How Dark Am I Right Now?
Desperate Enough to Pull the Plug?
Grief has no rules. I’ve heard that since 2019, but it has taken me several years to actually comprehend it. I began discussing grief in detail with my social worker in 2020. I had no idea at that time what grief could do to our bodies, beyond the emotional.
Then I was diagnosed with Broken Heart Syndrome (Takotsubo cardiomyopathy), an actual medical diagnosis. I wasn’t handling grief as well as I thought. I realized I had never grieved the death of my father when he was 48. I didn’t know how. Now I was faced with my husband dying before either of us had expected. I still didn’t know how to grieve.
True grief, when analyzed, swallowed me each time I went into a weird heart rhythm: my broken heart. My husband was in his second year of hospice, the pandemic hit, we were housebound. We couldn’t even drive to the lake for a sunset or moonrise. I actually thought the grieving I survived on a day-to-day basis, watching the slow decline of my very stubborn Yankee husband, would be easier to handle when he died — as I was already in the process of coping with his pending death. Silly me.
Grief was exponentially worse. For two years he was still with me, weakening every day, forgetting more and more, but still able to hold hands at bedtime. Now he was truly gone, after battling too many health…
