In a lot of the literature that I’ve come across reading about grief – and I want to stress, I don’t go looking for this and people aren’t sending it to me, but I keep tripping over it these days – I see that it’s fairly common for people in grief to make sure they’re busy all the time so that they don’t have any time to sit around and think about what’s really bothering them.
Given that that was my default before I ever dreamed that a child of mine could get cancer, it means I’m getting it in spades.
My therapist and I talked a bit about control today and, it does make a little sense that after going through 3-4 years of hell where I really had no control over anything, I might double down on things and really try to make sure things are just the way I like it. Even so, when he asked what all I was doing, I had to admit it seemed like a bit much. Counting down, I came across:
- My normal job (where I’m trying to finish this eternal project to get our style guide complete and up online)
- My normal parenting duties
- The writing I’m doing on the side about Colin
- The writing I’m doing on this blog
- My work to make this blog look like it’s not a middle school science fair project
- My promise to translate the hospice’s website
- My latest promise to edit an academic paper by the hospital psychologist, titled, of all things “Regret in Bereaved Parents.”
- My efforts to make sure we finally get all the medical bills paid
- Efforts to make sure we finally get some kind of receipt for all the stuff we donated to the hospice (Christina is doing the heavy lifting here)
- Just making sure all the loose ends are tied up: his passport cancelled, his bank accounts, closed, etc
- And we’ll have to get a headstone one of these days.
It’s kind of a lot, I realized. But I’m not sure what to cut out or if I would want to cut anything out. There is a part of me that realizes I would be a little freaked out if I suddenly had nothing to do but sit around the house and read and watch TV. There is a part of me that worries that, if I wasn’t fully distracted, I might go to some dark places. And then there’s a part of me that wants me to go to those dark places because I remain unhappy about how, to me, it feels like I’m not grieving him nearly enough, how I’m just snapping back to normal life.
I knew it wouldn’t all end when he died. It is astounding though, how the choices continue to be just as crappy.
OK. Off to edit that paper now.