A special welcome to anyone who is new to The Grieving Room. We meet every Monday evening. Whether your loss is recent or many years ago, whether you have lost a person or a pet, or even if the person you are "mourning" is still alive ("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time) you can come to this diary and process your grieving in whatever way works for you. Share whatever you need to share. We can't solve each other's problems, but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Please join me below the Great Orange Squiggle...
Thank you for opening the diary tonight... This will not be terribly long, as I am stepping in to cover an unclaimed hosting date. Please feel welcome to share your own grief trials and/or triumphs in the comments.
As many "regulars" here know, this series started, partly, in response to my mother's death in 2007. She had been terminally ill (pancreatic cancer) for a year before passing away, and one of the things I struggled with most was the clash of the grief and the relief I felt when it was finally over. I have worked through this pretty well, and now, over five years later, I am doing pretty well.
I have glimpses, though, that what I consider "healing" may, in fact, be plain old burial of feelings that I don't want to deal with. I am generally fine when dealing with memories of my mom in that last year, when she was so strong, yet so sick and weakened by the pain and the chemo. I know it's good that it is over. But I rarely bring myself to think about the healthy, vital woman that she was in her mid-sixties, say about 7 or 8 years ago...and the memories of her twenty years ago? Those, somehow, are incredibly hard for me to focus on or process.
You may have guessed what's coming, from the diary title. This week will be my twentieth wedding anniversary. I had a very modest but very GREAT wedding. I wore my mom's dress (from 1960), and I chose a champagne mostly because it was in my budget and it shared her name. And then, there are the pictures. Because the event was planned quickly and on a tight budget, we didn't hire a professional photographer, but instead bought ten disposable cameras and placed them around the event for guests to grab and record the event for us. We are missing the formal shots, and the artsy shots, but we definitely captured the soul of our wedding day.
This year, as a gift for my husband, I had a beautiful book created - the kind where you format pages with your own digital or scanned photos, and the online company prints and binds it, and it shows up in the mail, a beautiful work of art. The first spread I created covers our wedding day, and the following pages of the book are a whirlwind tour through the twenty years since. In preparing it, I was forced to come face-to-face with the younger, vibrant, extremely happy, ALIVE woman that she was. On that day, she was only 54 - the age my husband is now. This is not a mom I have the strength to look upon very often, because I'm still pretty pissed off that I can't have THIS mom ever again. Seeing the beautiful picture of her and me, both of us beaming radiantly after the vows were over, or seeing her teaching my elder son to fish, or seeing her cradling my second son when he was a minute old -- these are the images that still hit me in the gut.
I had a similar, though lesser, response to the pictures that I sifted through of my mother-in-law, who died last year.
I guess the best way to put it is that happy celebrations become increasingly bittersweet as we lose our loved ones over time. We expect the sad anniversaries to be tough, but I never thought that this happy milestone would bring out this response in me.
Love you, mom.