Today was odd. After having Andrew here yesterday and last night, it was too damn quiet. Also, having that company yesterday and last night kept me distracted. We've already established that - at least, for me - grief delayed is grief that comes back with a vengeance. Some days, though, the delay is too hard to resist.
Today was such a day, so I made it another distracted day; I just couldn't stomach the idea of having another day like last Wednesday. And that's a problem: taking a Scarlett O'Hara, "I'll think about that tomorrow" approach to grief is SEDUCTIVE, yo. I mean, every day that I can mostly distract myself is a day I don't spend crying, and... look, human nature is to run toward pleasure and away from pain. There's no pleasure in distraction, but it limits the pain.
How many days can I distract myself, though? If I do it long enough, I could find myself stuck and unable to get back to a place where I CAN grieve, and I've read enough to know that's not healthy either. It's a conundrum, for sure: distracting myself day after day could leave me unable to fully grieve, which would give me absolutely no shot at having a happy life. But I'm equally certain that, no matter how much I grieve, I have absolutely no shot at having a happy life anyway. So, do I put in the work knowing it's going to be excruciatingly painful for a period of time and then I'll end up miserable? Or do I keep distracting myself to the point where I'm still miserable, but without all the peaks of suffering along the way?
Since I was tired, I took a nap for a bit this morning. I took care of the litter boxes, and read the second chapter of The Grief Recovery Handbook (my one nod to grief work today), and watched some more episodes of The Walking Dead. I also emptied the dishwasher (which I loaded and ran last night) and washed the cats' bowls and the saucepan and bowl I used for tonight's dinner of butternut squash soup. Three nights in a row, my sink has been empty when I went to bed - so there's definitely something to distraction.
Nevertheless, there were a number of moments when I had breakthrough sadness. Invariably, those moments happen when I accidentally stumble on something that makes me think of Doug: seeing Sunday's recording of Call the Midwife on the DVR (he never watched it with me, and I kept hoping I'd get him to do so; of course, now that can't happen); seeing that What We Do in the Shadows just started its new season (we watched that together, and loved it, and I don't know if I'll be able to enjoy it without him sitting next to me laughing his ass off). Such little things, and yet the elicit so much sadness.
Yeah, it's tempting to try and spend every day distracting myself as much as possible. Alas, I can't do that tomorrow: Tuesday is grief counseling day, and Grace isn't going to let me distract myself through our session. So tomorrow will be a grief work day: have my session with Grace, go for a walk, read the next two chapters of The Grief Recovery Handbook, and maybe start working on trying to put myself on some kind of schedule. That may be overly ambitious: after two days avoiding my grief, once I break the seal with the session with Grace that may be all she wrote for the day: I may end up curled up on the couch crying for the duration. And that's okay.
Maybe that's all I can do right now: choose on any given day - or at least, for stretches of time on any given day - whether to let myself feel or not. What's funny in all this is that I spent YEARS not letting myself feel, and I got to be REALLY good at it. Doug ruined that for me, in the best possible way. He made me WANT to feel again. And now, because of losing him and how painful that is, the desire to run back to that old habit is strong - SO strong. I know Doug wouldn't want that, but Doug isn't here, and feeling nothing is a lot less painful than feeling what's real for me.
Tomorrow I'll choose to feel, because distraction isn't really an option on grief counseling days. And the day after that I'll have to choose again. Neither choice seems to lead me to a place where I'm happy, though: in one direction, I end up missing him forever but permanently emotionally stunted; in the other, I end up missing him forever and feeling every bit of that misery every day.
I don't like this. I don't like being lost, and I don't like being empty (it worked for me for years, but I don't LIKE it), and I don't like crying all the time, and I don't like life without Doug. And somehow, without a roadmap or any idea how to get un-lost, I'm supposed to find myself, fill myself up, and find reasons not to cry. But these are not skills I possess, and they aren't skills I know how to cultivate in myself.
But I can't solve that problem. Not tonight, anyway. So I'll take my cue from Doug's favorite band - The Beatles - and, at least for now, I'll let it be.
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