These are the Days

Sometimes you just have a day. I think everyone has those days sometimes, but when you are grieving those days can be almost overwhelming. For me when I have those days it usually sneaks up on me.

It goes something like this... When I wake up I have an overwhelming feeling of wanting to just pull the covers over my head and go back to sleep. I chalk it up to just being tired. I get up anyway and get ready (on these days I usually barely care what I'm wearing or what I look like sometimes not even looking in the mirror for more than a moment). Then I go to work, and on the way to work every tiny bad driving error by the people around me turns me into someone who should probably be arrested for road rage. When I get to work I sit down at my desk and try to make a to-do list but am overwhelmed by a sense of inability to care about anything my job entails. I try to do a few things on my list but get continually distracted. At this point I usually give up and play a few online games. During these games, when my mind starts to slow down a little, all of the sudden I realize that I feel like I've been crying for several hours. And then I get it. "Oh I'm having a day. I'm super sad and angry that my kid died. I've been holding all of my emotions in for days just trying to get through this moment and the next and then the next. I guess I'm done."

There is nothing to be done on these days except muddle through and give yourself a pass. Luckily at 2.5 years out the days are fewer than they once were (given that the first year every day was one of those days). On a good one of those days I let it happen and live the grief and don't give myself shit for it. On a bad one of those days I berate myself for not being able to keep it together enough to go to work and get something done, or for forgetting things that I promised other people or for not caring enough about my dead kid by keeping it too together the preceding days.

It seems like the only relief in this grief crap is that as time moves on, even if there are still a lot of those days, they are fewer than they once were and I'm more used to dealing with them than I used to be, so I tolerate the grief more easily. It sucks but it is. Things are marginally not as overwhelming, so someday bad will be slightly less bad.