N.K. Murray

It gets easier, they say.

Purportedly, your daily life continues after a great loss, and you adapt to the negative space once filled by a loved one much like you’d navigate an unexpected and deep pothole in the road – you swerve around it, heart pounding that you may have damaged your car, and hoping there aren’t any more in front of you to maneuver around.

But, you don’t adapt.

You sometimes forget there’s a hole. Or they’ve tried to fill it with cold patch so it’s not so bad, or they’ve laid a strip of asphalt over top that you know damn well will be destroyed by the strain of the upcoming winter cold/thaw cycle and the plows keeping the road clear. The hole doesn’t go away until someone makes a concerted and determined effort to mill that road down to the base, and cover it.

However, you remember where that hole was. You remember the jarring feeling you had when you hit it that first time. You remember it every single time you go down that road, there it is again, even though it’s not really there.

I liken my buddy Grief to that pothole. Most days, I’m ok. I avoid roads that I know will cause me to swerve unexpectedly. I avoid my triggers, you could say. I roll through my life, content in the knowledge that I’m functioning, and for the most part, functional. But, there are days when no matter what road I travel, that fucking pothole looms and I can’t do anything to avoid it.

That’s today.

I had been awake for something like 40 hours by the time my mom died 9 years ago today. I got up for work the day before, spent the night awake in the hospital listening to the harshness of her breathing and by the following afternoon, I was driven home exhausted and hoping I could sleep. I had walked in the door and gone upstairs to crash when I got the call that I needed to rush back – she was leaving us. By the time everything was all said and done and we had regrouped and hashed out the arrangements, it was full on dark and I had another eulogy to write.

I took 7 Benadryl that night to shut my mind off so I could sleep. (Full disclosure – I used to pop 4 a night just to get me to sleep knowing full well I’d be wide awake by 2am.)

It didn’t work. All I could think of was all of the things I didn’t get a chance to solve in the 13 days from when we found out it was cancer, till the day we lost her. All I could think of was all of the opportunities I missed to find out things that no one now knew, and now never would. All I could think of is what a horrible person I was to have removed myself so completely from her daily life, that I missed the very clear signs that something was amiss.

I spent a year hating myself. A year castigating myself in the dark of night for all of the things that I didn’t do and couldn’t be. It’s taken me a long time to accept that I can’t change any of that, and to do good things in spite of the fact that neither of my parents are here to see them done in their memory.

But, there are days when it hits me. Friday night at dinner, hubby and I were talking about how old his dad was and it struck me – mom would be 70 this year. 70….she died right before her 61st birthday, which is still older than my dad was when he died at 55. I’m encroaching 43. The math doesn’t mesh in my brain some times, and I get caught up in the what if I have something I don’t know about because 3 of 5 of us have/had cancer?

I’m not a gambler. I mitigate risk for a living, making educated decisions based on known data and metrics. The odds are terrible here. It’s hard not to swan dive down the rabbit hole (or should I say pothole?) and wonder if that headache isn’t a headache. Is my shoulder sore from working out, and is my knee sore from riding or do I have bone cancer? Is that cough just a cold, or do I have a tumor? Stupid shit that goes through my head when I’m not me. It’s easy to avoid those conspiracy theorist-style moments when I’m not triggered by Grief.

It’s harder to talk myself off the ledge when I hit that pothole and can’t breathe because I don’t have a mom or dad anymore. Most days, I am functioning and I am functional but there are moments when I’m behind the veil Grief puts in front of my eyes, and I can’t understand how I’m going to clean my house or take that meeting or go work out. I have yet to find the path forward where I can walk through the veil and not worry about face-planting in that pothole I didn’t expect.

Tomorrow won’t be today. Tomorrow won’t be the anniversary of becoming an adult orphan. Tomorrow won’t have me contemplating how I’m going to manage to do all of the things when I barely have the energy and the mental capacity to get off my ass, because tomorrow won’t remind me of what happened today, and 9 years ago. Tomorrow, the pothole will have been patched, until the next day, the next trigger, the next storm.

And I will be functioning, and hopefully functional once again.