Sometimes the grief of having lost a loved one blankets everything in grey - takes the colors out of everything, takes the importance away from everything, sets it all past an arm's reach. You just don't see anymore, and if you did see things, you don't really give a crap about it.
If the blanket lifts - and it does, inexplicably - it feels good to see those colors, to run around like all the regular people in the world who aren't suffering or certainly aren't showing it if they are. "Wow! Can't believe I can actually be happy or care about that!" You'd think one would welcome the lifting of the blanket.
Nope. Not really...and not just because you feel your responsibilities and those aren't always fun picnics with free cotton candy and lots of pretty gardens to skip through every day.
No, I hate the lifting of the blanket because of the sucker punch that comes when I'm least expecting it. WHAM! Remember that? Remember how much it sucks that you loved that person and THEY ARE NEVER COMING BACK? Or worse, Remember how much your children loved that person and THEY ARE NEVER COMING BACK. Or possibly even worse, Remember how much your husband loved that person and SHE IS NEVER COMING BACK AND YOUR HUSBAND MIGHT NOT COME BACK FOR A LONG TIME, EITHER.
Tonight I was cleaning up yet another mess my darling, dearest, beloved and special eldest daughter had created recently (she's a mess maker, that one), and I stumbled upon a whole entire cache of Get Well! cards, I LOVE YOU! cards, and Happy Mother's Day cards my children made for my beloved departed mother-in-law. They provided a very strong sucker punch. Remember how much time I would spend asking and overseeing the production of handmade cards, both for expected (Mother's Day) and for the many, many unexpected (emergency room visits, hospital admissions, and way back to the diagnosis(es - because not even that long ago we were doing this for my Dad, too)? Well, guess what - there's no need for these cards. The beautiful emotion in these cards? Lost, or mingled with tears and fears that everyone else is going to leave too.
I wouldn't wish for my beloved mother-in-law to be suffering anymore - emotionally as well as physically, because as much as all of the uncertainty of not being able to ever really know where I was going to be, what I could do, where I could go, what I could commit to (because someone could get sick, or get admitted to the hospital, or this might be the last holiday, the last family dinner, the last shopping trip, the last time I even get to visit her in the hospital, and then someone might be dying) BOTHERED me, it was probably worse for my mother-in-law, because she was the one watching her own life contract and fly away.
Now I can make plans again (if I care too, mostly I don't still). Now we could plan a vacation and actually use those plans. And I have a lot of free time that has been carved out until fairly recently with either watching kids (while my husband rushes to the hospital, or attends doctor appointments, or researches treatments), picking up pieces, worrying, discussing treatments and prognoses, trying to think of thoughtful things to do, ways to spend those special moments and ways to fit it all in along with all of those many normal things that make up childhood.
But honestly? Regular life isn't all I was wishing it could be and I would give most things up to just be back to about 4 months ago when I had no regular life but I did have my mother-in-law.
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