I’m not really crazy - I'm just grieving…

I have not given up, even though I want to most days. Those who call my grief complicated or morbid are wrong.  It's just grief.  For some, perhaps, it goes away.  From what I have read and heard, for most it quietens down, the contours of grief change.  But does it end?  Not in my life.  In my life every morning - and every waking minute - and then every sleeping minute I am conscious of my grief.  As much as I feel him with me spiritually - even talking with him and hearing what he whispers back to me in my heart, he is not HERE - he cannot come back HERE and HERE with me is where I want him.

When you love so hard and intensely and they die - it hurts!!  It hurts every day for the rest of your life.

My grief for my beloved Freddy - my missing him - my longing for his physical presence - will be with me always. I still can't imagine Zell without Freddy.  I don't want to imagine myself that way.  Why is he still so much a part of me?  I don't know.  He just is and will always be – utterly irreplaceable.

I cried when I first realized I had fallen madly and irretrievably in love with him.  I remember that night so clearly.  We met on Saturday, 23 June 2012 and somewhere in the second week of July it hit me like a freight train.  A love so great and overwhelming for this sweet, gentle man that I cried, totally surprising him (and myself). The poor guy thought he had done something wrong!  I now believe that God in his foresight of what was to come short 22 months after that night in July 2012 gave me a double portion of earthly and Godly love to impart on this very precious and hurting soul that would sustain both of us and heal us both from past hurts. That love still overwhelms me and with him no longer here to bestow it on, it flows over in tears which God’s angels store up in heaven.  Freddy was a part of every day of my life for 22 months. So short, but long enough to engrave him into my heart and psyche forever.  To take him out of me, to put his memory behind me like some piece of history, is to stop being me – to kill the real me.

I liked who I was when we were together.  I became a new and better person when I met him and he completed and healed me. They say you know you have found the right person when they bring out the best in you.  My Freddy brought out the best in me and I loved him with all my heart and he loved me back in buckets.

When someone is alive you expect their loved one to talk about them and share things about them.  I was so proud of my Freddy. I always talked about him. And you know what? He said he was proud to be seen next to me – so many times. So who says this has to stop just because he is gone? Why?  I will continue to talk about him, and cry and miss him - because he loved me and still loves me and being fully alive with grief is the best way I know to honour that love we shared.

I don’t care if anyone finds that strange. Only I know how special our love is – it is eternal – it did not end on 24 April 2014. The only moving on I will do is moving on to heaven to be with him one day.  In the meantime I will live my life and God’s will to the best of my ability.  I will have moments of victory and joy even, but I will not allow myself to be pressured to get over him or be at peace about him not being with me.

Our separation in this world will hurt until my dying day. It does not grieve his soul to express my pain and tears.  He watches and sees my pain and understands that my pain and tears are as part of my expression of love for him as are my adoring poems, in the fierce and desperate way I cling to the stuffed toy he bought me early on in our relationship and which he tucked in with me every night. My love is in my “good morning” and “good night” kisses which I shower on the cold glass of his framed photographs every day.  Sometimes I wake up and look at his photograph and smile and say “Good morning honey” and lean over and plant dozens of kisses on that cold, unresponsive glass.  In life I often woke him up this way: with a shower of kisses all over his face.  It made him giggle like a child.  I like to think he still giggles and smiles in heaven when he sees me do that. Sometimes I reach out and hold the photograph close to my heart to warm it, so that it is not so cold and I recall his warm delicious and loving kisses with a smile and fond remembering. 

Then again, some days (too many) I awake and when I feel the overwhelming emptiness of his absence, I cannot say or do anything but get on my knees next to my bed, hold that precious photograph against my chest and rain hot tears on and cry out wordlessly to God in my pain.  He sends relief and refreshment.  It is not hurting my beloved’s soul or disturbing his peace in heaven, it is remembering and honouring our love – a natural outflow from a love so great which is no longer here on this earth with me. Tears are a language God understands. When we have no words, tears speak – and God records every tear and bottles them. My Freddy sees the stores of my tears and he knows I love him. How can the love contained in my tears be upsetting to his soul?

People who tell you to move on or that you are stuck, or that what you are experiencing isn't healthy or normal are in the dark themselves.  They don't know that grieving people eventually take to lying about how they really feel in order not to hear things that are hurtful - in order not to be rejected - or medicated - or fixed.  Ask the person who thinks you are grieving too much if they got a phone call in five minutes that their child was killed in a car accident - or their husband or wife - when they would get over it.

Staying in bed and staring out at sea actually works for me in small increments.  I find it helpful to spend time with my grief.  It doesn't work for me if I do it all day every day.  I have not yet lost the feeling of great sadness every time I return home knowing that he will not be waiting for me. I know I never will.

In the meantime the little challenges I face every day is for me in fact a Mt Everest.  What you see as a mole hill is indeed a mountain for me. Just taking the resolve to get up and do something useful and meaningful takes huge effort. I AM surviving, but the world for the most part is still surprised at my slow progress, willing me on to find the inner peace that I just cannot find yet.

I sometimes get confused between wanting to die to be with him and wanting to live to do everything else.  I have to remind myself that what is a long time to me on Earth is a blink of the eye in terms of eternity and that I have to be patient – my time will come. We WILL be together again.  And until that day comes, this is my path, this is my grief, this is the love I continue to express in tears and in smiles of fond remembrance.

This is me: I am not crazy, I am just a woman in love who is grieving.