Worse

I should have known it was coming.

I haven’t watched TV since Damon died. It’s too shallow… and often too painful. Well, I take that back. The TV was on constantly in the first weeks, particularly when I would have to lie down and try to be still; when I would try to let sleep take me but I wasn’t really watching.

When I lay on the couch with the computer in my lap and watched four hours of House Hunters International and Color Splash I should have known. I should have seen the water getting sucked from the shore as the Tsunami barreled toward me. I didn’t. I was too busy running from the pain. Head in the sand, butt in the air, wham!

I didn’t spend time with God that morning. Hardly spoke to Him all day.

It’s really hard to be that connected with Him, connected enough to feel His presence, and not open every door and window. I knew… I knew what was waiting. I knew the calm of the past few days was coming to a crashing, crushing end. I ran… hard.

I recently told a friend something like “You can run from it but you will just be exhausted and unprepared when it catches you. When I have to face a new memory of Damon’s death or a new season of my grief I always run for a while. It’s just too awful, too painful. But then I gather myself, root myself in my Shield and I turn and face it. It’s never easy, or even ok but I don’t want to be caught.”

If only I could follow my own stinking advice! It's just so exhausting to do it over and over and over again. To face the horror over and over and over again. It caught me. I had not rooted myself in my Shield. As my dear friend says, I had not lowered my “anchors.” I spun and twisted and was pummeled by the waves. I’m still reeling, grappling for footing before the next onslaught.

The same questions race through my mind and I scream “Where are You!” again and again.

I remember a father describing his grief, saying that the perception is that the first months are the worst. “I don’t know about you” he wrote “but it got far worse after the first months.” I read that soon after my own child was ripped from my life. “No, no, no!” I thought “there is nothing worse than this. Please God, tell me it doesn’t get worse!” I stopped reading that book that day. I couldn’t face the next hour, much less the looming possibility of “worse.” I didn’t want to know what was next.

It gets worse… and worse… and worse. There has been no end to the worse.

The first seasons of grief have eased, the shock, the fury, the bargains… they still linger and manifest in surges, whispers and explosions but they are extras in this act. Reality takes center stage. Every day it’s sinking in. This is real.

There is nothing worse than beginning to realize… this. is. real.  Or maybe there is. If there is one thing I’ve learned it’s that the worst can get worse.