“Why was I the one to live and not him?”
“Did I do enough when he was sick?”
“But if only I had done more then maybe, just maybe, he’d still be alive.”
These are all statement I have said to myself about Clayton’s death. These are all statements that I have heard other widowed people say about themselves and, for a long time, we believe them.
There is no guide to grief. There’s never a class in school to warn you of the crash course you hit the minute the “after death” alarm clock starts. No matter how hard you try to hit the snooze button, you are forever a new kind of awake. All the emotions you think will come with loss of a loved one pour out of your heart all over your world. You expect sadness. You expect the depression. You expect the anger. What you don’t expect is the worst of them all. This small widowed whisper that keeps saying:
“It should have been you. You didn’t do enough. Why do you get to live and he didn’t.”
The low voice of Grief’s guilt making you question everything you did. You know the truth that you loved with your whole soul but Grief turns your own argument against you.
“Did you REALLY do everything you could? What if you went to the doctor with him that first time and questioned the medication? Would he still be here Bryan? You COULD have gone but YOU didn’t!”
For a while I couldn’t get out of grief’s sick cycle. Again and again I’d fight back with a valid reason I did the best I could and still the eerie echo would reverberate the denial from a distance. I was cornered so I just gave in to the guilt and laid down full of learned helplessness believing there was no where safe to go. The vicious voice reminded me of mean kids in school and my memories washed over me strengthening the grief. I started to replay those difficult days like a record and began to think all was lost except that grief didn’t realize he had just showed his weakness. Grief’s guilt was just another one of those mean kids. Grief was just a bully of bereavement and I had survived 100% of those hard days. It’s time these psychological tactics were stopped. Enough was enough.
They say to take away something’s power is to name it and so from now moving forward Grief’s Guilt is nothing more than just a Gaslighter and your flame no longer controls my feelings. I did enough. I am enough. I loved enough and you will no longer deny me of my dignity…
