This is MY Grief, but why aren’t YOU grieving?

While attending the 2012 Compassionate Friends National Conference this year I was approached by many asking if my husband was with me.  The answer was always no and as the weekend went on, I came to a harsh reality.  Not only did I not want him there, but I was angry that he wasn’t.  Many may read this and say “typical woman”.  Maybe, but it is much deeper than that.  My husband-Jeff, is Tony’s step dad.  He has known Tony since he was 7 years old-most of his life. Tony’s biological dad and I divorced when Tony was 5 and died in January of 2004 from colon cancer.   

I tried to explain this to someone and felt terrible as the words came out of my mouth.  This was MY grief.  I owned it.  I gave birth to Tony, I raised him, understood him, loved him and this pain was mine!  It was July 11, 2009 at 10:11pm that my world as I knew it ended. Tony had been in the hospital being treated for a very rare disease called TTP.  He had suffered from a bout of this in January of 2009 and we almost lost him then.  The definitive test for TTP had come back inconclusive and although Tony reacted to the treatment, they were not positive that this is what he had.  The doctors decided they would watch him closely for 6 months and see if it was indeed TTP or just one of those oddities.  Just two weeks before Tony became ill again, he was cleared and told he should be just fine.  On July 4th, Tony had a seizure which sent him back to the hospital, it was then they determined he did have TTP and we proceeded to do the treatments for it and come up with a plan where he could continue to live his active lifestyle with this disease.  It was possible. On July 11th Tony was heading home, and something went terribly wrong.  He never made it out of the hospital.

While I was immediately aware of the pain and suffering my two surviving children were going to endure, I looked at my husband as someone whose job was to help me through this, NOT, as a dad who was suffering a loss as well.  He wasn’t there when he was born.  He didn’t experience the pain and joy of his birth, he didn’t know all the little things that made Tony who he was.  Sure, he heard the stories but as wrong as it was I truly felt he could not know what I was going through, nor deserved to be a part of my pain.  Yet, over and over again I became angry.  Why wasn’t he crying?  Why was he still able to function?  Why did it appear not to affect his life as greatly as it did mine?  All these observations just made my ownership of the grief justifiable.  After all, if he wasn’t going to grieve like I was then he forfeited all his rights.  Sounds reasonable to a grieving mother.

It took three years and speaking it out loud before I fully understood the enormity of my thoughts and actions.  Instead of walking the journey together with my son’s stepfather, I had isolated myself as a parent.  While I am not proud of my actions, I am also not ashamed.  I believe however unreasonable they might have been, it was exactly what I needed to be to get through the early years.  I needed to own the grief. I needed to hang onto it like a comfort blanket that wrapped me up in the love I shared with my son.  I needed to hurt in order to move forward and if I let someone else hurt as much then maybe it was possible that he/she loved MY son as much as I did.  Those are some harsh realities to accept.  NO ONE loves my child as much as I do.  It seems I subconsciously developed a grief ladder.  Of course, I was on top as Mother.  Then naturally came Tony’s siblings. then a jumble of relatives and Tony’s girlfriend.  Jeff, was haphazardly thrown around in the mix wherever I deemed necessary for him to be.  Depending on where I was, what I needed, seems to be the way the rungs lined up.  I still looked to Jeff as a support person and not a grieving Dad (which he was).  Unknowingly I was categorizing others grief to what I needed.  They were criticized for grieving to much and condemned for not grieving enough.  I am still unsure as to why, but I did.  In reality, to a degree I still do, after all there is no greater love than that of a mothers.

It is only through a harsh reality check that I became aware of my actions.  Jeff deserved to grieve in his own way.  Jeff loved my boys as if he was their dad.  Blood does not make one a parent.  Unconditional love and emotional support were just a few of the many ways Jeff had become the boys dad. Upon returning from the conference I shared what I realized with him.  He spoke of wanting to join me at the next conference, and my gut reaction was NO!  Searching as to why I was so opposed to him joining me, I found that I am still in a very selfish period of my grief journey.  I do not want my love for my husband to be clouded by the pain of my grief.  I want to keep the two worlds separate-which is impossible.  I do know that if he needs to attend the conference for his own healing then I welcome him to do so.  Hopefully, now that I have become more aware of my thought process, I will be able to learn how to mingle the two worlds better and come out stronger.

Look for me at the conference next year to see how the year has unfolded.  I have hope that it will be exactly what I need for this point in my journey.  You may even get to meet Jeff!