Trauma, Triggers, and Tears.

In "This Widow Life" of mine, I have met many other widows. We are all going through the same loss, but how our loss happened is not the same. Some lost their husband from a car accident, suicide, heart attack, cancer. I think that there are different traumas associated with the different losses. I am not saying that any of them are worse than the other. They are all horrible, and losing your spouse is trauma enough, no matter how it happens. We deal with our grief, and the waves of it. The ups and downs, the emotion, the tears. There is no book that says "This is what to do when you lose your husband" or "This is how to live after he is gone" We navigate This Widow Life as best we can.

Jerry had liver and bile duct cancer. Stage 4....So his battle was swift and he died 8 weeks after diagnosis. Things happened so quickly in those few months especially the last 11 days. When he was admitted to the hospital on 2/9/17 I had no idea he would be gone by 11 days later. I knew he was not going to survive this cancer, we were told that, but I never thought I would only have 2 months. There is trauma #1 of probably 1,354 things that haunt me daily. There many things that I struggle with in my head everyday, and some days it feels like a battle of whether I cry about going through all of that, or just the fact that he is gone. It feels like I can accept that he is gone, but the trauma stays with me. There are things that I am just starting to remember from taking care of him, or when he went in the hospital. They come to my mind and it brings me back and I can not stop it from bringing me to my knees.  I obsess over the details of what happened and every moment before he died. I have flashbacks, and thoughts that I can't get out of my head. I am still afraid of many things that have to do with a hospital, and elevators.

I feel like I cant concentrate, I cant sleep, I blank out in mid sentence, I have anxiety attacks, I am stressed, and I cant get the thoughts out of my head. This is not a daily thing as it was in the early months. I think when it was something that I felt daily in the beginning that I accepted it as grief in the early stages. But now? I will be fine for weeks, and then BAM! All of those things hit me at once and I cant process it. The ups and downs of grief can feel crippling sometimes.

Then there are Triggers. I was cleaning out my entertainment center yesterday because I was selling it. There are a pile of framed pictures from Jerrys memorial in there so of course I looked at them all. I came across this green spiral notebook we had gotten from "Phil's Friends" it was part of a care package from a group that sends free items to people going through cancer and getting treatment. They send a hand knitted blanket, water bottle, crosswords, notebooks and a few other things. Then occasionally you get a personalized handmade card made by a child. I still get these. I never let them know that Jerry is gone.

I opened the notebook and realized what it was. How could I forget? I wrote in this book about 6 times a day. It was where I logged Jerry's vitals each day. Blood pressure, Temp, O2 level, Heart rate, What he ate and how he felt. I started right before Chemo treatment and my last entry was a day before we went to the hospital. I sat there with all this stuff around me from the entertainment center and I just wanted to sit and read every entry, every number. It brought me back to the when I was taking these. Jerry would not get up much, but he would sit up on and swing his legs on the edge of the bed. I bought him a stool so he could keep his feet propped there and that was about as much as he wanted to do. I would pull out the thermometer, and BP cuff and be Nurse Danielle. Morning, afternoons, evenings, and in the middle of the night when he would wake up in pain or in a pool of sweat on soaked sheets. As I read each entry in the notebook, some of the moments of conversation between him and I came back. Sometimes I would do this in silence, every one in a while he would crack a joke. I remembered that this was when I would decide how much pain medicine to give him and try to convince him to eat or drink, which was always a battle. These moments of me standing in front of him while I took these vitals, was when we had most of our conversations. I would ask the questions I needed to, talk about the day, and then let him rest after that. This must have triggered something else because that night (last night) I had a dream that I was listening for his last breaths and feeling his chest for a heartbeat and It was so vivid. I woke up in a sweat, and tried to stay awake long enough so that my mind was distracted enough not to fall back asleep and fall back into the same dream. It brings me back to those moments in the hospital, his last moments, his last breath. Triggers SUCK!

When I have these days, or moments they stay with me for a few days and it takes some time to get back into the groove of my life. I have work,  kids to raise, bills to pay...I just don't have time to grieve and cry. When this happens I feel like it throws me backwards and hinders the progress I am making. I never asked for this, and I have worked so hard to keep it together this last year and a half. I talk about my grief, I have been to groups, classes, workshops, blogged, and see a counselor. Then life will feel ok again, I am busy, smiling, happy and moving forward. Then BAM! there it is again. It feels like Jerry is out there saying, "Hey! What about me! Did you forget about me? Do you still think about me?"  Then I feel guilty for trying to keep my life together and not thinking about my loss for a freaking second. AAHH...This Widow Life, that is just how it goes. Am I grieving enough? Have I said his name enough? Is it ok to smile today?

 To anyone reading this who has lost a spouse,  please know that you are not alone. How we got here might be different, how we grieve, and grow might not all be the same but we all understand the journey. I am still learning something new about how to live after loss each day. How to deal with the Trauma, Triggers, and Tears.