CHAPTER 3, PART 1
After several years, I realized that although I categorized the feelings as I had done for my friend in chapter two, the reality is that many side symptoms occur with grief. Sifting through the emotions is akin to untangling many strands of Christmas lights that have become enmeshed in each other. You pull one string through what looks like a hole, only to discover that you still have this huge tangled ball upon your hands. At that point you want to give up, throw the lights in the trash and drive to the closest Wal-Mart and buy more. Unfortunately, I do not know of any store that sells a whole new set of emotions. However, just as with the Christmas lights, you realize that if you persist long enough, you might get the mess straightened out—some parts of your emotions will be damaged, but you will learn to replace former beliefs with altered ones, allowing you to function.
CHAPTER 3, PART 2
At first, the emotions pertaining to the death overpower you. When a grieving person feels anger at God or a bad decision by the deceased child, the emotions expressed result directly from the death. These thoughts do not get mixed in with everyday living because you know what causes them. As time goes on, though, everyday life intrudes, and it becomes more difficult to decide whether the reaction of annoyance to a matter unrelated to the death is disproportionate to the actual circumstance that caused the annoyance or not. Perhaps a movie moves you to tears, but are these tears a result of the actor’s performance or the underlying grief? For example, I cried at Napoleon Dynamite, a comedy, the first time I saw it because I focused totally on his loneliness and not on the comedic aspects. The next time I saw it with students, I laughed myself silly. So obviously the loneliness I felt following my son’s death caused my initial reaction to the movie.
CHAPTER 3, PART 3
For a while, your outlook on life can be tinged with this underlying sadness, resentment, and sense of futility, so that every emotion becomes magnified. Along with the intensity of emotions, you now carry with you the realization of the fragility of life.
When you say goodbye to a friend that you will not see for a long time, the pain seems more intense because of the finality this might bring. Even the delight at the sight of wrapping paper and ribbons strewn on the floor as your grandchild excitedly opens birthday presents becomes poignant because you know the delicate nature of life. Our mental state, until we become more adjusted, remains erratic.
Chapter 3, part 4
How convenient life would be if the emotions came one at a time: “Now I’m in denial; next comes anger.” Our grief does not come in categories as much as our minds want to put them there. The brain learns by generalizing and categorizing. When my younger son was a toddler, he called anything round “ball.” A water tower was “ball, ball, ball,” as he pointed. Our brains organize our world by finding a framework which we already know (a ball being round, hence a water tower is a ball). But then we lose a child and suddenly, in the emotional realm, we cannot categorize feelings because they occur together and separately while our mind struggles to do what it does best: find a spot for this barrage of emotions to fit inside. It wants a framework, but we have no reference point, so I believe that our brains have to build a new framework for life to make sense again.
Chapter 3, part 5
The structure of our brain relies on existing information: sorrow feels like this; anger behaves this way; joy causes laughter. However, what happens to our subconscious when we experience anger, sadness, loneliness, and remorse, simultaneously? How does our brain deny the reality of the death, and yet cry about the very death it denies? The mind must create a whole new structure for these emotions to make sense within, and this takes time.
Our newfound emotions are myriad, complex, and disturbing. Grief brings tangles and knots and it snarls the brain and feelings. Expect it to take time to sort, but we know that the brain rebuilds our perception of life. Our minds work on turning the unfamiliar world we experience after the death of a child into something more familiar. You can help this process of rebuilding.
Chapter 3, part 6
ACTIVITY
Take ten minutes to focus on something other than the loss of your child, whether baking, video games, music, etc. Try to totally focus for just ten minutes on the activity. Write about how this feels.
