It's hard to believe that it's been over three years since my Mark passed. It was an unscheduled death. Took me by surprise, kind of like a tsunami. One day you're here, the next you're gone. I've been comtemplating about writing a memoir about this difficult journey, but opening up those dark memories and the pain is a difficult task. But I want so badly to share this journey with everyone. To shed light on a topic that we desparately avoid; death. Grief. Depression. Anger. Confusion. Fear. These are just a sample of what I encountered on my long journey. A journey that I thought would never end. A journey that was filled with turbulence, uncertainty, hope and ultimately happiness.
In our society death is taboo. When we learn that someone has died to someone that is close to us, we feel awkward and unsure of what to say or do. We start to think about our own mortality, then we brush it off. It won't happen to us, that just happens to other people. Then it does. Bam! Bif! Whop! Holy armegeddon Batman! This is heavy and too much to deal with. It's true. It is. But there it is. Staring you in the face. Your loved one, your husband, your wife, your mother or your father. Is gone. And a bigger loss is your child. Every day we live is a gamble. We don't know when we'll go or when our loved ones will go, but they will. And we will. Now you have to deal with grief. My mother told me at one point in my grief that you can't run away from it. If you do, it will find you and really destroy you.
Grief is a natural process. Every culture, every society and every person has a different way of dealing with it, but they all do at some level or in some way. It may be a ceremonious way with different traditions and ceremonies. It may be in a personal way with just yourself and close friends and family. Or it may just be you. It starts out like a violent storm. Especially when you're not expecting it, like me. When the doctors came into the waiting room, it was written all over their faces. Death. Then they said the rehearsed, "We're sorry, but we tried everything and we couldn't save him". No! Go back and try again! I'll wait. But that wasn't an option. He was only admitted the night before with pancreatitis. People don't die from that. The doctors said over and over that he had a deadly case of it, but I ignored the deadly part of it. He was only 48 and relatively healthy. C'mon! He's not going to die. Then in the last couple hours of his life, I started to realize that death was in the cards. It was an option.
After the doctors dumped the bad news on us I got up and punched the vending machine. I don't remember if it even hurt. I couldn't express my despair and shock loud enough, violently enough or clear enough. I was shaken to the core. Then shock took over. I kept telling myself that I would wake up. It was only a dream. Somehow this wasn't really happening. It wasn't. I had uncontrollable bouts of crying and sobbing. I remember I couldn't cry hard enough. I couldn't find a way to truly express everything that was stirring inside of me. Every emotion hit me like a tsunami! There was no sorting through them or putting them into any special order. They were all there and they wouldn't go away.
