The Many Faces of Catastrophic Grief

It will soon be five years since the catastrophic triple loss our family suffered.  We are all so different until I no longer recognize us as a family.  As a matter of fact, one could hardly call us a family anymore.  We are now three separate small families still just putting one foot in front of the other and still struggling to survive this however we can.

People kept talking about finding my "New Normal" well after almost five years I'm not sure I know what a "new normal" looks like unless it is a whole lot like "more loss".  I would hardly call it any kind of "normal".

My oldest son shoved me out of his life the day of the memorial service - four days after the deaths of my son, my daughter in law and my grand baby.  He caught me at the door as he was leaving for his home 400 miles away and hugged me and said,
"You know I can't do this anymore."
"Do what?"
"Come here.  I can't come here anymore.  I just can't.  He is everywhere here.  This is where we all came for holidays and he was always here.  I see him everywhere and I can't do this.  This will be my last time coming here."

I thought he was joking.  He wasn't. I thought surely to God, he cannot mean that.  He feels like that now but he will get better in time.  It's been almost five years.  He was true to his word.  He never went there again.  So we moved and he doesn't come here either.  He still cannot face it and he has shoved it under the rug and goes about his business as if it did not happen.  Except that his bottled up pain and anger do not stay in their neat little box.  Instead they come spewing out unchecked about anything and everything and it is most always directed at me.  I am his outlet for the rage.  He has cussed me, screamed at me, raged at me, refused to speak to me and even in a mad fit --blamed me.

I don't quite know what to do with this.

It is heart-breaking on many levels.  It is all I can do to hold it together and instead of us pulling together at the worst time in all of our lives - we are ripped apart.  I am suddenly the enemy without any understanding of why.  He absolutely hates me.  According to him I've ruined his life.  He had a terrible childhood and I've never done anything right.

As of this time last year my daughter has joined him in making me public enemy number one.  I cannot do or say anything right. She does not talk to me nor does she want to see me.  And she has turned into someone I barely recognize.

I understand their anger at this entire situation.  I do.  And I can't say that I don't see how this happens.  I too, am angry and I have cut all ties with most of my relationships outside of my family.

It changes you - more than you could ever imagine.  How can you maintain relationships that were based on you being one person when you are no longer that person?  You can't.  It does not just change the number of children or grandchildren you have.  It changes EVERYTHING.  You are not the same person at all.  You may as well have a different face and different name.  I don't recognize anything about this person I am nor do I recognize either of my children.

It changed my relationship with my family, my home, my church, my town and my job.

I had to leave.  If I were going to survive this. I could not live looking at the places where that baby played everyday.  I could not walk out into my backyard and remember twenty years of Holidays, Sunday cookouts with horseshoes, badminton, canoeing around the lake, fishing, swimming, picking blueberries, years and years of baby showers, weddings, prom pictures, birthday parties.  Every family memory I had for the last twenty years was there.  When we moved there my oldest grandchild was three.  She turned 30 today.  My grandchildren grew up there.  They never knew us to live any place else. Paxton made number 10 and he came home from the hospital there and stayed with us on the weekends from his first weekend.  He had just caught his first fish there and he ran a thousand miles up and down our quarter mile long driveway pushing a Fisher Price walking toy.

I had to move or I was not going to survive it.  I wasn't sure I could anyway but I knew for a fact I couldn't if I stayed there.  My son was right.  Brian was everywhere.  Paxton was more so.

My church - These were the people that gathered around us the day we found out.  They were loving and loyal and good to us and I love them still but I was having a huge faith crisis and I tried to talk to my pastor about it.  Granted that is a tough subject but I felt like he let me down.  Also, over the pulpit hangs a four foot tall beautiful polished wooden cross --that Brian made with his own hands.  And that baby had run up and down the pew we sat on since he could crawl.  I could not sit there and not see him playing with little cars.  People at the church "knew".  I couldn't look at them without thinking about it.  I could see one that crocheted him a gorgeous blanket when he was born.  Another that once told me he was the prettiest child she'd ever seen and he was too pretty to be a boy.  Still another that tried to keep him in nursery once - you could hear him screaming all through the sanctuary.  Then the nursery where I finally had to go keep him myself.  The Sunday School class where he sat in my lap for 2 years and eight months and ran hot wheels back and forth quietly.  No.  I had to go.

It changed my relationship with my town; a town I had dearly loved for over twenty years; the town I had once written a story about and had published in a magazine because I truly thought it was such a special place.  Suddenly I couldn't go anywhere without people staring and pointing and whispering.  No one would work for us.  And it was a big place with a lot of upkeep, we needed occasional help.  Contractors, Landscapers, yard maintenance people were all delighted to have the job --until someone in the neighborhood told them who we were.  And their whole demeanor would change instantly and when they left, they never came back.  They would not answer or return our calls.  We were literally shunned --in the town we had been well-respected in and called home for 23 years.

