Day 24

Wednesday was the first morning I woke up without feeling buried under an oppressive weight of sadness. It was both relieving and unsettling.

I’ve been afraid of having good days. I told Aaron I loved him, and if I’m too happy too soon it feels like that might make me a liar or a traitor. Did I not really mean it? Was I just saying the words to make him happy? Could I have really loved him if the feeling can dissipate so quickly? I made this decision to end our relationship, and while I don’t have regrets about my choice, I’m fully aware that Aaron didn’t have a say in it. I know he must be hurting, and his grief was not self-imposed. So if I have a good day just three weeks since this all happened, does that make my heart callous? Insensitive? I feel I owe Aaron a time of penance to prove my love wasn’t superficial or cheap and easily thrown aside. C.S. Lewis wrote something similar in A Grief Observed: “Still, there’s no denying that in some sense I ‘feel better,’ and with that comes at once a sort of shame, and a feeling that one is under a sort of obligation to cherish and foment and prolong one’s unhappiness.”

Another aspect of my fear—if I have a good day (or perhaps a few) will people think I’m over it and stop checking on me or caring for my heart? And then when the next bout of tears come will they be frustrated, wondering why I can’t seem to leave my grief behind? Perhaps to you these things seem irrational. Even I can tell myself the right truths to combat these feelings, yet knowing something and letting it sink into the bone marrow of your soul are two very different things. Someone who has walked a similar pain told me guilt is part of the grieving process. It’s normal. Natural. So good news. I’m not crazy. [At least for that reason].

Yet just because it’s warranted doesn’t mean I should stay there. So how do I move beyond? You know your world has flipped upside down when it’s a brave thing to have a good day. Laughing takes courage.

Y’shua is starting to teach me the difference between sitting under a sorrowing spirit and the gift of real sadness. A sorrowing spirit feels oppressive, like a weight pressing upon my shoulders whispering, don’t you dare feel anything other than sad. And yet it’s not a real sadness because so many days I can’t access my tears. I can’t really grieve. It’s just a fog of vague pain. No clarity. No ability to lament and return to joy. Real sadness would allow me to do those things, and it comes coupled with the oil of joy so that there is a reprieve from the tears. Yet the concept of flipping back and forth so seamlessly between joy and sadness is foreign to me. My perfectionism drives me towards all or nothing. If I’m going to bother to do something then I must do it well. When I loved, I loved hard. Now I must grieve hard. But does that mean I must be sad all the time, or does grieving well mean something else? There’s no formula for this process—for anything like death, separation, or loss. Our spirits weren’t designed to know these things, and so we are forever left floundering through in an attempt to figure out something that is impossible to figure out.