It’s funny how grief operates.
New grief can stir the embers of pain from previous loss.
I thought about that a lot yesterday as it was my husband’s birthday. He would be 89 had he not died in 2013.
As anyone who has experienced significant loss knows, grief never ends.
There’s no closure.
There is no getting over it.
There is simply learning to live with it.
Some years the anniversary of my husband’s birthday isn’t extremely difficult for me.
Which is why I was surprised most of yesterday morning when I was frequently getting misty eyed and had that clutch of discomfort inside. The pain of grief shouldn’t be this intense after so many years. Should it?
After considering that question throughout the day yesterday, I think I figured out the reason.
Please bear with me as you continue to read. You may wonder why I’m including this history of some of our pets, but it does have relevance.
It really does.
Three weeks ago, my kitty, Lily, went over the Rainbow Bridge, and her loss was, and still is, incredibly tough. Primarily because Lily was my husband’s cat.
Years ago, we lived out in the country and eventually grew weary of feeding our inside/outside cats to coyotes. So we decided we should have indoor kitties only.
First, we adopted two black kitties, Harry and Hermione. Harry was Carl’s cat and Hermione was mine.
The next year, Lily and Sammy came to our house from the same rescue organization as the other cats. This time Carl got the girl and Sammy was mine.
At the time, we also had a dog, Poppy. She was Carl’s dog, even though I spent more time working out on the property with her then he did.
But she was still his dog. She’d nap by his chair in the living room, and sometimes stand up to put her head on his knee for some ear scratching.
Poppy’s job – all Australian Shepherds need a job – was retrieving tennis balls. Carl would toss one from the front deck so she could dart like a bullet, grab it up, and bring it back, dropping it at his feet with a happy dog smile.
A few years after Carl died, I had to move from our country home to the city, and I brought the menagerie of pets with me. Then shortly after the move, Poppy suddenly got sick and went over the rainbow bridge.
My emotions were already in turmoil because of having to leave a place I’d loved, and one that my husband enjoyed so much. That made having to say goodbye to Poppy brutal.
I had a reprieve from loss for about a year and a half, then Harry and Sammy joined Poppy in that place wherever it is that our fur friends go after they die.
We pet lovers always hope it is a good place.
I still had Hermione and Lily for a couple more years before Hermione got seriously ill and had to be put to sleep.
Shortly after that, I moved again, and Lily came with me. She lived almost another year until that day three weeks ago.
When she was gone, that was the last of the pets I shared with my husband, and yesterday I realized that losing her was opening old wounds. Wounds that were making that birthday anniversary of my husbands a little harder to bear this year.
Which brings me now to the reason I wrote about all those pets
Not only is grief never ending, it’s also complicated and there can be a compounding effect when bereavement piles up.
We grieve the loss of people, pets, jobs, homes, good health, and so many other things, and when the losses come relatively close together there’s no recovery time. We don’t get a break to process the emotional impact before the next loss hits.
That’s why after losing my father and then my husband within a few years of each other, I prayed fervently that my mother who was ill would hang in at least a year.
She did not, so there was another big blow to my heart and my emotions that preceded losing beloved pets and homes.
When I talked to the counselor I was seeing a few months ago, she pointed out how all the losses I experienced in a period of ten years – people, homes, animals, health – fit that description of compounded grief. Feelings from earlier losses can mix with the new ones, making the overall pain much heavier and harder to untangle.
That reminded me of something that Hannah Siller, a counselor and life coach at Serene Life Consulting once posted on social media that grief doesn’t happen in stages, “it’s more like a grief yarn-ball, all sort of messed up and mixed up.”
That is so true, and yesterday my emotions resembled the worst yarn bomb I’d ever seen.
That’s all from me for today, folks. If you’d like to share anything from a grief experience, please feel free to add something in the comments. All thoughts and ideas that could help others are welcome.
If you’d like to know more about coping with grief check out my book, The Many Faces of Grief: Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope From a Hospital Chaplain. It has more of my grief journey in it as well as expertise I gained while working as a chaplain in a hospital setting as well as for hospice.