An Elusive Path Forward

Why is it that an arbitrary date on a calendar can bring so much anxiety? There is no rational, logical reason to fear a date. And yet, today has come like a freight train steadily gaining speed. The simple fact that I have fallen into a habit of only publishing on this site around birth dates and death dates might on its own say quite a bit about how well I am managing in the two years (today) since Rivena’s death.

There is something about losing a child that any parent can relate to. Whether you want to relate or not is another story altogether. For any of you who have supported us over these last couple years, I’m giving you a free pass – you don’t need to feel obligated to read this. I suppose I’m writing this more for those who have lost somebody close and are still trying to find a path forward. I’m writing this to show you that you’re not alone. Even if we don’t know each other, there is something powerful about shared experience, and sometimes just knowing someone else is going through a similar experience can help us all get through.

Today is a day I didn’t want to get out of bed. To be honest, I’m actually a little pissed off to see the sun shining and the mountains west of Denver looking stately as I write this. Based on how I feel, today should be a cold, gray, foggy day. No blue sky. No mountains on the horizon. No sun producing rainbows as it tracks up the wall of our bedroom.

And yet, the sun did in fact rise this morning. This is the hard part about grief, and something I’m yet to be comfortable with. Once you lose somebody, the world goes on. It’s infuriating. It’s unfair. It feels so wrong. And it’s your job to figure out how to get back on board.

For those of us stuck in grief, however, it feels like riding a merry-go-round spinning out of control. We hold on, gripping as best we can for stability. For every fleeting moment of clarity, things in the background begin to blur again, until the blur is all you see. So how do you (meaning me) go about getting things back under control before puking your guts out? I honestly don’t know.

Fake it till you make it

If you’ve been around me over the last few months, my guess is some of this may be surprising. I have tried as best I can to put on the armor every day, and essentially to fake my way through. A friend and respected (but don’t tell him) sports psychologist, Dr. Simon Marshall, talks quite a bit about the concept of ‘fake it till you make it’ when it comes to mindset. I suppose in many ways that’s exactly what I’ve been doing over the last couple years. But faking it on a daily basis gets really hard. It is mentally exhausting to try to be out there in a social setting, making small talk and doing all the things I used to do with others, when all I can think about inside is how much I miss my daughter. It’s almost like you want to go through daily life wearing a sign that says “MY KID DIED” just so others know why you’re not laughing at the same jokes, or why you’re staring blankly off into the distance.

One of the more difficult things for me is simultaneously knowing that we absolutely need to figure out how to find joy in life again but also having no idea how to make that happen. Forcing it is not an option. I’ve read the books talking about the power of choosing to be happy, and for an average person with average life experiences, fine. But for anybody stuck deep in the well of soul-crushing grief, I have to call bullshit… happiness is not a choice. Happiness and joy require the elusive combination of passion, people, circumstances, and the desire to find them. Only when these things organically come together can we begin to move forward.

Permission to move forward

As my therapist has reminded me repeatedly, it’s easy to be in the place of not wanting to find joy. Just as I woke up today and wanted to see gray skies, so it is for many of us dealing with loss of a loved one. It can be so incredibly hard to give ourselves permission to be happy, to allow ourselves small pleasures.

But like I have written before about Rivena, she was her own worst critic. The kindness she extended so many others, including total strangers, was so much more than she would allow for herself. So, if I do anything with this blog, I want to put into words that it is OK to allow ourselves to find happiness again. It is OK to seek out joy in life – to put yourself in the situations that might just let you get a small peak. And believe me, I’m writing this more for my own benefit that anybody else’s… I need to keep reminding myself that I can grieve and continue seeking joy.

And to be fair, there have been minor glimpses here and there. I try as best I can to say yes to requests to do things with others… it’s my own self-imposed way to short-circuit every fiber of my soul wanting to isolate. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to a life-long friend who forced me back onto my skis last year. And to my business partner and training partner who has nudged me to train and start competing in triathlon and running events again. And to my wife, who despite her own overwhelming sense of loss, has been there beside me to help point out the things worth stopping to appreciate. And to my daughter, whose very presence serves to remind me every day what is most important in this life. You get the idea…

Their subtle (and in some cases, not-so-subtle) pushes have helped me begin to find new happiness in the things I always enjoyed before. Every now and then, the thrill of floating through soft powdery turns on a pair of skis, the struggle to reach the top of a difficult climb on a bicycle, or the sense of wonder at a truly gorgeous sunset can shine through all on its own, without being darkened by the clouds of grief. In these rare moments, I can begin to see there is still joy to be found if we are willing to put ourselves in the right situations to find it.

Expanding your experiences

One of the best analogies I’ve heard about losing someone close to you is that they leave a hole in your heat that never goes away. The old remark ‘time heals all wounds’ is again, bullshit (as I have unfortunately told more than a few well-wishers who rattled off the phrase without thinking). Time has the effect of lessening the intensity of the pain, but the pain itself is still very much there. I can honestly say there has not been one of the last 730 days since Rivena’s death that she has not been right at the surface of my thoughts and emotions.

As for that hole in your heart, love and loss are both part of the human condition – the yin and yang of our very existence. If you have been fortunate to have never lost a loved one, the hard truth is that the day will come when you will. It is as inevitable as death itself. The harder you love another, the greater that hole when that person is no longer there. In the case of Rivena, the hole she left in my heart will be there, every bit as large as it is today, until the day I die. I can’t change that… and wouldn’t want to; that hole is the place reserved for the love of my first-born daughter. In order to move forward, I need to learn how to add new life experiences, new memories, and new happiness around it. That’s the challenge I now face every day.

World’s worst club

I so wish our experience were unique. As I’ve told countless others, I would not wish this feeling on anybody else, and I hope like hell that no other parent or loved one ends up knowing this life sentence of grief. But unfortunately, we’ve seen too many other friends face this same kind of pain since losing Rivena. We are now members of a club nobody wants to belong to. On behalf of all of us in this place, if you’ve read this far, please take just a minute after this to tell someone you love them. There is no time like the present to refocus on those who are most important.

Like I said at the outset, the sun came up today despite my deepest desires to have a dark day. The path ahead may not be obvious, but it has to be there. Until someone tells me otherwise, the only thing I know to do is keep loving those around me and keep forcing myself into situations that might just offer up some of those chances to find new organic happiness. To keep searching for an elusive path forward. Yin and yang. Life and death. Love and grief.

 

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