All Buttoned Up

I look okay, don’t I?

I seem good.

My sweater is all buttoned up. My hair is (mostly) combed.

But can I tell you something? Part of me really isn’t.

I wake up at 3 am.

Every night. Still. Even with the time change. My tenacious grief is happy to keep farmer’s hours.

About a month after my mother died suddenly in her sleep, I went down. Body and soul. Done in by my thoughts.

I’d held my high function together long enough to co-manage funeral details and school year starts, but even then there was a whispering. In an empty minute, in the middle of a sentence, in my deepest sleep…

“It’s your fault. It’s your fault she died.”

You guys, I know. I know that it’s hard to hear, but I need you to hear it because it’s the truth.

I am truly so much more okay than I was, AND I live with “it’s my fault” every day. Usually more than once.

The minivan idling in the parking lot of a long since closed Dairy Queen, four kids playing pokemon cards inside, my siblings living their last normal, pre-shatter moments, and my husband gently crying on the phone.

‘“I’m so sorry honey.”

My mind responded instantly. “It’s my fault.”

I took a breath, said to myself, “You are a trauma therapist. They will remember this call for the rest of their lives,” and called my five siblings. Oldest to youngest.

And each time I said, “I think it’s my fault.”

Because I do.

And I understand that it isn’t.

Each of my siblings immediately told me it wasn’t, just as you would have had you been there. But their minds never plagued them with the belief to begin with. It’s easily given grace.

For me, “it’s my fault” is part of the grief. The impossible thoughts. The idea that shows me off-ramps from the inevitable — if only I’d taken her back to the doctor, to a different hospital, been more attentive, more insistent.

It’s the way I suffer. The way I grieve.

And I have to say it out loud and I need you to let me say it.

I’ve read some other people’s words on suffering as of late. I’m surprised at how judgment laden suffering has become. I blame Buddha. All that releasing, unattaching. Somehow, with the increased misinterpretation of Buddism, we began to interpret suffering as a failure. Leave it to us to turn a hopeful practice of letting go into a competitive, achievement-oriented, breeding ground for shame. It may not be popular, but I can’t use another word for the sake of the spiritual shamers who are righteously nodding their enlighted heads. I am suffering. I am. AND I know in my core I won’t always be.

I already go minutes, maybe more where I have visiting hours with the previous version of my emotional self — the one that described her life as baseline happy all the time (this was a hard-fought adult emotional space, my teen years sucked just like yours did). But these days my lobby level is heartbroken. The cells inside my body are different and I’m learning myself. I’m moving forward and it’s painful AF.

The universe gave me the grace of losing my mother in the presence of two of the most important women in my life. Although I don’t think this actually happened, I have an image of them carrying me like a wounded soldier off a battlefield. Their arms under my arms.

One of the first things I said to both:

“I think it’s my fault.”

One said, “That’s okay.” The other said, “I know you do. “

And seven months in, on the phone with my sweet friend she said, “I just think you should have more help. It shouldn’t be that hard.”

And it made me cry. Because it is this hard. It is. I know the people who love me want it to be otherwise. The fact that I don’t sleep, that I have no appetite ever, that sometimes I count how many times I miss her in a day (and it’s often higher than thirty), that I’m often preoccupied with the terror of dying suddenly and doing this to my babies, that I wonder if I should be living everything differently because sometimes I look at it close up, or from high above and I’m not sure my life makes any sense — I need this to be true without fear or judgment. I suffer more the minute I believe it should be otherwise.

And yes, I’m in therapy. She’s not worried. This is grief.

The other night I slipped out of bed quietly so as not to wake my husband. The next morning he said something like, “Everything okay?” I replied, “My mind was just doing that, ‘it’s my fault she died ‘thing.” He turned and looked at me with something I’ve come to recognize as fear.

‘That’s still happening?”

And I realized I’ve been buttoning it up. So I just said it.

“Yep. Every day. At least once.”

And I resisted telling him that I am okay. He can already see that. I make dinner, go to work, play with our kids, walk in the woods and drive the carpool. But he can’t see I’m still also in that parking lot, hearing his voice, smelling gasoline, seeing traffic and seagulls. Which is also okay.

I’m not afraid. I’ve been so busy grieving, I forgot to show my inside. I’m showing it now, but my cohort and I have already discussed this — It’s like watching a video of Paris, or reading about it in a book. It’s better than nothing, but you can’t really know — the sights, the smells, the way the air feels — until you’ve been here.

In the fall I was treated for PTSD. A traumatized trauma therapist.

My treatment was comprehensive, intensive, and effective. It took lots of time, lots of money, and it worked.

And grief still shows at 3 am for a clandestine heart to heart.

She’s pretty shitty. She wants me to know she banked on a different outcome and she holds me accountable. She wants me to know it hurts, and it was always going to be this way. She wants me to bear witness.

So I do.

And now you do, too.

(I wrote this for my sister who is reading this, and whom I love to my deepest, deep down).