Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

I think the experience of grieving, both actively and in the recent past (at least for me) has had the added and ongoing result of complicating my ability to analyze my emotional lows and determine their source.  Everyone has ups and downs in life, but when you’ve been grieving for a long enough time, it becomes more difficult to suss out what the problem really is.  I remember how I happy I was the first day I realized that I was out of sorts because the day had been truly and empirically crappy in its own right.  I knew it was a milestone.  I shared it with my grief group, and they understood its importance. I had never been so happy to be crabby; I was healing.

But it’s not always so easy to determine that.  You start with the fact that you’re feeling down, which is where I’ve found myself for the last two weeks, and the last 2 days in particular.  So you make the mental list of what’s going wrong, analyzing each thing to see if that’s what triggered the funk (or you do if you’re me).  Problem is, regardless of what the particular trigger is—current life events, hormones, memories, whatever—once you get to the place where things aren’t going well, and you feel sad, upset, and most of all, sorry for yourself, even if grief wasn’t at the top of the list of triggers this time, it slips in anyway.  So you think, "As if all this isn’t bad enough, A is STILL dead."  I start missing him even more, and it just makes it all worse; at that point, it’s nigh on impossible to figure out where one problem ends and another begins.  And what, under non-grieving circumstances, would’ve just been seen clearly as a bad stretch (or perhaps a depression in the making that needs to be monitored), becomes "Everything sucks, and all I want to do is crawl into bed and stay there."  (I didn’t say it was a logical or mature reaction.)