Tell his story

    

                                                                                       Dan trying to make me laugh when I was in the hospital

I miss Dan. Just miss Dan. Sometimes the grief is so overwhelming it takes away from the person you lost. Not that you have forgotten him, that will never happen, but that you are so sad and so tired and so overwhelmed that all you can do is say I miss him. When you say that, in your mind (or at least my mind) I am thinking mostly about how I felt when he was around. Happy, calm, peaceful. The way I felt when he smiled at me, or gave me a look like "lady your crazy"  I think about an all encompassing Dan, about his presence. 

It is much harder to think of specifics.  Grief isn't just saddness, it's everything. Everything single thing you do is affected by grief. Memory is a big one for me. I can't remember anything. I can't tell you how many times I've walked into a store and just stopped because I couldn't remember why I was there. Thats grief. You mind is focused on your loss, on making itself continue on, on literally physically breathing. It doesn't have room for silly things like remembering what you need at the grocery store. Or remembering where the hair brush is. (that what happened today, it was in the office, who knows how it got there.) I was having dinner with some friends the other night and one of them commented on how hungry they were because they skipped lunch and had a very light breakfast. I said "Uh, I think I ate today, I don't actually remember, I must have" Two years, nine months, I still can't remember eating. you would think I would have lost weight from forgetting to eat so much but I haven't. Maybe that means I eat and just don't remember eating, who knows.

Baby Girl has started to really like hearing stories about her daddy, especially her and daddy. She says "tell me a story about Daddy. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy" She went over two years with barely saying his name and now she says it four times in one breath. I have a million trillion stories about her and Dan. She asks me for a story and I draw a blank. I take several minutes thinking of one. Because what comes to mind when I think of Baby Girl and Dan is her giggle and ear to ear grin as he flies her around the room like an airplane when she was about 18 months old.  It's a good memory for sure but not a very long story.  I think of the million times she got tired of walking and Dan would swoop her up and carry her, even when she was plenty old enough to walk. Even on that last Day we were together, she was 7 1/2 and he carried her around downtown because "daddy my legs are tired"

I think about how he always made this funny face at me when he wanted me to laugh. I called it his muppet face because it reminded me of a muppet character. I think about how I would put my freezing feet on him in bed, and he would let me. I think about how he used to say things like "I don't like cats" as one was sitting in his lap purring because he was petting it.  I think about how he would say things like "that dress is despicable" when baby girl would come out with the frilliest dress we could possibly find and spin for him.  All the while hes taking pictures of her and his eyes are lit up because his baby girl is so precious to him. 

I think about all the things he has missed out on in the last two years. We moved Dan, we moved without you. We have done so many things without you, we went to Disneyland, it would have been funner with you. We went to the redwoods, you would have loved it, I'm certain you would have tried to convince me to runaway with you there and build a cabin in the woods, I might have said yes.  You missed your grandmothers funeral. You missed comforting your family on how hard they are taking your own death. You missed every single, solitary day of the hardest two years of our lives, I really really needed you here for those days.

I think of all the things you are going to miss. Baby Girl is getting braces on Wednesday, wish you were here for that. We are going to Disneyland again, your gonna miss all the fun.  That whole puberty thing, ahhhhh its coming, it's coming, it's coming. How am I going to get through that without you?  Teaching her to drive? I'm not teaching her to drive, thats your job.  That whole getting married thing, I can't even go there.

In the two minutes that Baby Girl has asked me for a daddy story this is what my brain has thought of, but no specific story. Baby Girl wants a story. Ok lets try this one.

