Good grief!
Grief is a weird thing, right? It’s this intense, overwhelming emotion that we cary with us when something horrible happens. Sometimes you feel like it will never go away, and sometimes you let it overcome your world because that’s the only logical way to handle grief it seems.
In the last 4 years, I have known a lot of grief. I have grieved the loss of my sister, the loss of an aunt for my daughter and future children. I have grieved my delivery experience, and I have grieved for my child’s diagnosis and treatment often. There are a lot of ways I handled my grief, and not many of them were very healthy.
Anger is one emotion that stuck around for a long time. I was angry that my sister was taken from me, angry that none of her healthcare providers caught her aneurysm or her symptoms. I was angry that my daughter would never know her aunt here on earth and I was so angry with myself for fighting with Loren the last year she was alive before I got married. So stupid! I was angry with Ben, not that it was his fault she died, but angry that nothing in his world changed, that he didn’t have this hurt that I was dealing with and I was jealous of that. The hardest part was losing the support of having a sister. Losing someone to call the first time I took a pregnancy test, the first time I felt my baby move. There are certain things that only a sister can understand and losing that still is a struggle for me today.
If you know me at all, I don’t have a huge group of close friends- and that’s okay, I prefer it like that. It’s less drama, you know? Anyway, Loren was the person I would call if I needed someone to be mad with me. It didn’t matter if she was in the best mood, if I called her mad her response would be “Who am I yelling at?” without question. Knowing the kind of aunt she was to her best friend’s son makes me happy she had that experience but sad because she would have been fantastic with Brooklyn too. There would have been Princess parties, Disney trips, or maybe she would’ve moved home to be closer to us. Don’t get me wrong, we went through some shit, and I’ll regret it until I die but she would have been an amazing Auntie Doon.
As time has clearly gone on, fear and anxiety are other emotions that regularly enter the picture for me. If you don’t know, when I delivered Brooklyn, I was in labor for 22 hours, pushed for 2.5 hours and had a postpartum hemorrhage that required an emergency D and C and later found out my cervix ripped. I grieve this labor and delivery because it isn’t how I wanted it to be. I was stuck in a bed for 22 hours and it seemed that all of my autonomy was gone. I couldn’t get up and move around, I couldn’t eat- which goes against ACOG’s recommendations for low-risk pregnancies- and I wish I would have been more educated about labor and delivery going into an induction. I grieve this because I lost the first few hours of Brooklyn’s life and I was devastated. This experience gave me fear about having another child because I was traumatized by the hemorrhage, and anxiety about being away from her because I wasn’t there for her for long after she was born. You carry this tiny human for 40 weeks and they are safe, you don’t have to share them, and all of a sudden, they’re here and you watch a piece of your heart move around on the outside of your body. It. Is. Wild! To say this experience didn’t cause me lasting fear and anxiety would be a lie. Yes, I have fear about having more kids because of this experience. Yes I worry about if another birth would be as traumatic, and I worry about how, and where I would deliver and if I would find a provider/ hospital that aligns with my desires for another birth. But I love being a mom and can’t help but feel like Brooklyn needs a sibling…but it is TERRIFYING.
Uncertainty isn’t necessarily a stage of grief…someone has died, and unfortunately, you’re certain they’re not coming back. I think the unknown provides a lot of fear and anxiety, overprotectiveness and stress. When Brooklyn was diagnosed with cancer, there were so many unknowns. Would she survive the surgeries needed to remove the tumor. What would chemotherapy do to her tiny body. What kind of delays would she have, if any. SOOO many unknowns- and I think any parent of a child who has gone through this journey like we have, can tell you that every three moths, or how ever often scans are, the anxiety and fear of the unknown never goes away.I cried the majority of the time we were in the PICU, most of the time on the Oncology floor and I for sure cried every time Brooklyn got her lovenox injections because of all of the unknowns.
I’m pretty sure that for the first two cycles of Brooklyn’s treatment, I cried when she got chemo, when she went for her scans and when she got her port. I didn’t know how Brooklyn would handle the chemo, if she would be sick often, and when the breaks in her cycles came, I cried again knowing that she would have to do it again and worrying about the outcomes of her scans.
This grief was different because we were grieving the lost infancy for Brooklyn. We grieved “normal” milestones, activities that didn’t involve being hooked up to an IV pole, and her receiving drugs that would make her feel like shit. I grieved for her, but also for me and Ben, feeling the incredible guilt that came with consenting to the treatment, knowing that these drugs that would make her sick, would also help save her life. It’s a wild thing to have to live with- not knowing what caused her tumor, wondering if it was something I had or hadn’t done during pregnancy, whether I was exposed to something that impacted her development and the growth of the tumor.
My takeaway, I think would be this. Grief doesn’t shrink. Grief sticks with you, but not the people around you and that’s okay. It’s okay to be sad but as time goes on, we learn to carry grief differently. It’s no longer this consuming, ever present emotion of tears constantly streaming down your face. It’s this weird thing that feels like you’re handling but that can creep up and smack you right in the face. Most days, I do okay and while I think abut my sister every day, I don’t cry every day. Things that make this grief noticeable are listening to others being able to have conversations with their sister, the ability to get together with their sister and I don’t have that. Sometimes I have flashbacks from our time in the hospital and certain smells will remind me of our time spend there…and especially when we go to the hospital for appointments, a bit of anxiety creeps up even though we aren’t going for pokes or chemo. Learning that this is a part of our story and sharing when the days are hard helps with the realization that we aren’t alone. My parents and brother still grieve for my sister. My husband lost the same milestones for Brooklyn that I did. We acknowledge that the grief is there, and always will be but we have learned that carrying the grief makes all of the difference.
I like to have a cry sometimes, and then I pick that shit up , stick it in my pocket and carry on.
We have known grief, but have more blessings to count than we have fingers. We are fearfully and wonderfully brave.
Fearfully and Wonderfully Brave 