I was dying there.

I don't feel like I'm living here but I could literally feel myself "dying" there.

I know 100 miles away was extreme but I needed new.  I needed anonymous.  I needed a new church, a new preacher, a new church family and a fresh start. I needed to be where the "now me" could feel at home instead of like an alien where I once belonged.

And my job - I stayed and stuck it out as long as I could as long as I had to but I felt guilty all of the time because they never had the employee they hired.  I had been a loyal and dedicated worker that came to them highly recommended from another department.  And three months into the job my sister was diagnosed and six weeks later three of my children died.  I was a shell of a person.  I didn't care about anything.  I was no longer dedicated to my job.  That job was the last thing on my mind.  I had always been a quick-study and perfectly at ease with computers and on my last job trained everyone else because I knew how to do everything.  I was very good at what I did and I loved what I did.  Suddenly, I had no memory, no mind, no focus and no concentration.  I stayed confused and cried at the drop of a hat.  I actually got LOST going to work  on several occasions.  I've lived here 65 years and I'd worked in that same building 9 years with a  previous employer and 6 years with the current employer and I got lost going to work and had to call my husband crying hysterically to help me find my way to work!

I was certain I was losing my mind.  I could not retain anything and could not learn the system or remember the simplest things. I stuck it out three and half years because I felt like I owed my bosses because they were so good to me when my sister was sick but in thinking about it, I know it would have been kinder to them to have just quit and let them hire someone that had a half a brain.

And after having lost my children which was catastrophic alone and unfathomable when most people would expect that I would be well past any danger of not surviving this at almost five years out - I've lost my best friend of 40 years and in fact, all but one friend from before and she is on shaky ground most of the time, I've left my home of 23 years, lost my home town, my reputation, my standing in my community, my pride in my work, my confidence in my abilities, my job, my church, my faith and my mind.

And now my other two children as well.

So "this" is my New Normal?

Another Wave...

I have told you of several really weird and unexplainable things that happened early on like the incident with the pendulum on the clock, Siri asking if I wanted to ask her: "Where is Brian?" etc. All of that happened early on and there has been nothing odd or unexplainable since.

However, until a couple of months ago when another weird thing happened.  My phone battery had depleted while I was in the car without my charger and the phone went completely dead.  I had to wait till I got home to plug it in and let it charge a while before it would even boot up.  When it finally did and I picked it up to use it there was an email on the screen as if it had just come in.  I opened the email and it was from --Brian; from five years ago --on his birthday!  It said:

"He's saying: "Here comes another one." He's talking about a wave."

Well this didn't make sense out of context so I had to go back through five years and thousands of emails to find and read the email string that lead up to this to see that he is referring to a video he sent me of Paxton at the beach.  I'd sent him one saying that I couldn't understand what the baby was saying in the video and this email was his answer to that.  But it was just those words:

"He's saying: "Here comes another one." He's talking about a wave."

Well I have referred as have many others to grief coming in waves and I have also referred to this being like a shipwreck with me being overcome by the waves so this was unnerving to say the least.  Here comes another one?  Oh God, I hope and pray not --but let me tell you, it totally rattled me.  I tried to blow it off and try and get on with my day but the weirdness of the fact that out of literally thousands of emails that sit on my email account - an email from five years ago, from my son that died five months after that, on what turned out to be his very last birthday shows up on my phone screen as if it were brand new and unread - was strange enough but "this" being the actual message of that email?  Beyond weird.

Well I finally settled down about it and chalked it up to a freaky weird coincidence when two days later it happened again.  Same deal.  Email shows up on my phone screen like a brand new email.  I open it.  It is from Brian.  Same exact email now a second time.  The following week I get an error message on my screen that said:  "your text could not go through."  Well...I had not sent a text.  I opened the error message and it lead me to the actual text it was referring to... and it was the last text I ever sent to Kara; asking "Are you okay?"  She was not.  I had been texting both of them alternately all morning with no answer and that was my last text to her before I sent someone to the house to check on them.

But again "this" a few months shy of five years ago! And believe it or not - that too, actually happened a second time a week later.  And this past Monday - I got the email from Brian now a third time!  This has never happened with any other emails as long as I have had a smartphone. Never.  And now out of thousands of archived emails - this one email has come up on my screen as if it had just been received - three times! And I have also never had an error message come up like that and did not in fact even get that error message the day or days shortly after I sent it.  But I get it twice almost five years later and within days of the emails from Brian???

That is crazy and I really do not know what to make of it.