"Once upon a time"

"mommy real stories don't start with once upon a time"

"well mine do. Once upon a time when Baby Girl was still in my tummy I was very very sick . I had to go stay in the hospital for a very long time. Daddy came with me. I slept in the hospital bed and daddy slept across the room on the couch. I was so sick that it was hard for me to talk and daddy was afraid I would wake up in the middle of the night and need him but he wouldnt be able to hear me because my voice was so little.  So daddy got me a tiny stuffed animal chicken.  (laugh laugh laugh from baby girl) Daddy said 'when you need me in the middle of the night push this chicken,' he pushed it and it started clucking. 'and then throw it at my head, it will wake me up'. (laugh laugh laugh from Baby Girl) Then daddy said  'if that one doesn't work use this one' and he pulled out a little stuffed duck. He pushed it and it started quaking. 'that will definitely wake me up' daddy said.  (laugh laugh laugh from Baby Girl) So we went to sleep and in the middle of the night I had to go potty but I had all these wires and cords and things attached to me so I needed help.  So I pushed the chicken and threw him at daddy. It clucked through the air and landed right on his chest. And daddy said snore snore snore. well that didn't work and I really had to go potty so I got out the duck. He quaked through the air and landed right on daddy's face. And daddy said snore snore snore. (by this time Baby Girl was laughing non stop.) 

"Then what did you do mommy"

"well I still had to go potty and I was out of amo, so I just got up and went myself and it pulled all the cords out of the machines and they all started beeping but hey man I had to go potty. When I came out of the bathroom the nusrse and daddy were standing outside the door staring at me with thier mouths open. 'are you ok' daddy said uh ya I was just going potty 'you were supposed to wake me up' daddy said. I tried the chicken and the duck didn't work and I really had to go potty.  Then daddy and the nurse both said I couldn't go potty by myself anymore cause they were scared cause all the machines were making noise and they thought something was wrong."

"Baby Girl your daddy was really silly"

"I know mommy thats what made him daddy"

I wrote a book about my grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Milestones in grief

Image
                                                                Dan and I around 2011 I wrote this for a writing contest about milestones. Writing about every grief milestone would take a book and I had a word limit so I couldn't do that. I tried to do the really big ones. I have not had a particularly eventful life. When I was eight, my parents moved, but they took me with them. At ten, I had a pretty bad accident, but I came out of it fine. My husband and I met at sixteen, and at nineteen, we went against all good advice and got married. I gave birth to our daughter when I was 27.   I loved our boring, normal life. We were living our happily ever after. I was a stay at home mom, Dan was finishing up grad school. Everyone says this kind of thing at funerals, but Dan really was the most amazing person I’ve ever met in my...
Read more

PTSD is not for sissys

Image
Do you know what PTSD is? Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I bet you think you do.  You might say something like "ya its what people that go off to war have" true. You might say "It's when people see really terrible things" true. A few really smart people might say "ya my friend watched her beloved husband die and now she has it" very true. If you are a mental health professional you might say "ya a child who all of a sudden has a dad who dies will have it" also true.  I was telling a friend once about how life is now without Dan and she said "wow it's almost like you have PTSD or something." No not almost, we do. But what exactly is it? Well it's complicated. I can't describe it for baby girl because I am not in her mind (unfortunately) but I can try and describe it for me. I am hesitant to do so; it's not an easy thing to talk about, But if we are going on a the point of this blog is to be therapeutic for me and h...
Read more

My therapist told me to start a blog

Image
My therapist told me to start a blog. She thinks I have something worth while to say. Something? Yes. Worth while? I guess we will find out. I mean, everyone and their dog has a blog, right? What makes me so special? At the very least, I hope it will be cathartic. Here is the short story, which I will elaborate on in future blogs. Eighteen months ago, I was 34. I had a 7 1/2 year old daughter. I was married to my high school sweetheart, and we were still madly in love with each other. It was like a fairy tale; we liked to compare ourselves to Wesley and Buttercup from The Princess Bride. We were in the process of adopting a baby. And then we weren't. And then it was gone. In a second, literally one second, he was gone. My husband Dan died, extremely suddenly and unexpectedly. All day long he was fine. We went downtown to our favorite bookstore, we ate lunch, we had dinner, we went to bed at 11. At 11:15 I called 911. At 12:01 am on January 12, 2015, Dan was pronounced dead on...
Read more