impossible days (day 38 of grieving)

Some days, it’s just hard. The kids are both crying and the toys are everywhere and I’m partially through six different emails for work that I can’t finish. I know my husband isn’t coming home to me after work to help me cook dinner and play with the kids, that he won’t be here to divide and conquer bedtime and then wash all the bottles and make all the baby formula. It’s just me now and it’s hard.

But those days are at least manageable. They’re just tasks to be done, just hills that will take me a bit more effort to climb. The work will get done. The kids will get fed. The house will get picked up after they’re asleep, just like washing the dishes and scrubbing the bottles and sweeping the floor. I probably won’t get to shower or be alone with my thoughts or have a second to myself, but I know I’ll get through the day.

Other days, though, are impossible. I never know when to expect those days; they’re little surprises. I wake up and notice almost immediately that my chest feels hollow. It’s a familiar feeling, but it makes my heart sink all the same. The feeling of emptiness is somehow the heaviest thing I’ve ever felt. I’m a shell of a person, yet also filled to the brim with tears. My eyes will leak and my empty chest will ache, and I will know that today will be an Impossible Day.

I can’t do this life on Impossible Days. On days that are just plain hard, I see the bigger picture, I see that I am creating a new life from scratch and that it will take time. I can see that there are blessings here, too. I even sometimes feel excited for things. I am often grateful for the soft place we’ve landed for now. But on the Impossible Days, none of that happens. On those days I might as well be at the bottom of a lake the way I feel so cut off from everything. Waterlogged. I can’t properly hear or see or feel. People seem like optical illusions, so they certainly can’t help me with their hugs or their advice or their love.

I open my computer, but I can’t do any work. I open the emails and I flag them for later because it’s like I’ve forgotten how to read. I scan my personal email and see there are still more t’s to cross and i’s to dot, the list of necessary paperwork that comes with your spouse dying just grows and grows. I make a mental note to get back to that later, knowing that if I tried right now, I would merely stare at the screen and try desperately to remember how to use a computer mouse. Even that feels impossible.

I feel like I might throw up. My limbs weigh ten thousand pounds. Each chance I get to turn my head away from my kids, the tears pour out of me and I choke back silent sobs so I don’t upset them. My 4 year old knows mommy cries, he knows I miss his daddy, and we cry together sometimes. But on Impossible Days it’s not just crying, it’s like my soul is screaming and I don’t want him witnessing the weight of that. Even the baby, who most would say doesn’t know what’s going on, doesn’t deserve the amount of tears that have fallen on his peachfuzzed little head, or the shaking from my sobs as he’s slept in my arms. My kids will already carry the weight of being fatherless the rest of their lives, they don’t also need to carry the fact that mommy sometimes falls apart. So I do it in pieces, in little bits and bobs. I sob while I pee, while my back is turned as I do the dishes, anytime my face is obscured for even a second. It’s not even a choice; the tears have to come out at some point, so I try and let them out as they come, because I’m afraid they might suffocate me to death if I don’t. They feel that important, that unavoidable.

My husband has been dead for 38 days. I’m lucky that most of those days have not been Impossible, just hard. Most of them excruciating. Only a few have been Impossible. Each time it happens, I wonder if this will be the time people stop sympathizing. 38 days out, I can still tell my boss I’m having A Day without it being an issue. In a few days when I’m back to filling out paperwork to enroll my son in school and making doctor’s appointments and getting my husband’s 401k signed over, I can explain my circumstances and be met with understanding. I can burst into tears in the middle of a mundane conversation or cancel plans and people immediately know why. But how much time will have to pass before people stop giving me a pass? What happens when I have an Impossible Day 3 months from now or 9 months from now or in 2 years? I’ll surely have to explain to someone that I’m nonfunctional because my husband dropped dead in our bathroom on a Monday morning 10 minutes after a perfectly normal conversation and I had to watch his blood pool out from under the door as I called 911. My entire brain is now rewired due to trauma and it will probably never be the same. I dread the day I have to explain that to someone.

I want to say something inspirational about how these days always pass and I do eventually feel better and capable and happy and strong. Because they do, and I do. But focusing on how the sun is always going to come up sometimes feels like downplaying how cold and dark and terrifying the night can feel. Impossible Days are like dark nights with no stars and no moon; there is nothing. There is pain and there are tears, and I take care of my kids the best I can while my world feels like I’m existing in molasses. I feel like a petulant child; I want to kick my legs and scream about how much I want my husband back. I want to shatter a kitchen plate on the floor in anger. I want to slam the door and run out into the cold winter air, out into the woods, let the bare branches slap at my face and tear at my clothes until I’m completely lost out there. I want to escape. But there is no escape: this is my life now. The only way out is through.