, I’m starting to truly understand what grief is.

Have you ever given a one-year-old a box of crayons and a color-by-number page? I encourage you to try it. Here is what you might learn: that one-year-old might get lucky and choose the correctly matched color and number for one section, but that’s it.

The colors will be different from the directions, the numbers and colors definitely won’t match according to the key, there will be scribbles, and the defining borders will be blurred.

It is completely unpredictable, just like grief.

Before I resided permanently in the bereaved parent world, I thought constant sadness had to be present in grief.

I didn’t understand how a person could smile, laugh, be genuinely content and still grieving. You’re supposed to be sad.

You should be crying all of the time. Putting one foot in front of the other shouldn’t be possible.

Those were the ideas I had about grief before it became part of my everyday life.

I became those ideas personified for months after the death of my second son.  Sadness consumed me.

It physically hurt as I would think about him, write about or to him, and talk about him. I was great at putting on a show for the rest of the world, or so I thought.

I cried over everything and sometimes cried over nothing. My eyes hurt from all of that work they were doing. Pillowcases were drenched in my grief.

During my leave from work, following his death, simple, mindless tasks seemed daunting.

How was I going to do this for the rest of my life?

So This is Life After Loss

The simple answer is that I wouldn’t live that way my whole life.

The reality is that the answer to this question isn’t simple. It’s confusing, yet liberating. On the 18th of August, he would be 4.

In four years, I’ve cried more tears than I knew the human body could produce. I have sat silently in a darkened living room numbed with sadness counting the minutes until the sun came back up.

I have yelled in anger at the top of my lungs in hopes that someone could hear me and perhaps fix it.

These four years have also been filled with smiles, not just the fake ones you flash to get people to leave you alone. I’ve shared genuine smiles, too.

When my guilt over being happy first started to fade, I found my smile again. I deserve that. My family deserves that.

And although Wyatt isn’t with us, he deserves that. Even though I miss him, I smile when I think, write, and talk about him.

I even laugh and crack jokes sometimes. Laughter can rejuvenate the soul, in my opinion.

I’m sure Wyatt would crack himself up, just like his brothers do.

You Will Laugh Again

I am content and at peace with where I am on this journey.

I am proudly hanging up that messy, unexpected color-by-number page on my refrigerator of life.

Tears of sadness are fewer than they’ve been in a long while. Happiness and grief coexist in my heart.

This will be the first year that his day is more of a celebration than a day of sorrow.

Grief is a fickle thing. Tomorrow is a new day and new days aren’t always good, but they can be.

I will always miss Wyatt; that will never change. I know that I can miss the life he would have had and still enjoy the life in front of me.

Four years ago, I wouldn’t have believed someone if they told me that all of this was possible.

Grief is not linear. There will be ups and downs.

The path can and will change without any warning.

Being happy does not mean you love or miss your child any less.

You’re living for them and that’s the greatest love of all.