Saturday, May 17, 2008

wow.

Late last night, I came across this post. I have been following this woman's story for the last few weeks and have been amazed at her writing clarity and the honesty with which she writes. She's four months or so ahead of me in the learning experience of grief. I know she says that this is all new to her, but she has been a source of comfort and understanding in the last little while that I haven't been able to find elsewhere. She knows how it feels. She lives it like I do. I know we're not the same, I know our experiences are different...but my heart hears what she says and weeps with her....and understands. With her recent post, I feel like standing on my chair and yelling, 'Yeah!! That's right! You go!' (Even though the 'you go' part makes me feeling ridiculous, I didn't know how to express it another way....)
I think I need to find a support group for young widows. I am so not negating the pain that older widows feel as well. I just need to find someone else who can understand the feelings that go along with raising very small children when the love of their life is dead. I need to hear how they are coping and how they explain to their little ones what is happening. My friends and family are fabulous and they all try and I so appreciate it....but I need to find someone who truly knows. Someone who I know does not judge how I am dealing with this nightmare...Someone who knows that it is hard to remember to brush my teeth sometimes and that feeding the kids scrambled eggs for dinner is coping. Someone who doesn't think that I am taking Jeff's death too hard.

I am finding myself grieving for the fact that I didn't get to say 'good-bye' to my love. It is a blessing that he went so fast...for him. I am so glad that he didn't struggle with a long battle against some awful disease....but for me and the kids, I wish we had even had a few minutes...a day or a week, to say "I love you and goodbye." I wish the kids would have been able to see him in a different state. I hate how seemingly violent the end was. It wasn't calm and horribly sad. It was fraught with terror and screaming. I didn't get to say goodbye. I didn't get to hold his hand. He died in my arms but it wasn't like in the movies. I get taken back to those moments so many times a day. I see it all over again and again. I try to block them out but they seep around the corners of other thoughts.

4 comments:

World Wide Alternative said...

Ah. Fabulous.
I'm so glad you feel understood...Xxx

Rachael said...

This link was sent to me by an Etsy seller to pass on to you - I didn't want to 'shove it' on you earlier...

http://www.ywbb.org

I am not sure what it is like or whether you will find it useful but it may be worth a look. xxx

Anonymous said...

It's amazing how much of a difference it makes to be able to "talk" to someone else who has been there. Friends and family can be so very supportive, but no one else can touch us the way someone else who has been through something similar can....

Candice said...

I'm a stranger, but I stumbled across your blog a couple of days ago from geePatty's...but I have no idea how I stumbled onto hers last week.

I'm a young widow too--my husband died almost three years ago, in a bicycle crash during an organized race. It came out of nowhere--we'd only been married 19 months and our baby girl was 10 months old; I was 27 and my husband 28--and I was (and still am) totally devastated by it. I read some of your grief- and Jeff-related posts and they're echoes of things I said, felt, and thought in the first months (and even longer) after Charley died. So if you hear yourself if what you read what Patty is writing, know that other young widows (or at least me) hear it too.

I mentioned it in a comment on Patty's blog too and I see Rach here mentioned it to you, but the Young Widow Bulletin Board (at http://www.ywbb.org) was a PHENOMENAL help to me. I found it ~6 weeks after my husband died, and it helped so much to hear people experiencing this tragedy right alongside me. I also found a local young widowed support group in my area, and it's been even more phenomenal and helpful. So if you can find one, by all means, it's helped me so very, very much.

I started writing a blog about 2 months ago because I just needed to process all the grief crap in an external forum (separate from the journal I kept the first 1-2 years after Charley died), and from it I've run across other widows--and widowers--who are also writing blogs about their experiences. I'm so thankful for it. If you want to check out my blog, you'll see a list of some other blogs by young widows and widowers. They're not all equally useful (or at least not to me) but maybe something will spark you. Other than you and Patty, there's one, a widower, who's only about 2 months out from his wife's death 1 day after childbirth. He blogs everyday, it seems, and it may help you to read someone else right in the thick of it. His blog is at http://www.mattlogelin.com/. I don't know if my blog will be helpful to you or not, since I'm quite a bit farther out (at almost 3 years), but if nothing else, know that I've struggled with the same things you are.

Hang in there, and be gentle with yourself.

Candice