I'm walking down the mountain. There's no path - you just try the best you can to find a place to put your foot down. The walk is extremely difficult. There are many boulders, rocks, big stones, smaller stones on the way. There's no way to avoid them. You must step or climb on most of them to continue. There's no way to turn back and climb up - you must continue down, down, down. Any rock you step awkwardly on can send you tumbling down the slope. Even when you're trying to just rest for a minute, things are shaky and dangerous. All the while, I'm carrying a heavy, clumsy, backpack. It makes it so much more difficult to walk and puts pressure on my back. But somehow it also feels "good" to know that all my "stuff" is still with me.
I don't know what to expect at the bottom - is there an end point? What would the bottom of the hill look like? Would it be flat and easy or would it turn into a sharp cliff?
Eventually I reach the bottom and take the load off my back. But somehow it's not a relief. All I find is.....nothing. One big empty space. A vacuum, maybe. I already miss the down slope and the weight on my back.
How does one cope with the loss, with the mourning?
For me, it's helpful to look up-hill at the dangerous slope we walked for the past year. I'm analyzing each and every boulder, rock, pebble. I realize and recognize that indeed we had no choice: there was no climbing back up and we HAD TO stumble on each rock. And somehow this analysis bridges between the down-slope and the "now". My annoying engineer brain is trying to find logical explanation for everything. And this process somehow works for me - I think. Everything is explained. For months, while in-and-out of the hospital I've been saying "the writing is on the wall". Looking back at it from the bottom of the hill up, I can see the unavoidable path now - the same path that I could not see walking down the hill. And now, that it's all explained, all that is left are the longings. How much I miss Liam. Oh, how much....
Another thing that helps me is to be out and about: to go to work, be around people (who are not involved), ride my bike to the park, go to ball games. Some would call it denial; I prefer to call it healing. At the same time, I fully recognize and respect that people grieve in different ways and that what works for me works JUST for me.
I'm reading about the 5 stages of grief and trying to map at which stage I am. And I think, just think, that I'm doing pretty good. Too good, for a matter of fact. Sometimes I hate myself for moving so fast. Some would call it denial (here we go again). Maybe it is, what do I know? But when I went through an extremely fast similar process with both my parents, it worked out for me. I don't intend it to be fast - it just happens that way. The problem with moving so fast is that the people close to me (and society in general) don't move that fast in the mourning process. That requires extra sensitivity on my side and sometimes to step back into the mourning process, into the grief - just out of respect to others - even though I moved on already.
But don't take all this the wrong way. At the same time I'm moving fast, I miss Liam soooooooo, so much, I don't have words to describe it. And I'm crying occasionally - especially when I'm writing her name - LIAM.
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