Urgh ... at the minute it's hard ... but I wouldn't have missed the dance

One of the oddest things I’m finding about grief is how quickly things can go from totally ok, to completely falling apart, lurching back to ok, swinging back around to not ok…

And how utterly overwhelming, even for just 10 minutes or an hour or a day, it can be.

It’s really odd also that I can’t seem to anticipate what will cause the lurching and swinging.

I mean, the obvious causes are easy.

But the everyday ones are less so.

And they are not ever necessarily the same.

One day it might just being overwhelmed with sadness.

The next day it might be an anxiety attack that renders you marginally functional.

Then it could be overwhelming loneliness.

Then it can just be tears that just won’t stop.

Then it can be outrageous laughing, complete body consuming laughing at the ludicrousness of it all.

It can be anger at the injustice of it all, which is often mired in self pity at having to deal with it all.

And the triggers are similarly varied – a thought, a song, a comment, a date, a day, a smell, a memory, a conversation.

I find it monumentally perplexing that I can’t seem to work out what the triggers are, or the reactions to those.

Noted: Clearly more of a control freak than I thought I was.

Also clearly have never had deep grief impact my life before this all happened.

For that I am actually quite thankful.

I mean, I had grandparents who passed away. Had lost pets. Had struggled with grief over job changes, relationship breakdowns, lost friendships, felt sadness for friends who had lost parents … all of those things which have their own elements of grief of attached to them.

But not this.

Not complete and total heartbreaking grief.

And certainly not that coupled with being the adult responsible to trying to help four small people through their own completely and total heartbreaking grief.

Recently grief has been manifesting itself in so many different forms I’m totally lost with thinking I had it all under control.

It has appeared in utter loneliness at being the only adult in this house dealing with the kids. The pandemic and its associated remote schooling and remote working has only really doubled down on there being no other adult in the house to help break the monotony of dealing with it all.

Jealousy in almost everyone else in my village having another person. I know its totally unreasonable to be jealous of the fact other people have a partner, but it happens, and I find myself scolding myself for feeling that way. And possibly reacting badly when some have said ‘oh the grass isn’t greener over here, its not all roses …’

The response on more than one occasion has definitely been: No kidding. There was that one time where I was married to someone for nearly 14 years. And let me tell you, brown grass and wilting roses is a damn freaking sight better than a widow’s baron Earth!

It’s also appeared in complete sadness and self pity at the place we find ourselves in without Pete. That I have children who cry about the fact they get upset that all their friends have Dads but they don’t. That they are in this hole of grief with me at such a young age when I had blissfully lived 39 years of my life before I had to suffer these monumental feelings.

All of the craziness of grief has also appeared with listening to songs.

For some reason I’ve found myself listening to music and ending up down rabbit holes of iTunes and Spotify finding music that meant so many different things to us as a couple.

I have smiled and laughed at the memories it has evoked. I have cried at lyrics. I have spent lots of money on music to keep it and the warm comfort some of the songs have provided.

But the odd thing has been knowing no one else on this Earth can share in the same memories. I can message friends who were part of shenanigans the music reminds me of with us, but we all have different memories of that event or time. Or perhaps the memory attached to that song was only between Pete and I. It meant something to us as a couple.

And that has bred some strange loneliness. The loneliness that comes with knowing no matter how I try and explain the time and place and memory, that I will not ever have the conversations that I had with Pete about that time and place and song.

Most of all, a wander down the play list of Garth Brooks has made me think back to all the fun and highjinx of the late 1990s and early 2000s. His songs were on serious high rotation and so many of them remind me of road trips, or pub sessions, and the beginning of our relationship, and all evoke memories of such great fun times.

But as I was wondering why this all seems so hard at the minute, one song probably really hit home: The Dance.

A song which questions whether if we knew how it was all going to end, would we change anything?

And it resolves that no, while we could do without the pain, we wouldn’t have missed ‘the dance’.

The ‘dance’ being all of the things (good and bad) and the life you had with that other person.

The irony of it all being, that neither Pete or I danced. So little, in fact, that for our wedding waltz we did the Chicken Dance and the Hokey Pokey because it would have looked so ridiculous if we – the least dancey people we know – tried to awkwardly rock back and forth to a song. Instead, it was much more ‘us’ to have all our friends up laughing at the top of our lungs wiggling and flying like chickens, and monumentally stuffing up putting right and left sides of ourselves in and out.

And I think that while I’m struggling with all of the things – the loneliness, the sadness, the hardness, the everything … that yes, I could have done without the pain, I wouldn’t have missed the dance.

It was a good dance.

Garth Brooks’ The Dance: https://youtu.be/9rba7NOjHkQ